Leonardo Boiko’s Diary

• I can’t stand the “look but don’t touch” feel of the Western art tradition. I mean, I really can’t stand it. My æsthetic tastes were formed by the tea ceremony, which like the West features deep respect for beautiful objects — but where Western art expresses that respect by isolating the pieces behind a dozen “keep distance” signs, Japanese art was made to be manipulated, interacted, passed from hand to hand, exalted by the human touch instead of by its avoidance — when I visit a museum I find the aura of sanctity to be unbearable, like if I was a pig in a church.

  I just went to an exhibition where the artist made a room wholly in red — walls, furniture, lamps, everything. It had a cozy feeling to it, like if one had just entered James Bond’s bedroom right in the middle of a spy-movie opening. Forgetting the chains and warnings of the Museum for a moment, me and my daughter promptly proceeded to try out red hats and glasses and sit in red sofas, only to be politely but firmly told not to touch anything. What’s the point?

  (Side note: The artist put a Brazilian Hermes Lettera portable typewriter in there, but she didn’t notice the Lettera is not really red —it’s orangeish. That’s why I spray-painted mine 8)

• When Andy placed commercial, mass-produced designs right in the middle of the Museum’s holy ground, it was shocking and innovative because it went counter to what everyone believed art to be back then. In the sixties. Since then, pasting a logo a hundred times is not shocking nor innovative anymore. Seriously, guys, stop. Think of something yourselves.

  It’s ironic that pop-art backfired: in its attempt to take Real Art down from the pedestal, it ended up there herself — and now chocolate wrapping paper is raised to the realm of elitism by painters who can’t draw, while the bourgeois middle-class audience either pretend there’s some mysterious meaning to it or whines that “my son could do better”. The beast is tamed; pop is unpopped.

This weekend’s art project: 1992 Brazilian walkthrough guide Guia Games redone in New Games Journalism style.

Only the first game is done, mind you; this will be a serialization. Expect a feed in the next few days.

Update: feed now at http://namakajiri.net/the-guia-games-project/feed.xml.

I’m always talking big about reality-based parenting — that is, never lying to your kids nor hiding them from the truth about death, poverty, injustice, the non-existence of Santa Claus, Easter Bunny, the afterlife, or God. People always make this funny look on their faces — you’re ruining their childhood without fantasy! I’m like wtf, do you know who are you talking to? I read fiction like I drink water, several books per month plus hundreds of comic books and games and cartoons — I spend more time with fantasy than reality; I’m way more involved with fantasy than any of them Santa Claus advocates. By a childhood “with fantasy” they mean, of course, lying to them that fantasy is real; but, as a lover of fantasy, I know good stories have no need for such lies — and I know children are more than smart enough to tell make-believe from truth.

Having said that, I figure I’m being a fucking hypocrite with my disgust for “curriculum parents” — the kind of parent who enrolls his kids in a dozen language courses and personal improvement whatnots, “paving their future” with a cash carpet. The thing is, they are right — they are making their kids’ future “better”, albeit for an awfully short-sighted, ignorant measure of betterness. I, OTOH, am rising my children for art — but art is a lie. What right have I to tell them to get away from the dehumanizing corporate machine, to shut their ears to the siren call of consumerism, to seek their interests and become great human beings — when I myself have sold my soul and prostituted my mind?

Art is my religion, it’s the particular lie I chose to believe in to make the bleak reality tolerable — passing it on to my kids and sheltering them from the System is exactly the same as telling tales of Heaven to shelter them from death. Perhaps there’s no escape from the parental sin.