This essay first appeared in slightly edited form at Splice Today.
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Art is by most objective standards a useless endeavor. You can’t repair our nation’s crumbling infrastructure with a sonnet; you can’t beat back a terrorist-affiliated insurgency with a performance piece, even if it involves some combination of meat, elephant dung, and/or Lady Gaga. Go ahead and sing “We Are the World” till even starving Ethiopian children with giant bellies cover their ears and pray for death and/or earplugs, but the fact remains that the last best hope of man isn’t Bono finding what he’s looking for or Angelina Jolie adopting it but the loose change in Bill Gates’ underwear drawer. Relevant artists are the white elephants of our times — uselessly bloated, irritatingly stentorian, semi-sentient tschotskes. The only real difference between the two is that you can imagine situations in which someone might actually want to look at a white elephant.