Day: March 30, 2019

Neoliberal artist Kenneth Goldsmith has a new exhibit opening in Venice called HILLARY: The Hillary Clinton Emails.
A press pack is available via the commercialized sharing platform Dropbox.
Using "techniques of appropriation and collage," Goldsmith prints out the emails that Clinton sequestered on a private server when she was ostensibly working for the American taxpayer. The show is not a criticism of this dicey activity but rather an attempt to shift the blame for her 2016 election loss back to the email server controversy, just as the Russian collusion narrative is dying an ignoble death. As the press release explains:

The almost 60,000 pages of [Clinton email] documentation are printed in double copy and are on display in the gallery and in the lobby on the second floor of Despar Teatro Italia. The pile of papers is rather unimpressive, rebutting Trump’s efforts to make them monumental. In this way, Goldsmith creates the greatest poem of the 21st century, an anti-monument to the folly of the heinous smear campaign against Clinton.

The gallerygoer is supposed to be impressed by this unimpressive pile of paper, sufficiently to rethink the election. Perhaps we can look forward to a future exhibition from Goldsmith documenting Clinton's unimpressive speeches to investment bankers, the mere millions in "speaking fees" she received in advance of the contest, or evidence of the sheer underwhelmingness of the failed state she helped to create in Libya!

underwhelming, but pretty