Jason Rhodes Dies

Well that was weird. You're going along, everything more or less on schedule, and this young artist just up and dies. While I have always sort of dis-liked Mr. Rhodes' work and suspected it might be nothing more than insincere bluster, I also think I kind of secretly hoped that one day I would find out that there was something to it. I had never known what he actually looked like, only that he was fairly young. What I imagined was probably something smaller and dirtier than this obituary picture from the Times seems to suggest, although the Times picture (click to enlarge) strongly reinforces my suposition that his work may be involved with some asshole-guy swagger. I remember his PeaRoeFoam show at the Greene St. Zwirner location being thoroughly perplexing and slightly maddening on at least a couple levels, in a way that seemed to lack the cool underlying poetry of someone like Jessica Stockholder, who aesthetically anyway seems to draw from a similar palette of nonsense and crapola. It was as though he managed to get every single thing wrong, and the whole thing STILL didn't work. It was the artworld equivalent of seeing hipsters in Williamsburg wearing Moon Boots and Fred Flintstone jackets: one feels vaguely disgusted, but at the same time suspects that one may have been gotten the better of. Good night sweet coked-up prince!