An Honorable Mention for VernissageTV
You would think that yet another unflattering reference to “the greatest country in the world” makes me some kind of recent immigrant. Nope. Dude, my roots in North America are so deep that you have to make up white lies to make light of the depth into the Blackness. You gots to come up with simplifying assumptions and grand, sweeping dis-informations about how my mind is constructed and how my thoughts go.
But here they go: It’s no surprise that VernissageTV is not an American production—neither North or South. The current trend—which I dare describe without the proper credentials from Viacom—is that the kids of the stars and stripes trying to make a video Blog about artists and art galleries would eventually degrade toward some extreme featuring evangelical rants about how stupid art is or how great art is. Violence is not far from the American mainstream. We have to struggle with our extremism.
VernissageTV is quite passive and back-grounding—they shoot in my understanding of a French style of cinema—its quality of finding the pace of the life before the camera instead of imposing a pace upon what’s before the camera. In simple terms of American teen spirit trapped in 30-year-old bodies trying to make money, you won’t find VernissageTV trying to set their visuals to drum loops and guitar licks in the near future. So here are some super-bad bullets about VernissageTV (‘super-bad’ refers to being above the dialectic).
- Since I haven’t been to art gallery openings in years, VernissageTV shows me that they are still as cold, distant and boring as ever. It is wonderful to watch this from the relative comfort of the space in front of my screen than to show up in person having fought stupid traffic jams.
- VernissageTV puts me in touch with the art world that Basquiat died for… no, it’s better to say that it’s the art world that he would not live for… I don’t want to freeze their world in time. VernissageTV allows me to see that, so far, they are already freezing their world in time for me…
- VernissageTV inspires me. It makes me want to get back into my grand plan to interview the professional, self-described “artists” in my community. We started this project here at kintespace.com back in 2000. Our audio version of VernissageTV is “Michael Massenburg: Massenburg Faces Five” here at kintespace.com.