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THESE ARE THE DAYS OF MIRACLE AND WONDER

As the tide pulls from the coast a murmur-less vacuum is left where once a bubble stood. What goes up must come down and there’s no denying that the art market bubble has evaporated, rising on a hot wind to splatter it’s residue over the auction houses and commercial galleries far below it.

There’s enough to be melancholic about, but that’s not the position I’m going to take. Maybe for the first time my generation has something to fight against some of the disharmony. There’s always a war somewhere, a plight on TV, but for the first time since the 80s, that plight is right in our faces and we’re old enough to grasp it, maybe even old enough to do something about it.

New York’s not the mad crazy world it was - any frontiersmen died long ago in the battle as Giuliani spot-lit revellers after dusk with piercing helicopter beams, picking out every drug deal. The clubs and their kids are relegated to back rooms. The Mudd and Studio 54 now only partially linger like lunchtime’s liquour on the lips of a corporate homogenised art crowd, complete with Comme des Garçons’ bellows. Black and baggy, they shuffle round Chelsea, ducking in and out of chrome and glass.

Before I got there, I sat 37,000 feet in the air, London a memory, and a weightless nothingness that couldn’t be cleared by swallowing. The kind of ear-pop that lasts a lifetime. Perhaps when there’s no tangible time, the universe is on pause and everything on the ground is a perfect mix of potentiality and hope. Showing your art in the New World is scary when you’ve grown so accustomed to the old one. Perhaps art’s constant quest for the new, its unquestioning gaze of chaos that touches on every subject, emotion and impulse, has made less of an impact on the world than we thought. Now the world itself is fighting back.

Am I scared about the flight or the show? I don’t know. Maybe I’m just scared in general.

I tried to swallow again but my ears still didn’t clear. Perhaps if I ate something whilst up in the air, this would have been better. Still I exercised my ‘nil by mouth regime’ for a reason. The last thing I needed on top of this jet lag fuelled insomnia was anaphylaxis 2 hours off Newfoundland. Perhaps the entire planet needs to swallow to clear its sense of stasis.

It takes about 40 seconds to get to the top of the rock. Rockefeller is this what you wanted for this great city.? 20 bucks to the top of your plaza and the Moma thrown in as a sweetener to the deal?

The big apple laid out before me, the Chrysler, the Empire State and Central Park as a slice of nature in the middle if it all. From Rockefeller’s perspective this city’s ambition really does reach for the sky; for a long time the Americans have been looking up, however on my arrival I found them staring at their feet.

Somewhere in this cell-like grid below me, I pray to find the kids with the fire in their eyes, the insane purveyors of far flung ideas. Distant dreamers from across the ocean. But they aren’t here. First they are “in Brooklyn” then they’re “in Philly” the next thing you know “they’re in Berlin” and before you know it “they’re in Hoxton, London”. Well that’ll be me then. Great! The truth is they were here a decade ago and died when the pubs discovered cocktail bar interiors. And the difference? My lot have gadgets. Hirst didn’t have a digital camera and used slides not jpegs. We have colour printers, instant communication; we follow the pulse of the world in a tweet. My computer has more power than the one that put a man on the moon. All of this at our finger tips, yet we change nothing? I can’t resolve that, we’ve changed nothing. The punks made more noise with glue and photocopies. If video killed the radio star, and images came and broke our heart, what’s the internet done to us? Could it have made us inert?

The signage is dated here; the plugs stick out the wall on two pins often sparking as they go. Even the electricity seems old fashioned. The heat sticks. I need to make my diamond piece light up for the show tomorrow night, but like a 70s neon sign in disrepair, it just flickers, there’s not enough juice in the outlet. Even my soldering iron is lukewarm.

No sleep for 32 hours now, the heat is unbearable, I run from hardware store to Radio Shack to hardware store. The
elusive plug always out of reach. It’s at Best Buys, only to find the voltage is backwards. My body knows it’s the middle of the night. I ask the friendly guy in the hardware store for some solder, he thinks I’m after a soda and asks if I want regular or diet. Joviality left when the third blister arrived between my sweaty socks and K-Swiss.

I try to sleep but I can’t, there’s 200+ channels of ads, and every gimmick I need to be a better fisherman.

The next day I’m out on the street again, lost and it seems the piece of kit I need to make the diamond glow is a stepup adapter. Flower sellers quickly surround me and I ask a kind looking Jamaican if he can point me in the direction of the device. I explain what it’s for and we end up in a debate about the art market.

This blip... I explain, what if it’s not a blip? What if the past 7 year escalation was the blip? Step back and run through the time line again. Did everything at auction always sell? Would bad things fetch money just because they were ‘art’? Or was it a smaller niche, like fine wine or rare golf clubs that those on the inside understood and cherished? Was the 90’s marketing and the reduction of concept to street level a great thing for accessibility? Or has it left us high and dry with more noise than ears to decipher it? Maybe we need to rise to the challenge of this moment. Of this time!

I don’t know how I did it, but a subway trip later and I finally had it, the holy grail of plugs, the very thing that would
make the work glow! Suddenly I had a second wind and ran back to the gallery, weaving between the busloads of
tourists at Gagosian next door for the Picasso Show. Between you and me, it wasn’t great. There are much better
ones at Moma.

On my way back however I passed Metro pictures and Robert Longo’s new show Surrendering the Absolutes. His gigantic charcoal drawings cast ominous shadows of isolation. In a departure from his recent seriality, Longo takes us to deserted forests and confined aircrafts, the air a stagnant, close oppression. More than just a way an image can shift our perception, the environments that they evoke really did transport me to a different place in thought, albeit a frightening one. Longo, like the other members of the Pictures Generation have an amazing ability to take us to a breaking point of the image itself. They show us the falsification of a world, where the image is supposed to reflect how we really are. Far from being our real state, the image world in the hands of the ‘Pictures Generation’ is exposed for its lie. A lie I think my generation, one I’d like to name ‘the media generation’, has accepted hook ,line and sinker.

I tried to show the futility in the media reproduced image in my show at Anna Kustera down the road, and now with
my step-up adaptor, my work here was complete. I even dropped the house from the Wizard of Oz on top of Thatcher. If there truly is ‘no society’, then Manhattan seemed the perfect place to slay a media version of the perpetrator of that myth. The danger as spelled out by the ‘Pictures Generation’ in the retrospective at the Met was certainly that these very myths through repetition, shape our reality. Susan Boyle made it inside her TV only to be killed by celebrity’s now instant and doomed trajectory; it’s straight to therapy in now.

Whilst Susan broods about her cats I’m in the air again and Yasha’s sitting next to me. We talk about our collaboration with the Prodigy, and her Sandman inspired Neil Gaiman project. Only to find the pilots name is the latter. Weird. I pull out my notebook to write this, but there’s a hole in my memory, the opening of the show is a complete blur, did I finally sleep in the back room? Or has it just merged with the other openings in London and Italy this month?

I remember that after the private view, Anna Kustera, Ken, Paul, Tony and I went to Park for a bite to eat. It’s a
seriously hip restaurant; I think it’s been there for a while. On entering, Anna’s two bright helium balloons were
impounded for being ‘against the restaurant’s balloon policy’. It felt a bit like my friend Susie (who’s been in a punk
band for decades) trying to get her daughter to revise for her GCSEs. Something just doesn’t click.

Yasha’s more scared in the air than me, and for some reason the journey back is the easiest flight I’ve ever taken.
The trash of Lesbian Vampire Killers is all I can mange from the in-flight entertainment and before I knew it I was back in London and in a car home, ready to start my next mission.

With everyone else partying in Venice and Basel this week, I’ve been left with the task of moving studios across the
canal. As I finally finish I’m surrounded by ceiling height boxes and I pop my iPod on shuffle before I start sorting, to be greeted by Paul Simon singing “every generation throws a hero at the pop charts.” Well I’m waiting, with complete anticipation, for whosoever it is from mine to stand up.