The Thousands

When you see Britney Spears eating a sandwich, what do you think? I think, ‘Check it out – it’s Britney Spears, and she’s eating a sandwich.’ I also think, ‘Gold.’

Sydney-based artist Romi Graham has similar thoughts. We all do. The weird psychic disconnect between banality and modern celebrity makes the idea of celebrities doing “real” things sort of spooky and thrilling, like pets with human feelings, or your parents doing sex. That much is pretty obvious, and it’s tempting not to think about it much further. Once you take a deep breath and put aside heavier questions of suffering, mortality, fetishism, decadence, demagoguery and the kind of Marxist / Feminist critiques we’re trained to shoehorn onto everything, you arrive at the bottom. And what’s at the bottom? Britney Spears eating a sandwich. Gold.

The other show opening at CACSA is concerned with something called “Post-Formalism”, which is a new response to the idea that art doesn’t necessarily have to be burdened with morality, politics, culture or any meaning that isn’t derived from its medium and visual form. In effect, the value of art is the result of its purest physicality – something close to that which Kant so cheerfully liked to call “The Thing Itself”. Good old Kant, eh? Imagine that guy eating a burrito.