Today, ART21 (aka one of my most treasured and consistent confirmations that the world is, in fact, an awesome place) published an interview with emerging artist Sean Joseph Patrick Carney on it’s blog .  In it, we get a brief but entertaining look at this deceptively intelligent, tattooed, bearded, jort wearing artist who lures folks into his art shows with a cooler full of PBR.  In other words, a startling facsimile of a significant number of my friends.   It would be more than easy to write Mr. Carney’s work off as the kind of shitcky, “ironic,” self-indulgent nonsense that I have come to think of as hipster art, but his engagements with some of the patron saints of cultural theory (Benjamin, Baudrillard, Foucault, Kristeva) deserve a pause for consideration, however brief.

If I’ve convinced you give in to distraction for a few minutes, I highly recommend his Procession of Simulacra, an English to “American” translation of a chapter from Baudrillard’s Simulations and Simulacra (1981).  The humor in the piece (or attempts as such) is obvious, but also an acute awareness of the fragility of the theoretical debates people who do what I do for a living hang our hats on.

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Read the full text of the interview:  http://blog.art21.org/2012/11/12/new-kids-on-the-block-baudrillard-for-bozos-an-interview-with-sean-joseph-patrick-carney/?utm_source=art21.org&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=textlink&utm_campaign=Art21_HP