CAN AN ARTIST HIT THE JUGULAR while they’re reaching for the wallet at the same time? Only if the wallet and the jugular are the same thing. In the cultural devolution of “audience” to “eyeballs,” perhaps no genre has so loudly insisted on its robust resistance to power as comedy and perhaps no genre’s complicity has, since 2017, been made more transparent. (Let the rise of Joe Rogan be citation enough here.) To borrow a one-liner from Morgan Bassichis’s brilliant solo performance Questions to Ask Beforehand (Bridget Donahue), “What stage of capitalism is it called when everyone’s a comedian?”
On September 29, New York Times art critic Holland Cotter championed an exhibit of “queer” and trans art under the headline “When It Comes to Gender, Let Confusion Reign." The exhibit at the New Museum in Manhattan is titled “Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon.” Cotter cheered breaking down "the binary male-female face-off" and stretching "the perimeters of gender to the snapping point."