Michael Manning: I Hate Mondays

These days artists all want to be corporations, start ups, or brands, WHAT A DRAG!!

The truth is I don’t hate mondays, I think they are pretty great. I think about Mondays in the way most of the world does, as the start of the work week, but I always liked going back to work. Life is different now though, imperialist post-fordism is a whole thing, creative types and tele-web-coffee shop commuters have run amok and now the paradigm of the work week is all but gone (the banks are about the only ones still holding on). On Christmas Eve at 11:37pm in 2016 your boss doesn’t care if you’re in the middle of your annual Love Actually ‘Net!ix and Chill’ they expect you to answer your phone or email or Slack or inter-company IRC chat so the client’s servers don’t go of!ine. So the suit is out, and hoodies are in.

This art show is about being a different kind of artist (and I’m not talking about reviving painting).

This art show is about being the non-binary change in the world the social justice warriors on your twitter feed want to see. Remember beauty? We still care about that, the sublime too. Ambiguity is our favourite. We take the fucked up lemons of our contemporary technocracy and make that sweet divine lemonade you had after hiking Le Chemin de Nietzsche in Eze. We’re sick of food served on wood boards and you’re going to hear about it. This is a #TBT to perfection glimmering in the petal of a peony. We serve the lasagna that makes you remember hiding under the table eating the scraps of your grandmother’s pasta dough.

I watched the mustard “eld outside Charles de Gaulle radiate peace while remembering the Kentucky criminal on TV that always said “nothing is free but the grace of God”. He was right.

We believe love is more than an economy based on resource scarcity. We are keeping the faith.