CURRENT NM EPISODE
After Dark w/ Shumon Basar & Dean Kissick (NM43)
WHAT WE’RE READING
Kevin Driscoll, The Modem World: A Prehistory of Social Media (Yale U. Press, 2022): The untold story about how the internet became social and why this matters…”
Dean Kissick (Spike) reviews the 58th Venice Biennale: Nearly half of those included in this Biennale are dead. As is the trend in contemporary art…
Manhattan Art Review reviews the 2022 Whitney Biennial: A restaurant is good if the food is good, not because all the ingredients are organic or sustainably farmed...
Ben Davis (artnet) unpacks Mother of Creation, Beeple x Madonna’s NFT: To be fair, the just-opened Venice Biennale, “The Milk of Dreams,” was very much on this wavelength, with all its images of humans merging with trees and robots…
Patreon releases its 2022 census giving NM all the more reason to keep building Channel and, in parallel, publish to SubStack.
WHAT WE’RE WATCHING
The Andy Warhol Diaries on Netflix. Assuming this would be more posthumous shlock, we almost didn’t even watch. But in fact, it’s great. More than being “about Andy Warhol” (though the amount of rarely-if-ever published video and photographs of him doesn’t disappoint), the six-episode series relays the stories of the people and cultural conditions that formed him—Jed Johnson, John Gould, Basquiat, but also e.g., preppie as drag, crystal healing in the face of AIDS, networked media’s acceleration, and mass culture’s rise to fame.
By extension, the series provides a kind of (pre-)history for all of us … or at least those who, for better or worse, have followed that late-twentieth-century American pop cultural dream through to its postmillennial collapse. Features interviews and cameos by everyone from Mary Boone to Michael Chow (we even spotted a 21yo Rob Pruitt in one archival shot), plus a Holly+ style, deepfake performance of Andy’s own words. Dan Keller explains that somebody had to read the text aloud, performing the lines, and then alter the voice with ML (as opposed to it just being text-to-speech). Dan says, it’s a genuinely new form of acting.
Lil Internet notes that the series is underpinned by an ‘aesthetic pack’ that we would like to see continue in the iteration-machine of video-streaming: the ASMR Documentary—dreamy visuals, meditative music, and a slow and steady pace that gives you room to think, all narrated in hypnotizing monotone. “Wait, so instead of creating anxiety in the viewer with episodic cliffhangers, we actually relieve the anxiety they already have, and that relief will keep them watching?” Yes, Netflix, it sounds crazy… but it works.