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Art Culture
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Weekly updates


In recent art news, Miso, a friend of ACCLAIM, had one of her pieces stolen from a display suite on Smith Street, Collingwood. The work, Walking to all my friends’ houses in the world, was one of two major pieces shown late last year at Backwoods Gallery, and its companion piece was acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria.

This is unusual for a number of reasons:

— Art thefts in Australia are rare, especially when it comes to the work of contemporary living artists.
— The thieves apparently knew in advance where CCTV cameras were placed, and were able to avoid them during the robbery.
— There were other works on display, but Miso’s was deliberately targeted and handled in a way that suggests familiarity with art transportation.

As occasionally occurs when something of note happens locally, the theft was reported by The Age in their arts section – because, you know, it was news relating to the art world and apparently some people actually still read traditional media.

BUT THEN THINGS GOT WEIRD. See, for some reason, the fact that The Age reported a legitimate news item inspired the vitriol of professional troll Andrew Bolt, who responded via a post of his own. You can read his piece online, but I’m not going to link to it because I’m really not prepared to give that dude any traffic for any reason. But the basic gist is this: half of Bolt’s article is literally quoting the aforementioned Age article, and then there are some half-assed generalisations sent in by a reader who’s confusingly also called Andrew.

You can read that section below:

Reader Andrew has other questions:

This takes up a whole page!!!

But it has all the elements that appeal to the core readership of the Age.  A thief with a ponytail… Smith Street, Collingwood… a work of art ..  stolen… an enigmatic title “Moon (Walking to all my friends’ houses in the world) I,”!! …  It is “ethereal” … “thousands of tiny pin pricks on white paper” …  an artist who doesn’t paint under her real name but is now named after a Japanese fermented soy paste.

OKAY – so I thought I’d go all Solange on this bitch (#relevant), take a leaf out of the Bolt handbook of journalism and take a look at a piece of reporting that makes me so angry that I want to punch a duckling in the mouth. First up, I know I mentioned this earlier, but literally more than 50% off the ‘article’ is a direct quote from The Age report. Funnily enough, it’s also the only part that makes any sense as well. The other 45% is the inane ramblings of someone who has brought this report to the attention of Bolt. That makes Bolt’s actual contribution to this piece exactly two sentences – which is pretty fucking rich considering he’s complaining about print journalism.

Then there’s commentary, so let’s break this down bit by bit. The first actual sentence (which is also not a question as implied by the preceding line) contains the number-one most despised grammatical tic that’s almost universally loathed by writers: HE USES A FUCKING SCREAMER (!!!) There’s literally only one reason to ever type three exclamation points in a row, and that’s to try and impress a girl with your knowledge of obscure indie bands with indecipherable names via Facebook chat, circa 2007. I mean, I know our dear reader wants to convey how upset he is by a newspaper having the gall to actually report news, but BRO THIS IS 2k14 – WHEN YOU WANT TO DEMONSTRATE EMOTION YOU JUST GO TURBOCAPSLOCK MODE.

What comes next legitimately reads like the court transcript of a psychopath driven to a hipster-murdering spree because the barista accidentally put soy milk in their cappuccino – including SEVEN ellipses and an arbitrary connection between Miso (the artist) and miso (the soup), which, all things considered, is pretty clever for a Bolt fan. Also, you may note that there’s an arbitrary ‘I’ after the tile of the work. That’s not a mistake on my behalf but rather how the original article appears – I assume the author was going to try and explain himself rationally here before his mind wandered to gluten-free eating and he flew off the handle again.

Finally – he wraps with a bewildering argument that goes along the lines of (and I’ll admit I’m paraphrasing here) ‘cars are stolen all the time, especially in lower socio-economic suburbs, so The Age should report on those instead of the theft of a one-off piece of art that’s of legitimate interest to an audience outside of the person from whom it was stolen from.’ I mean, there’s a logic there but I’m afraid that if I contort my brain enough to understand it then I may never fully recover.

In summation: Hey Bolt – traditional media is dead, you’re a sad old man applauding the sound of your own echo, and if you want to try and snark blog then GET ON OUR FUCKING LEVEL.

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