Diamond Stingily at Wattis

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A shelving not quite inspiring confidence. A bookshelf is a form of social signaling, marking class, worth, status. This one is made of compressed dust to which it shall return.

Google "no participation trophies in life." You'll get hundred of results, get NYTimes debates. Rapid opinions, Millennial castigation. This despite childhood development studies saying you should reward effort, not achievement. "You did so well" is less positive reinforcement than "You worked so hard." Rewarding achievement threatens the hand of failure. Effort can be contributed without risk.

Sports are a form of systematized and controlled adversity. For a certain class of children this will be their only form of adversity.

Trophies, shelved, imply the past that looked through tint rose, nostalgia on achievement.

No one seemed to really mention the stark shadow these cast. 

Things said in recollecting the past, against the trophy of achievement they do not contain, become lamentations for a past that isn't garnered any such social trophies like a real wood bookshelf.

Diamond Stingily at Freedman Fitzpatrick

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The transition from handmade dolls to mass produced Teddy Bears had to be meaningful for the unconscious of humanity. All sorts of issues for what it would mean with children grown on loving sweatshop objects. Units of CareBears moved. To move you. Shouldn't the Toy Story characters speak Chinese? Dominant culture gets to force its cast to speak its language, dub them against their natural speaking voice, force adoption of its language. It's called localized for a market. It's called acting white. It's called "he's eloquent." called AAVE, a vernacular nonstandard but "equal." They surely will speak whatever when localized for market. Giving commodities to children so they learn to love their master. Because really they'd speak Mandarin. Klaus Biesenbach's apartment has nothing in it and is entirely white, which is a lie since minimalism is basically predicated on closeting the workers you're standing on, but we'll give him several architectural and NYT magazine spreads anyway, a new advancement in whitewash interiors. Because pretending the working body isn't there, pretending everything spontaneously generates on store shelves clean, without indentured sweat, is important to our culture. Corporate production gets so massive it takes pains to relocate itself, force adoption of itself, anything outside it gets the searchlight, brought back under eye that is pretended as benign with total market share, control.


see too: Melvin Edwards at Daniel Buchholz, Diamond Stingily at Queer Thoughts

Diamond Stingily at Queer Thoughts

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How did the written form of Jungle Book's all powerful snake Kaa become the Disney film's second tier villain and comedic relief, and how did natural black hair become a 9 billion dollar industry so profoundly contentious it led Chris Rock to make a documentary about the subject with a Rotten Tomatoes 95% approval rating after his daughter at three asked why her natural hair wasn't "good?" Disneyfication, conforming a subject to dominant culture's preexisting expectations of how that object should be, making for a lot of unnecessary and uncomfortable changes. In a book rife with assimilating contradictions, in which the Medusa fights an Odalisque from obscure Quebecois myth so beautiful anyone catching sight turns to gemstone against the gorgon's stone, an elaborate fight fought through mirrors, one of Infinite Jest's major characters who wears a veil is either hideously disfigured or fatally pulchritudinous behind it, forever ambiguous until looked upon which like the quantum cat's vitals inside a box, a physical attribute achieves a superposition in culture, a sort of walking contradiction as a symbol of power at the same time it leaves open the wound for the bitter slight, "Becky with the good hair."
They're contentious things and that's why they're hanging in a gallery.