I Don't Want Your Life

I sat down last night to write out some thoughts I had about a lecture I attended on Wednesday by Peter Schjeldahl, art critic for the New Yorker. It was altogether enjoyable and has already sparked a few observations, one of which I was going to write about here—when I saw a commercial for Friday Night Lights.

I can't contain it. Schjeldahl will have to wait—this is a real problem for me. After some point maybe about six months ago, I became completely unable to resist movies about high school football. Particularly if there's even a suggestion that the movie documents a 2-A conference in Texas, and especially when said Texasness exhibits itself in the form of a soft-spoken but stern aw-shucks determinism on behalf of the coach, a team of upright loose-cannon underdogs for each of whom the final play of the big game was tailor made to instill an important life lesson, and free-wheeling, cornfed, morally underresourced cheerleaders. As I have passionate (if indeterminate) ambitions to make a career as an aesthete—and few to no marketable skills to fall back on—this weakness could become a significant stumbling block in my future.

It's enough that I like Texas football—there is a very real art world that is very really full of shit and just Wednesday night that art world bore testament to how shitty it can be when, during the Q&A session and reception after Schjeldahl's lecture, in which he emphasized pragmatism and not drawing insider/outsider distinctions, individual after individual assaulted the man with quite sincere question-ish presentations of their own advanced manifestos, dissertation-winning theories and criticisms that leave no room for variance or interpretation, with Schjeldahl's employer (Conde Nast) being a topic of some scrutiny—as players in the DC art world seem to be of the opinion that the debut of Conde Nast's upcoming large-circulation art periodical will signify the end of contemporary art. That's the way it goes, and I'm comfortable in that world, I guess, so long as I never see a video installation of a UT football game in the gallery, at which point my beer-by-the-pitcher voice will rise to the fore and I will likely shout at the piece/quarterback, puncturing the very carefully procured illusion upon which the world of art is predicated.

Football is one thing, an interest that, like comic books, flip-flops, and America's Next Top Model, manifests itself in my life but coexists comfortably enough with my aesthetics. I am not, generally speaking, rife with tension. But there is simply no room in contemporary aesthetics for the schmaltzy high school football text, and I'm not sure which force will win me over. If you come back to this page in several weeks and find posted here a strong essay about the poststructuralist's duty to seek low art for input, know that I have succumbed to a yearning for the fatherly Billy Bob Thornton and his inspiring, pivotal half-time speeches (set to the accompaniment of a tear-jerking score) and the life I might have carved for myself in Odessa-Midland. And please accept me anyway. "Know y'all's selves," the man once said, and isn't that what we're all trying to do out here?