May 13 – Lena Dunham gets a hopeful artist’s showcase

I’m at an art show of a guy named Murakami, dubbed something about how octopodes will eat their own leg, hoping and mostly knowing it will regenerate, in order to escape entrapment. It’s symbolic in a way even the plebiest amongst us can figure out. A lot of the pieces really pop, and they make me want to have my own art show, so that’s what I will do.

First I’ll need to meet a curator or gallery owner, or maybe first I’ll need to create the show. Actually, first I’ll need an idea for the show. Yeah, that sounds better. This way it will be more for me. But I still want your opinion about which of these should I run with.

• Descendants – Composed of work by deceased artists who never had children, with me curating. This is what they passed down generationally, and it must be preserved. DNA transference is selfish on many levels – god-like, earth-ruining, etc-etc – and the opposite on other levels, as it requires one to give up their own desires and passions in favor of someone else’s. With the advancement of contraceptive technologies, most of us get to choose whether or not to have kids, and you have to be a little bonkers to make the baby-making choice.

• Access Prohibited – The attendee can’t get into any of the rooms which house the art. If they stretch their heads around they can kind of see what’s inside, very partially. The actual pieces visitors are trying to see centre around secrecy, censorship, or sometimes legitimate danger. Going a bit further, there can even be some rooms that require passwords to get in, with the words themselves being answers to riddles or the like. Or for one, you need to prove you have at least 10,000 Instagram followers, in an influencer-based social media experiment touched on by Black Mirror and more recently in a less fictional way by the country of China, but only a bit like In Time.

• Old Factory – A scent-centred show, where visuals and sounds are used only to complement the aromas. Scent is the sense most closely tied with memory, and with stinking, but it’s rarely if ever the focus of an artist. Many of the rooms will be pitched black, maybe even vantablack, but I’ll need Anish Kapoor to sign off on that one. Here’s a few of the centrepieces of that one:
  * Farts – I know, I know, a little childish, but butt gas brings with it so much baggage that it can’t be left out without a thorough explanation, which I don’t want to give. They’re funny. They’re disgusting. They’re preferred by the creator. When you think of the work “smelly”, we’re mostly thinking farts here.
  * Subway store – I’ve been telling people for years that Subway has concocted and bottled this scent that reminds people of the artisanal sandwiches. Many refute this, claiming it’s the smell of the freshly-baked bread. I refuse to look it up because that would diminish the integrity of this message, no matter the answer.
  * Nostalgia – This one harkens back to days of yore, when the sweet smell of 1940s candy and 1950s candy and 1960s hippies filled the air.