The Plagiarist is Present: Thoughts on Art, Theft, Shia, Marina and... http://www.theweeklings.com/jkabat/2014/03/27/49-thoughts-on-s... THE PLAGIARIST IS PRESENT: THOUGHTS ON ART, THEFT, SHIA, MARINA AND JAY-Z JENNIFER KABAT TThhuurrssddaayy,, MMaarrcchh 2277,, 22001144 1. SHIA LABEOUF CRIES wearing a brown paper bag on his head with two holes cut for eyes. Jay-Z dances for “art world luminaries.” The dancing and crying are performance art – or stolen from it. 2. This February Shia sits in an art gallery in Los Angeles as fans line up for hours down the block and through an alley waiting for the chance to sit alone before the star and stare into his eyes. (Or, what you can see of them through the paper bag). Cameras aren’t allowed. They’re smuggled in. He remains impassive. The bag is tear-stained. He wears a tux. As you enter, you’re offered a choice of props to bring with you. They include angry tweets written on paper like messages from fortune cookies, a whip, whiskey, candy and a Transformers toy. Apparently you can do with these implements – and Shia – as you wish. Throughout he doesn’t respond. He simply stares and cries. But, if you can’t see the tears, is he really crying? Also, he’s an actor; he should be able to well up on command. The sign on the gallery door declares the piece is called #IAMSORRY. 3. Last summer the “art world luminaries” line up for hours outside the Pace Gallery in Chelsea. Once inside they crowd around a plinth and bench cordoned off by a shin-high rope, the sort museums use to keep people from touching the art. Behind the rope on the pedestal Jay-Z appears. Members of the audience are invited one-by-one to sit before him on the bench as he performs his song “Picasso Baby” over and over for hours in the gallery. 4. The two events are copies, maybe fakes, based on Marina Abramović’s arduous 700-hour long “The Artist is Present” performance at MoMA (also the name of her retrospective there on at the same time). She sat in a chair in the museum’s atrium, always wearing a long flowing dress, hair always braided and always over her left shoulder. Day in and day out she stared into some 1400 people’s eyes individually.[1] Crowds lined up for hours. Some came more than once. Her expression never changed, nor did her posture. She didn’t cry, but people in the audience did. This is what the art world calls “durational performance.” 5. The invitation to Jay-Z’s performance says: “The performance is an experimental and collaborative one, where rap’s own history with endurance and duration will be at play.” 6. Jay-Z only lasted six hours. Shia a week. 7. In “Picasso Baby” Jay-Z, aka Shawn Carter, sings, “Fuck it I want a billion/ Jeff Koons ballons. I just wanna blow up / Condos[2] in my condos. I wanna row of / Christie’s with my missy, live at the MoMA/ Bacons and turkey bacons, smell the aroma.” 8. Marina Abramović arrives at the shoot in a limo. When he performs for her, they stare at each other, locking eyes and foreheads. 9. Afterwards people in the art world describe feeling punked by it all, “punked” not their word but mine. A friend writes to me: 1 of 11 3/8/15 5:12 PM The Plagiarist is Present: Thoughts on Art, Theft, Shia, Marina and... http://www.theweeklings.com/jkabat/2014/03/27/49-thoughts-on-s... Jay-Z had water, many breaks, adulation, clapping, ego-patting, not to mention the glam life he raps about to return to, and the artist from whom it is borrowed (in this case from Marina) is a flattered and glad participant – what sort of a simulacrum is this? Can we use that word?? 10. Shia’s performance may be part of his long “apology tour,” as I’ll call it, for his plagiarizing comic artist Daniel Clowes. The apology has included skywriting and tweeting his abject sorrow. Only there are numerous earlier apologies LaBeouf made for other things – and all of those apologies were plagiarized as well, lifted from a writer at GQ, David Mamet, Yahoo Answers, Kanye West, Charles Bukowski…. Just to keep all this straight and make it clear: we have Shia apologizing in February 2013 on Twitter to Alec Baldwin. That apology? Ripped from GQ. Then, he apologizes for the apology using Mamet, and so it goes… He debuts his film plagiarized from Clowes in May at Cannes and gets caught in December. Of course, the apology? Not his. Not by a long shot… 11. This gets me thinking about four little paintings, shaped like an eye, a slit, a vagina…. In fact, their vaginal suggestiveness is impossible to ignore. Hold on and I’ll get to how they connect to Shia and Marina and Jay-Z. Just keep those paintings in your mind. Here’s an image of them: Rochelle Feinstein. The Abramovic Method, mixed media. Image courtesy the artist and On Stellar Rays. They’re by Rochelle Feinstein. They’re also called the Abramovic Method. 12. A funny thing happened on the way from A to Z, from Abramovic to Jay-Z. Here are some more of the lyrics of that song Picasso Baby: “It ain’t hard to tell, I’m the new Jean Michel/ Surrounded by Warhols…/ Twin Bugattis outside the Art Basel.” 13. Art here is just another commodity. Abramović’s performances have often been about duration and endurance, suffering, not exactly something it’s easy to buy or sell. It’s hard to commodify stabbing yourself or burning your hair and nails in a fire….[3] What’s there to purchase? Meanwhile much of the art market that you hear about – the high end with the big fairs and big money, the auction market, say – has become the ultimate luxury good for the private-jet class. Unhinged from any use-value, art’s worth is entirely arbitrary. I don’t want to suggest that Jay Z isn’t interested in art. He’s supposed to be a serious collector, and I don’t think the video equals who he is in “real” life. Also, I want “the art world,” which often seems like some fairytale realm set apart from the real world, to move closer to it. Here, though, Picassos and Condos and Basquiats are interchangeable with just so much Cristal and so many Benjamins. “I want a Picasso in my casa, no my castle… I’m an asshole…” Uh, yeah.[4] 14. So, we have crying Shia and Jay-Z bobbing. In the gallery during the filming New York magazine’s art critic, the ubiquitous Jerry Saltz, looks as if he’s being played by Paul Giamatti, and Shia LeB and Jay-Z have ripped off (or borrowed from) Marina A. Both have been inspired by her Artist is Present stare-down, the one memorialized in the HBO documentary, the one with the tumblr “Marina Abramović Made Me Cry,” the one that has made her the most famous woman artist today, where people lined up for hours on 53rd Street waiting to sit and stare before her. The 2 of 11 3/8/15 5:12 PM The Plagiarist is Present: Thoughts on Art, Theft, Shia, Marina and... http://www.theweeklings.com/jkabat/2014/03/27/49-thoughts-on-s... experience was supposed to offer up something real, a genuine exchange in this our age of social networks and supposedly “not-real” exchanges. Shia was impassive as he addressed us (well, the “us” who queued for him on the streets of LA. That “us” isn’t actually me). He cried for most, but stares at his interlocutor here. But what is he offering “us”? Somehow his entire play at fraud and copying, originality and apology seems like he’s trying to say something bigger, something that he thinks might be art, but what? 15. His plagiarizing Daniel Clowes looked at first like straight-up theft as if he didn’t realize taking someone else’s words was wrong or that he might get caught, as if he, a star, were above the realms (and rules) governing you and I and was literally celestial. Then, there’s the skywriting an apology in the skies of LA on New Year’s Day. And, wearing a bag on his head scrawled, “I am not famous anymore” at the premiere of Nymphomaniac at the Berlin Film Festival. Or the second act of skywriting, “Stop Creating” and a third time skywriting a dictum to “Start Creating” again. It came on the heels of his LA performance art “show,” where he sat in a room for eight hours a day letting us confront him. So, what is going on here? Plagiarism, joke, art? Or maybe he’s just trying to distract us from his bad sex and bad accent in Nymphomaniac. 16. James Franco believes it’s art. Apparently so too does Shia himself.[5] 17. On one of the preview days for this year’s Whitney Biennial (Go see it by the way. It’s good, and originality and value are on show) one of the curators whispers, “Go downstairs; James Franco’s getting a tour on the 3rd floor….” 18. With art it can feel at times like the joke is on us. (Here I mean me too, all of us, not the “us” above of the generalized, implied audience).