Salon | Sound Salvation

S O U N D+S A L V A T I O N+++S A R A H+V O W E L L

Sound Salvation by sarah Vowell

Playing the "Air Guitar"
Dave Hickey's essays on art and democracy hit a major chord

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in 20th-century art, crime always pays. And who's the ringleader? The godfather? The boss? He's a chess-playing joker named Marcel Duchamp, who grabbed a postcard of the Mona Lisa, uncapped his pen and, with a wink, defaced the smiling lady with a mustache, scrawling under her the letters "L.H.O.O.Q.," which, roughly translated, means "She's hot in the ass." The Mona Lisa! Dirty Duchamp stole from da Vinci, stole his dignity, his masterpiece, his aura, made him into the butt of a joke. But hey, Renaissance man, this is the modern age, which means only one thing -- jungle rules. And if you can rob one of the smartest artists of the millennium of his honor, then Gloria Estefan is pretty much fair game.
VH-1's "Pop-Up Video" isn't so much a TV show as an art project. Creators Tad Low and Woody Thompson should receive honorary MFAs for the program, because grad students worldwide are getting diplomas for just this sort of thing -- stealing (or as they say in art school, "appropriating") hackneyed pop images and scribbling on top of them à la granddaddy Marcel. The show, which would not be out of place on a monitor in a darkened gallery at CalArts, takes existing music videos and messes with them, making little word-balloons pop up periodically on the screen. The balloons illuminate everything from the performer's biography to behind-the-scenes dish, announcing that Joan Osborne's nose ring in her "One of Us" video is a clip-on (and therefore as fake as her singing), and that Duran Duran's "Rio" yacht shoot was postponed for a day because the cast and crew were seasick. Who knew?
"Pop-Up Video" is a show for people who hate videos, and, since there have only been about three good ones (R.E.M.'s "Man in the Moon," the Beastie Boys' "Sabotage" and ... I forget the other one), there are a lot of us. I'll admit that Cyndi Lauper was always fab and that I've gotten caught up in the Madonna thing and the Michael Jackson thing and the Nirvana thing and many, many other MTV phenomena. I'll even 'fess up to watching "The Real World," a show which has as much to do with real life as music videos have to do with music. Sure, we all know those people who get that huffy tone in their voices and say, "MTV doesn't play videos anymore." Hoo-ray. Wouldn't you much rather watch all those "Real World" goofballs fighting over who left a mess in the kitchen than watch Mariah Carey dork around in a swimsuit anyway?

N E X T+P A G E+| Distracted from distraction by distraction