Well done Mr. Koons. Very American of you.

Missmc gave the new au pair a tour around London yesterday.  We stopped by the Jeff Koons exhibition at the Serpentine, children in tow.   Inside were things that ought to appeal to children.  But they did not.  Three inflatable monkeys, arms linked, cascaded from the ceiling, holding up a chair.  A lobster did a headstand balanced with one claw on a refuse bin, the other on a chair.  Pop pop Popeye made an appearance in several large scale kitschy paintings with some more inflatable animals and airbrushed girls.  A host of seaside inflatables did tricks around the room.  

We continued onward to lunch at the Orangery and discussed the exhibition.  The Italian au pair found some English words to say something to the effect that the show gave her nothing to think about.  The eight year old gave it a 3 out of 10.  Even with a vast background of visual art to prop up looking at pop readymade hybrids, Missmc was drawing an utter blank.  The Serpentine staff were trying to sell catalogues with a Big Issue like fervour.  The subtle approach to catalogue sales had been thrown out the window.  The whole exhibition experience was so so utterly American, from the overt commercialization, the cheap ready-made, the advertising-like veneer of the paintings, and all things that go Pop, and disappear, leaving a trail of waste that would not ever decompose.  And so, therein, lay the content.  Missmc gingerly picked it up and looked it in the eye.  The American Dream was full of stuff.  Useless stuff.  Materialistic.  Produced in China.  Props.  Reliant on pure associational sensationalism appealing to base emotions.  

Well done Mr. Koons.  Very American of you.  I hated it all.

The American Dream...

The radio played softly in the background but its sound was progressively being drowned out by the ticking of the clock on the dashboard.  She could no longer look straight ahead and listen, so, she turned her head to look out the window.  Outside, house after house after house paraded by, all the same.  Three variations in door color, garage on the left, garage on the right. Small shaped evergreens and trees passed by at a different speed as they were closer. When that happened it was just black, a longer black than expected, followed by the world slowly sliding back into the frame before being buffeted aside by another hit of blackness.  He had stopped talking and was just driving.

That is the point Missmarketcrash woke up.  Now what?  Val is back. We've got a ticking clock (time or a tell-tale heart?), the man-who-was-talking-has-stopped-talking (now who on earth could this man be?), suburbia (gosh-at least Val is somewhere - she was nowhere in the last dream), and she is still in the car.  My thoughts think she is in America, it is a time thing, and umm...a mysterious-man-appearing-in-dreams is ultimately more appealing in the abstract so...let your thoughts wander.