Initially performed as a part of the #class project at Ed Winkleman gallery in New York-- organized by William Powhida and Jennifer Dalton. #Class was selected by New York Magazine senior critic Jerry Saltz a top ten year in art pick for 2010. Reprised performances of the Manifesto have taken place at PhotoLA and LuMagnus Gallery.
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Prologue:
My first attempt at 'a stirring defense of James Franco as the greatest artist of this generation, if not all time' was constructed in the following manor--
Step 1: For fifteen minutes I planned to repeat the name "Franco," to you... my increasingly disappointed audience.
Step 2: I would "see what happened." That was all. That was it.
I was hashtagging reality. It was "social media art." Something I keep referring to as "SoMe" Art (to the horror of those associated). It was simple, and derivative, and only as interesting as the minds and dispositions that my audience would project onto it. In this way, it was the prematurely bald head of graduate school quality performance art. It seemed mildly inappropriate, and contextually funny, and pretty awful. "Perfect," I thought.
To increase my impact on the night of the performance, I would practice. This involved video taping myself "performing" the word Franco in 15-minute intervals. Again, de rigueur Master of Fine Arts behavior.
On these tapes I pantomimed the speech patterns of every you tube video I could remember. I researched by watching mostly 13 year olds, who seemed very natural with the medium. Behind me there is a whole generation of Stanislavskities, weaned on "reality culture"-- and so they are not just method acting, but method living. They are horrifying and wonderful and I wish I didn't feel like I understood them so well. Sporadically I did other impressions of television, film, and cartoon characters as they came into my head. In one practice session I lay on my stomach with my nose touching the floor and whispered "Franco" flatly into the earth.
"Is this a post environmental earthwork?" said a hopeful voice in my mind. In another video I threw myself against the walls and shouted "FRANCO!" and made vaguely fascist gestures and sneers. '"Oh... maybe he means the other Franco!" said the hopeful voice-- "the political one! He's Spanish right? ... didn't Picasso have some beef with him?"
Then, to astound you with my bravery, I conceived of a conclusion in which I stripped naked, wearing only a sock on my penis and the sock would have the phrase "Franco," written on it.
"Oh!! Franco is the name of his penis! It's always about the penis! That's so right! It's like his penis is Rosebud!"
In the unfettered bliss of my imagination I'd be instantly raptured into the canonical slide lectures of the Art Industrial Complex. It was all Tino Sehgal and Marina Abramovic and Dan Colen and Vito Acconci and Trisha Brown and Tristan Zara and Gertrude Stein and the Situationalists and Dada, it was American Weimar, the culture was burning and self obsessed and Salinger was dead everyone would agree I was so fucking clever and then we'd all go home and just light ourselves on fire.
It was a fucking awful two weeks. It wasn't the "practicing" that got to me, but watching myself 'practice' on film. In my deteriorating confidence I kept repeating the last line of James Joyce's Araby: "Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger." Something is broken when you are using Joyce as governance for artistic restraint.
There were three factors that convinced me to pay more respect to my audience, and to treat them... you... like grownups. I don't need convincing that acting like a grown up is its own kind of failure... but in this case...
1. Bruce High Quality happened, and I found out about it. The 'market' was cornered on cooler than you art kids laughing at them selves for having learned a whole lot of nothing and felt sorry and angry and soldiered on towards the museum parapet and acted funky.
2. I leave my television on nearly all the time- with the sound off because I like the company of randomized color. And on one of those nights while I practiced--
"Late Night with Jimmy Fallon" appeared on my screen. Jimmy was commentating on a cage match between men dressed as mustaches-- this is a fairly regular bit for him. There was a ringside girl in an American flag bikini so small it would make Jeff Koons blush. A third mustache came marching down from the crowd with high fascist leg kicks; this mustache was short and vertical, and shaped like Hitler's.
Soundlessly I watched the "comedy" develop as the mustache climbed into the ring and delivered a flying cross body block to the other mustaches. Fallon bounced around wearing a mullety wig and shouted, I'm imagining, in the self-referential dudely tones of fraternity culture-- he looked like he knew how silly this was. He was O.K. with the great rouse.
And predictably, my MFA stashed away in a studio drawer, I wanted to vomit. Mind you, I'm sitting on several hours of footage in which I repeat one word and spastically perform a kind of ritualized seizure. It occurred to me that Jimmy Fallon had edgier material than myself. It was structurally more experimental. And his audience was near a million or so on any given night. I have never met anyone who would openly admit to watching the Jimmy Fallon show. The universe was becoming impossibly complex.
3. Despondent, and having chanted his name for weeks, it then occurred to me to actually think about the real James Franco. And this was a revelation.
I hadn't authentically considered my satirical premise-- James Franco as the greatest artist of this generation? What if it were true? And the more I thought about my motivations for picking, or picking on James, the more I recognized the ugliness at root of it-- Envy. James Franco is a star. And I admired that.
Was this a decent motivation for art? Is envy a worthwhile vehicle of expression?
My irony melted away. Artifice and the shelter of abstraction became vile in my mind. I'm actually just a fan...This work is fan art: a pleasure poem.
I'm in love with my imagination, and my imagination is in love with James Franco.
The "work" has become sincere.
Someday I would like to talk about the economics of sincerity.
But tonight I'm talking about James Franco.
******************************************************
The Celebritist Manifesto:
" A stirring defense of James Franco as the greatest artist of this generation if not all time."
*******************************************************
This is a warning shot from Middle America: where I last saw my point of view, destitute, watching skin flicks and cartoons, orphaned by a catholic priest undoing his rust belt, and later selling used cars to molestation victims, etc, etc.
There is a fracas on the horizon. A division and a land grab. Heroes will be the most ruthless. Fame is its own ethic... let me tell you what you already know...
This is a shot fired from Middle America where I learned from Barnes and Nobles what the "Art World" was. It's a rack next to Maxim and the other "nipple possibilities."
This is a manifesto written from an intellectual vacuum, sucked by the perpetual televised inbetween... I saw culture consummate one night on the internet...
...Hollywood and New York are pregnant, dividing zygotes: twin tyrants choke fucking in the womb. Call this the new American Tableaux: Romulus and Remus suckling the wolf's poison milk. It's a brand of infantile sexualization and beastiality based on an ancient recipe, then deep fried and packaged and sold off as culture. Not news. 'Just my take.'
One twin is an escapist fabulist with great tits.
The other sells negative pleasure and intellectual asphyxiation.
Two separate bodies sharing the same horrible brain.
Celebrity is the disease and the antidote. There is only one man positioned to save us..
One man who unites America's pleasure seeking hedonism with America's self loathing intellectual bewilderment.
When we talk about America as a culture hallucinating on the celluloid shadows of celebrity we over romanticize the value of actual Sunlight. The Sun is the most conspiratorially anti American of all the stars, as far as stars go.
We need to create our own stars... to conjure sublime metaphors of possible human transcendence and graft them on to organic actualities. We need vehicles to make-believe in the possibility of our dreams. We need fuel for our delusions, milk for our lucky charms. Breakfast should always include marshmallows...
Am I joking? I am only half joking. I am exactly half joking. The escapist in me is laughing earnestly. The intellectual in me is cringing. I am these two twinned choke fucking incestuous lovers.
But I am not the man.
There is only one man...
At the crest of every epoch, in all cultures where spectacle turns inward and exploitative and vicious, charisma is the catalyst. In a present tense where everyone is a futurist with typo faith and ego bleed and carpal tunnel and savage mistrust for brands and names and underwear models; when buying a hamburger feels directly connected to support for NAFTA or the Iraq war or an unnamed contra contra contra in deserts and jungles who do not have celebrities-- who do not yet have celebrities-- where magic still exists, before magic was outdone by charisma and the public relations industry...
I propose one man over all the static of your art fairs and biennials and pluralisms.
I propose we elect that man, not by democratic process but by shaking the trees of the liberty; committing a love revolt of immaculate and unimpeachable praise for our saint and savior...that we the virulent cynics spreading and then feeding our own distrust of class and industry and hierarchy and celebrations with any more than twenty five people... that we the self regarding sect of over educated lost boys and girls allow for passion's tryst and throw off ironic detachment and make wild and unwholesome group love to one man before all other possible gods... that we might be remembered as something just north of sycophants-- a proud fan culture, a fan culture who loves without malice...
Here tonight, let us make it manifest, let us declare:
There is one celebrity who is *good* for us...
There is one man, and only one man... that man is James Franco.
James Franco.
James Franco is a Freak.
James Franco is James fucking Dean.
James Franco is the Green Goblin.
James Franco is Harvey Milk's Boyfriend
James Franco is a giggling burnout pot smoker
James Franco is Allen Ginsberg
James Franco is Eating, Praying, Loving
James Franco is a wet tee-shirt model for Gucci
James Franco is a Director and a Producer
James Franco is a Novelist
James Franco is an Ivy League grad student pursuing two separate masters degrees
James Franco is a Soap Opera star...
James Franco is a performance artist
James Franco is a situationalist
James Franco is a self satirizing icon
James Franco is both overprivileged by his good genetic fortune, and also a humble a student of the universe
James Franco IS America.
In the visionary words of John Mayer, I propose that we crush him up and snort him. A chemical change is necessary... That we might completely disengage from our own smallish and autonomous pursuits and revel in the phantasmagoria of a man as a product, a man aware of his own product, who sells the joke about the man in the same package as the man himself. There are scant fantasies left for even the most ambitious of daydreamers.
James Franco is the vision and visage of fantasy wrapped in a wet dream about a tall dark and handsome version of a rugged intellectual individualist-- a glamrock cowboy gone east and done good in the shade of ivory towers and still had time to smoke his fine weed and laugh at bad viral videos... James Franco the bilateral symmetry...One hemisphere fingering LALAland where Marilyn did fuck and Marlon did fuck and each generation and half generation and then quarter generation found a new Marilyn and a new Marlon and they did fuck or half fuck or quarter fuck...and everyone was a comic book word bubble shouting WHAM! ZAP! POW!.... and the other hemisphere is turning tricks for caviar and brioche in smokehouses of the west village where Sartre and Camus and Nabokov have lunch with Steinum and Foucault and Sontag, where long established cocksmen and poets and nightclub owners still remember Miles Davis and heroine and Basquiat and wallow forth in the deejay skeet of New Museum flunkies shipwrecked and mustachioed on the lower east side all night vomiting to the specular rhythms and sometimes plausible song structures of the Animal Collective....
His success story is now new next America: how he cleverly avoided twenty seventh street and rose rank on his dashing good looks and public willingness to experiment with gender roles. James Franco whose name is easier to remember than Massimiliano Gioni, Josephine Meckseper, or Guthrie Lonergan.... James Franco who would name check Kalup Linzy's tossed salad animation style on one night and on the next night play opposite Julia Roberts in a romantic airport self help biopic. Here is your prom king deviant...only James Franco can simultaneously eat America's asshole and charm America's all American sweetheart who is also America's all American hooker...
James Franco who should play Vito Schnabel in a movie about Vito Schnabel directed by Julian Schnabel in which Vito Schnabel plays the young Julian Schnabel... wherein they lounge together and talk about the excesses of the art world and sip port in the Palazzo Chupi, that massive labia of the west village, wherein any of us, all of us, have dreamed about climbing up there and getting inside of her.
Let us toast a drink tonight America, let us christen a drink; America tonight let us concoct a drink that is James Franco and so also is America. This drink is one part high fructose corn syrup and one part petroleum and one part metallic pheromones leaking into our pulsing blood streams and out through water supplies and the toxicologist is taking samples and teaching big pharma about our boners and sadness and solitary confinement to digital prisons built by Photoshop... depressed America drinking its stupor of day time television and needing a General Hospital for its General Malaise.
Depressed America is chewing on its socks in the nude locker rooms of teenage America who is sexting middle school America who is playing hide the coconut and waiting for everyone to shut up so they can just exacerbate whatever, whatever...
Exacerbating the imaginary industry of the imaginary Art World that is too big for our imaginary economy, which trades greed for pornography and each transactor competes for ethical inferiority--that sinister industry which would try anything once (even fascism) just to prove it was not fascist...
Where a flower puppy is a flower puppy is a flower puppy. Where criticism is an unpaid religious vocation, the last remaining religious vocation for the non matriculating class, not hip to the power sugar sauce-- where power is truth and not the versa... the vice is president.. the vice is squeezing each art critic into the same pissing pot and that will be the premise of a new show on the Bravo television network that we all bitterly tried out for and were bitterly not selected but will bitterly watch and bitterly critique and bitterly pretend that our bitterness was actually virginal.
And how we learned on Bravo that Jerry Saltz was a very decent fellow who owns a fucking spaceship and from time to time leaves the planet because if you owned a fucking spaceship you would also leave the fucking planet. How America has left the fucking planet…
How the Bravo network chased around the possible socialist William Powhida and asked him if they could borrow his middle fingers. And Powhida said no because his middle fingers might not fit in the shot…
And how both of these men are star crossed art lovers whom know they are star crossed art lovers. And how James Franco could convincingly play both of them in the biopic – Jerry Saltz and William Powhida, the Allen Ginsberg and James Dean of critical discourse-- how everything is the sexier version of the thing it actually wanted to be... before it forgot what it actually wanted to be.
How it once figured out what it wanted to be in all night plotting sessions with the Hunter Mafia concerning the distasteful success of the Columbia and Yale and Hunter Mafia. Who moved to Hooverville and drank fair trade coffee and wore Burberry glasses and resisted buying sandals. Who met the starfucker Nic Rad and had a horrifying suspicion. Who adopted an ex-derivatives trader as his business partner and spiritual mentor. Who harassed art bloggers and tweeted live during sex and went to every restaurant in Manhattan and ordered the special.
This is also for you, graduate students of the New York Academy of Art, which started when Andy Warhol lost a bet, and so then had to train twenty years of somewhat artists to paint the bald vaginas of classicism... and avoided the bald vaginas of contemporary culture.
Who woke up one morning with an art scenic headache and went 'hair of the dog'…
…and binged on Deitch and Gagosian and Zwirner and James Cohan and Lehman Maupin and Pace and Feuer and Matthew Marks and Barbara Gladstone and 303 and Andrea Rosen and Elizabeth Dee and Marianne Boesky and Leslie Tonkonow and Mary Boone and Metro Pictures and Steve Kasher and Whitebox and Leo Koenig and PPOW and Sikkema Jenkins and Postmasters and Tony Shafrazi and did not know what to make of it and so staggered up to the Met and did copies of the bald vaginas of classicism.
At the critical point in social history when name dropping is no longer tactical, when it becomes name carpet bombing and obliterates both names and gravity-- there will only be one man left standing. James Franco will be left standing.
James Franco whom Jeffery Deitch has considered the next Warhol onto whom Jeffery Deitch has also been considered the next Andy Warhol...In 15 minutes everyone will be considered the next Warhol--and for 15 minutes...
Jeffery Deitch who is leaving the choke fucking baby of New York city for the innocent blonde baby with silicon tits of Los Angeles. Jeffery Deitch who sold urine stained phonebooks and semen stained collages and got tired and wanted to see other fluids and other bodies fledgling in other sun soaked avenues.
Leaving the spermizoid stew of the Chelsea shore to the LES museum tenements of moneyball magistrates where infomercials grew legs and walked out of the swamp and became press releases. Broadcast on networks that also sell knives and diet pills...
On selfsame networks that are somehow still networks with ancient laws about rights and ownership which predate both rights and ownership and so cannot be deciphered by the living and stand like other worldly obelisks and dictate bad juju.
Bad obelisks missing Banks Violet missing Rachel Whiteread missing Roxy Paine. Bad obelisks damning Shepard Fairy for sticking his hopscotch thumbs in the sore butthole of the Associated Press. Bad obelisks telling China how the highly celebrated rockstars of the highly celebrated United States should be highly celebrated...
where also securities regulators are rockstars
and horticulturists are rockstars
and real housewives are rockstars
and pedophiles are rockstars
and alaska king crab fishermen are rockstars
and users are rockstars
and binary codes are rockstars
and waterbuffalos are rockstars
and salsa dancers are rockstars
and bounty hunters are rockstars
and hotdog eaters are rockstars
and teleprompt operators are rockstars
and dogwalkers are rockstars
and scorpion lickers are rockstars
and hairstyles are rockstars
and eight hundred pounds is a rockstar
and bone bone bone is a rockstar
and divorce is a rockstar
and punch you in the face is a rockstar
and only rockstars are not rockstars because no one will have them.
And so it has been said "working for a larger common good is the vocation of the terminally innocent, leaving no likely outcome except heartbreak."
Then let us believe in a heartbreaker. Let us ask for our hearts to be broken.
James Franco, this is a love letter.
James Franco is the only name I am manifest to remember.
James Franco who might someday be sitting in a coffee shop and have a good idea for a script or a story or a poem.
James Franco who is a guy like any other guy; he's just a guy.
James Franco who may come across this love letter and scratch his head and wonder what is wrong with the universe.
James Franco who seems like a guy who does sometimes wonder what is wrong with the universe.
James Franco I could tell you several things that I think are wrong with the universe and we could compare notes.
Was this about the Art World or this generation or history or anything at all?
James Franco I have a studio in Williamsburg and it's pretty chill out here and I'm sure you're busy but why don't you check it out sometime?
James Franco who I met once for about thirty seconds and it was good.
James Franco I stayed up all night for seventy-two hours listening to podcasts of the convergence culture consortium hoping to find an intellectual basis for the platonic appreciation of some other human's existence and I fell asleep and dreamt about whales.
James Franco I'm a fan.
James Franco write me back sometime, Okay?
Prologue:
My first attempt at 'a stirring defense of James Franco as the greatest artist of this generation, if not all time' was constructed in the following manor--
Step 1: For fifteen minutes I planned to repeat the name "Franco," to you... my increasingly disappointed audience.
Step 2: I would "see what happened." That was all. That was it.
I was hashtagging reality. It was "social media art." Something I keep referring to as "SoMe" Art (to the horror of those associated). It was simple, and derivative, and only as interesting as the minds and dispositions that my audience would project onto it. In this way, it was the prematurely bald head of graduate school quality performance art. It seemed mildly inappropriate, and contextually funny, and pretty awful. "Perfect," I thought.
To increase my impact on the night of the performance, I would practice. This involved video taping myself "performing" the word Franco in 15-minute intervals. Again, de rigueur Master of Fine Arts behavior.
On these tapes I pantomimed the speech patterns of every you tube video I could remember. I researched by watching mostly 13 year olds, who seemed very natural with the medium. Behind me there is a whole generation of Stanislavskities, weaned on "reality culture"-- and so they are not just method acting, but method living. They are horrifying and wonderful and I wish I didn't feel like I understood them so well. Sporadically I did other impressions of television, film, and cartoon characters as they came into my head. In one practice session I lay on my stomach with my nose touching the floor and whispered "Franco" flatly into the earth.
"Is this a post environmental earthwork?" said a hopeful voice in my mind. In another video I threw myself against the walls and shouted "FRANCO!" and made vaguely fascist gestures and sneers. '"Oh... maybe he means the other Franco!" said the hopeful voice-- "the political one! He's Spanish right? ... didn't Picasso have some beef with him?"
Then, to astound you with my bravery, I conceived of a conclusion in which I stripped naked, wearing only a sock on my penis and the sock would have the phrase "Franco," written on it.
"Oh!! Franco is the name of his penis! It's always about the penis! That's so right! It's like his penis is Rosebud!"
In the unfettered bliss of my imagination I'd be instantly raptured into the canonical slide lectures of the Art Industrial Complex. It was all Tino Sehgal and Marina Abramovic and Dan Colen and Vito Acconci and Trisha Brown and Tristan Zara and Gertrude Stein and the Situationalists and Dada, it was American Weimar, the culture was burning and self obsessed and Salinger was dead everyone would agree I was so fucking clever and then we'd all go home and just light ourselves on fire.
It was a fucking awful two weeks. It wasn't the "practicing" that got to me, but watching myself 'practice' on film. In my deteriorating confidence I kept repeating the last line of James Joyce's Araby: "Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger." Something is broken when you are using Joyce as governance for artistic restraint.
There were three factors that convinced me to pay more respect to my audience, and to treat them... you... like grownups. I don't need convincing that acting like a grown up is its own kind of failure... but in this case...
1. Bruce High Quality happened, and I found out about it. The 'market' was cornered on cooler than you art kids laughing at them selves for having learned a whole lot of nothing and felt sorry and angry and soldiered on towards the museum parapet and acted funky.
2. I leave my television on nearly all the time- with the sound off because I like the company of randomized color. And on one of those nights while I practiced--
"Late Night with Jimmy Fallon" appeared on my screen. Jimmy was commentating on a cage match between men dressed as mustaches-- this is a fairly regular bit for him. There was a ringside girl in an American flag bikini so small it would make Jeff Koons blush. A third mustache came marching down from the crowd with high fascist leg kicks; this mustache was short and vertical, and shaped like Hitler's.
Soundlessly I watched the "comedy" develop as the mustache climbed into the ring and delivered a flying cross body block to the other mustaches. Fallon bounced around wearing a mullety wig and shouted, I'm imagining, in the self-referential dudely tones of fraternity culture-- he looked like he knew how silly this was. He was O.K. with the great rouse.
And predictably, my MFA stashed away in a studio drawer, I wanted to vomit. Mind you, I'm sitting on several hours of footage in which I repeat one word and spastically perform a kind of ritualized seizure. It occurred to me that Jimmy Fallon had edgier material than myself. It was structurally more experimental. And his audience was near a million or so on any given night. I have never met anyone who would openly admit to watching the Jimmy Fallon show. The universe was becoming impossibly complex.
3. Despondent, and having chanted his name for weeks, it then occurred to me to actually think about the real James Franco. And this was a revelation.
I hadn't authentically considered my satirical premise-- James Franco as the greatest artist of this generation? What if it were true? And the more I thought about my motivations for picking, or picking on James, the more I recognized the ugliness at root of it-- Envy. James Franco is a star. And I admired that.
Was this a decent motivation for art? Is envy a worthwhile vehicle of expression?
My irony melted away. Artifice and the shelter of abstraction became vile in my mind. I'm actually just a fan...This work is fan art: a pleasure poem.
I'm in love with my imagination, and my imagination is in love with James Franco.
The "work" has become sincere.
Someday I would like to talk about the economics of sincerity.
But tonight I'm talking about James Franco.
******************************************************
The Celebritist Manifesto:
" A stirring defense of James Franco as the greatest artist of this generation if not all time."
*******************************************************
This is a warning shot from Middle America: where I last saw my point of view, destitute, watching skin flicks and cartoons, orphaned by a catholic priest undoing his rust belt, and later selling used cars to molestation victims, etc, etc.
There is a fracas on the horizon. A division and a land grab. Heroes will be the most ruthless. Fame is its own ethic... let me tell you what you already know...
This is a shot fired from Middle America where I learned from Barnes and Nobles what the "Art World" was. It's a rack next to Maxim and the other "nipple possibilities."
This is a manifesto written from an intellectual vacuum, sucked by the perpetual televised inbetween... I saw culture consummate one night on the internet...
...Hollywood and New York are pregnant, dividing zygotes: twin tyrants choke fucking in the womb. Call this the new American Tableaux: Romulus and Remus suckling the wolf's poison milk. It's a brand of infantile sexualization and beastiality based on an ancient recipe, then deep fried and packaged and sold off as culture. Not news. 'Just my take.'
One twin is an escapist fabulist with great tits.
The other sells negative pleasure and intellectual asphyxiation.
Two separate bodies sharing the same horrible brain.
Celebrity is the disease and the antidote. There is only one man positioned to save us..
One man who unites America's pleasure seeking hedonism with America's self loathing intellectual bewilderment.
When we talk about America as a culture hallucinating on the celluloid shadows of celebrity we over romanticize the value of actual Sunlight. The Sun is the most conspiratorially anti American of all the stars, as far as stars go.
We need to create our own stars... to conjure sublime metaphors of possible human transcendence and graft them on to organic actualities. We need vehicles to make-believe in the possibility of our dreams. We need fuel for our delusions, milk for our lucky charms. Breakfast should always include marshmallows...
Am I joking? I am only half joking. I am exactly half joking. The escapist in me is laughing earnestly. The intellectual in me is cringing. I am these two twinned choke fucking incestuous lovers.
But I am not the man.
There is only one man...
At the crest of every epoch, in all cultures where spectacle turns inward and exploitative and vicious, charisma is the catalyst. In a present tense where everyone is a futurist with typo faith and ego bleed and carpal tunnel and savage mistrust for brands and names and underwear models; when buying a hamburger feels directly connected to support for NAFTA or the Iraq war or an unnamed contra contra contra in deserts and jungles who do not have celebrities-- who do not yet have celebrities-- where magic still exists, before magic was outdone by charisma and the public relations industry...
I propose one man over all the static of your art fairs and biennials and pluralisms.
I propose we elect that man, not by democratic process but by shaking the trees of the liberty; committing a love revolt of immaculate and unimpeachable praise for our saint and savior...that we the virulent cynics spreading and then feeding our own distrust of class and industry and hierarchy and celebrations with any more than twenty five people... that we the self regarding sect of over educated lost boys and girls allow for passion's tryst and throw off ironic detachment and make wild and unwholesome group love to one man before all other possible gods... that we might be remembered as something just north of sycophants-- a proud fan culture, a fan culture who loves without malice...
Here tonight, let us make it manifest, let us declare:
There is one celebrity who is *good* for us...
There is one man, and only one man... that man is James Franco.
James Franco.
James Franco is a Freak.
James Franco is James fucking Dean.
James Franco is the Green Goblin.
James Franco is Harvey Milk's Boyfriend
James Franco is a giggling burnout pot smoker
James Franco is Allen Ginsberg
James Franco is Eating, Praying, Loving
James Franco is a wet tee-shirt model for Gucci
James Franco is a Director and a Producer
James Franco is a Novelist
James Franco is an Ivy League grad student pursuing two separate masters degrees
James Franco is a Soap Opera star...
James Franco is a performance artist
James Franco is a situationalist
James Franco is a self satirizing icon
James Franco is both overprivileged by his good genetic fortune, and also a humble a student of the universe
James Franco IS America.
In the visionary words of John Mayer, I propose that we crush him up and snort him. A chemical change is necessary... That we might completely disengage from our own smallish and autonomous pursuits and revel in the phantasmagoria of a man as a product, a man aware of his own product, who sells the joke about the man in the same package as the man himself. There are scant fantasies left for even the most ambitious of daydreamers.
James Franco is the vision and visage of fantasy wrapped in a wet dream about a tall dark and handsome version of a rugged intellectual individualist-- a glamrock cowboy gone east and done good in the shade of ivory towers and still had time to smoke his fine weed and laugh at bad viral videos... James Franco the bilateral symmetry...One hemisphere fingering LALAland where Marilyn did fuck and Marlon did fuck and each generation and half generation and then quarter generation found a new Marilyn and a new Marlon and they did fuck or half fuck or quarter fuck...and everyone was a comic book word bubble shouting WHAM! ZAP! POW!.... and the other hemisphere is turning tricks for caviar and brioche in smokehouses of the west village where Sartre and Camus and Nabokov have lunch with Steinum and Foucault and Sontag, where long established cocksmen and poets and nightclub owners still remember Miles Davis and heroine and Basquiat and wallow forth in the deejay skeet of New Museum flunkies shipwrecked and mustachioed on the lower east side all night vomiting to the specular rhythms and sometimes plausible song structures of the Animal Collective....
His success story is now new next America: how he cleverly avoided twenty seventh street and rose rank on his dashing good looks and public willingness to experiment with gender roles. James Franco whose name is easier to remember than Massimiliano Gioni, Josephine Meckseper, or Guthrie Lonergan.... James Franco who would name check Kalup Linzy's tossed salad animation style on one night and on the next night play opposite Julia Roberts in a romantic airport self help biopic. Here is your prom king deviant...only James Franco can simultaneously eat America's asshole and charm America's all American sweetheart who is also America's all American hooker...
James Franco who should play Vito Schnabel in a movie about Vito Schnabel directed by Julian Schnabel in which Vito Schnabel plays the young Julian Schnabel... wherein they lounge together and talk about the excesses of the art world and sip port in the Palazzo Chupi, that massive labia of the west village, wherein any of us, all of us, have dreamed about climbing up there and getting inside of her.
Let us toast a drink tonight America, let us christen a drink; America tonight let us concoct a drink that is James Franco and so also is America. This drink is one part high fructose corn syrup and one part petroleum and one part metallic pheromones leaking into our pulsing blood streams and out through water supplies and the toxicologist is taking samples and teaching big pharma about our boners and sadness and solitary confinement to digital prisons built by Photoshop... depressed America drinking its stupor of day time television and needing a General Hospital for its General Malaise.
Depressed America is chewing on its socks in the nude locker rooms of teenage America who is sexting middle school America who is playing hide the coconut and waiting for everyone to shut up so they can just exacerbate whatever, whatever...
Exacerbating the imaginary industry of the imaginary Art World that is too big for our imaginary economy, which trades greed for pornography and each transactor competes for ethical inferiority--that sinister industry which would try anything once (even fascism) just to prove it was not fascist...
Where a flower puppy is a flower puppy is a flower puppy. Where criticism is an unpaid religious vocation, the last remaining religious vocation for the non matriculating class, not hip to the power sugar sauce-- where power is truth and not the versa... the vice is president.. the vice is squeezing each art critic into the same pissing pot and that will be the premise of a new show on the Bravo television network that we all bitterly tried out for and were bitterly not selected but will bitterly watch and bitterly critique and bitterly pretend that our bitterness was actually virginal.
And how we learned on Bravo that Jerry Saltz was a very decent fellow who owns a fucking spaceship and from time to time leaves the planet because if you owned a fucking spaceship you would also leave the fucking planet. How America has left the fucking planet…
How the Bravo network chased around the possible socialist William Powhida and asked him if they could borrow his middle fingers. And Powhida said no because his middle fingers might not fit in the shot…
And how both of these men are star crossed art lovers whom know they are star crossed art lovers. And how James Franco could convincingly play both of them in the biopic – Jerry Saltz and William Powhida, the Allen Ginsberg and James Dean of critical discourse-- how everything is the sexier version of the thing it actually wanted to be... before it forgot what it actually wanted to be.
How it once figured out what it wanted to be in all night plotting sessions with the Hunter Mafia concerning the distasteful success of the Columbia and Yale and Hunter Mafia. Who moved to Hooverville and drank fair trade coffee and wore Burberry glasses and resisted buying sandals. Who met the starfucker Nic Rad and had a horrifying suspicion. Who adopted an ex-derivatives trader as his business partner and spiritual mentor. Who harassed art bloggers and tweeted live during sex and went to every restaurant in Manhattan and ordered the special.
This is also for you, graduate students of the New York Academy of Art, which started when Andy Warhol lost a bet, and so then had to train twenty years of somewhat artists to paint the bald vaginas of classicism... and avoided the bald vaginas of contemporary culture.
Who woke up one morning with an art scenic headache and went 'hair of the dog'…
…and binged on Deitch and Gagosian and Zwirner and James Cohan and Lehman Maupin and Pace and Feuer and Matthew Marks and Barbara Gladstone and 303 and Andrea Rosen and Elizabeth Dee and Marianne Boesky and Leslie Tonkonow and Mary Boone and Metro Pictures and Steve Kasher and Whitebox and Leo Koenig and PPOW and Sikkema Jenkins and Postmasters and Tony Shafrazi and did not know what to make of it and so staggered up to the Met and did copies of the bald vaginas of classicism.
At the critical point in social history when name dropping is no longer tactical, when it becomes name carpet bombing and obliterates both names and gravity-- there will only be one man left standing. James Franco will be left standing.
James Franco whom Jeffery Deitch has considered the next Warhol onto whom Jeffery Deitch has also been considered the next Andy Warhol...In 15 minutes everyone will be considered the next Warhol--and for 15 minutes...
Jeffery Deitch who is leaving the choke fucking baby of New York city for the innocent blonde baby with silicon tits of Los Angeles. Jeffery Deitch who sold urine stained phonebooks and semen stained collages and got tired and wanted to see other fluids and other bodies fledgling in other sun soaked avenues.
Leaving the spermizoid stew of the Chelsea shore to the LES museum tenements of moneyball magistrates where infomercials grew legs and walked out of the swamp and became press releases. Broadcast on networks that also sell knives and diet pills...
On selfsame networks that are somehow still networks with ancient laws about rights and ownership which predate both rights and ownership and so cannot be deciphered by the living and stand like other worldly obelisks and dictate bad juju.
Bad obelisks missing Banks Violet missing Rachel Whiteread missing Roxy Paine. Bad obelisks damning Shepard Fairy for sticking his hopscotch thumbs in the sore butthole of the Associated Press. Bad obelisks telling China how the highly celebrated rockstars of the highly celebrated United States should be highly celebrated...
where also securities regulators are rockstars
and horticulturists are rockstars
and real housewives are rockstars
and pedophiles are rockstars
and alaska king crab fishermen are rockstars
and users are rockstars
and binary codes are rockstars
and waterbuffalos are rockstars
and salsa dancers are rockstars
and bounty hunters are rockstars
and hotdog eaters are rockstars
and teleprompt operators are rockstars
and dogwalkers are rockstars
and scorpion lickers are rockstars
and hairstyles are rockstars
and eight hundred pounds is a rockstar
and bone bone bone is a rockstar
and divorce is a rockstar
and punch you in the face is a rockstar
and only rockstars are not rockstars because no one will have them.
And so it has been said "working for a larger common good is the vocation of the terminally innocent, leaving no likely outcome except heartbreak."
Then let us believe in a heartbreaker. Let us ask for our hearts to be broken.
James Franco, this is a love letter.
James Franco is the only name I am manifest to remember.
James Franco who might someday be sitting in a coffee shop and have a good idea for a script or a story or a poem.
James Franco who is a guy like any other guy; he's just a guy.
James Franco who may come across this love letter and scratch his head and wonder what is wrong with the universe.
James Franco who seems like a guy who does sometimes wonder what is wrong with the universe.
James Franco I could tell you several things that I think are wrong with the universe and we could compare notes.
Was this about the Art World or this generation or history or anything at all?
James Franco I have a studio in Williamsburg and it's pretty chill out here and I'm sure you're busy but why don't you check it out sometime?
James Franco who I met once for about thirty seconds and it was good.
James Franco I stayed up all night for seventy-two hours listening to podcasts of the convergence culture consortium hoping to find an intellectual basis for the platonic appreciation of some other human's existence and I fell asleep and dreamt about whales.
James Franco I'm a fan.
James Franco write me back sometime, Okay?
