Douglas Barone
Douglas Barone
A Post-postmodernist with Objectivist leanings, fighting to catch up with his art after serving time as a capitalist oppressor of the people.
Doug Barone retired from corporate life after 20 years in the finance industry and is fooling everyone into thinking he is a writer. Having been a corporate strategist, finance executive, and IT executive he has found almost nothing of use to him from those years except the zany people and crazy stories that no one in their right mind could ever dream up. He uses these real life experiences in his work and this separates him from other writers who never really worked a day in their lives either.
His work, his prose fiction, is focused on power, its entanglement with emotional fulfillment, the impact of institutional concentrations of authority, and our struggles in the space created between. It deals with the ontological-deontological tension of existence in a post-postmodern world, where ideas have re-emerged as vastly powerful things even in the simple acts of everyday life. Sometimes his work allows just a bit of the mystical to cross over into reality, breaking the barriers of perception, heightening a sense of the possible.
Since this is all antithetical to the held narrative of our time, he fully expects to be pilloried by the academic left as well as the religious right, and looks forward to every lashing.
Drag Over Violence on 24th Street
West 24th Street. It’s not even a street, or at least it wasn’t till recently. Around 1970, it was an old alleyway, off 11th Avenue, left over from the better violence of 23rd or 14th street. Even 27th had more action, with at least a bar or two for the Irish toughs to bust each other’s heads. But on 24th, nothing. At best it was the place for a drag away crime. In other words the assault occurred on 23rd and the victim was dragged over to a building on 24th for the slow completion of man’s love against man.
Today, that is oh, so different. Now in gallery after gallery, 24th street can, in a proud moment, claim to be a center of the modern art world, such as it is in the depression of 2009. After a few – how many, too many – Martinis this afternoon, I decided that no, a nap was not appropriate, but a slip out the back door of my apartment to the street that girdles my block was better. Just one block, just one stretch, that even with the Gagosian closed for rehanging (of the fabulous, shamed that you missed it, Piero Manzoni, exhibit) still has more, and better, art than all the halls of the Whitney, shame on them. This was how I would spend my afternoon.
Feelings of awe, and derision, success and condensation, mixed with undried oils and linseed oil that not so long ago coated the canvass of works I’m sure were the loves of their creator’s lives. Expressions of screaming emotion were in every store front. Drip. Once loved by their creators and dealers, these canvases were now just something for someone from Oslo to say , ‘Ya, ve vent to ze Chelsea arts place, und saw ze arts’.
But the monstrousness of some installations demands more. Tourists be damed, you still can’t take home anything from David Musgrave at Augustnie, and you can’t have a Michael Raedecker from Andrea Rosen (well you can, but I want them, all. So let’s fight over it)
And you think, outside, watching women of a certain asset bracket cruise the street, it really isn’t over yet. Nope. We have not moved to another place. The economic fantasy produced by those who wish power from those that have it, they are really just stealing, just like they used to do on this street when ladies carried iron dagger and not just iron personalities. Obama shuts down New York, so that Washington can shop here. I get it. Power to (my) people.
Welcome to Chelsea. Be careful…