The End of My Life with Anna Weyant
We met at the Rhode Island School of Design. I was an Art History major, and she was a Fine Arts major, studying painting. Some of our lectures overlapped. There was an affinity between us, the tacit knowledge that at art school we didn’t fit in for the first time in our lives. It seemed that something had happened over summer, between high school and college. All the kids who had worked hard in school—the careerists—had started developing anti-establishment sentiments. Everyone was afraid of selling out when they should have been getting ahead. The RISD faculty wasn’t alarmed by this, and in fact encouraged it. Students put themselves out there in ways that made me feel embarrassed. Even if it wasn’t their first instinct, they appeared in strange outfits as though it were normal. They ventriloquised new motivations in service of some connection made between whatever they’d just read and their newfound amateurish sensibility. Whatever happened to that young enterprising person who uploaded a video to YouTube titled “My Accepted Ivy League Portfolio”? Half of them had come in clutching Wacom tablets. En masse, students abandoned painting or photography, whatever they’d been adept at in high school, for mediums they had no skill in, like assemblage sculpture or performance art.
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Dean Kissick’s Downward Spiral chronicled the art world’s contradictions with the breathless urgency of an end-times prophet. Now, with the column closed and the critic in semi-exile, the question lingers: was he a voice of his generation, or just another scenester burning out on his own myth?
Tim Burns’s art blurs fiction and reality, often staging disasters before they happen. His 1972 Ghost Train redesign eerily foreshadowed the 1979 Luna Park fire, just as his 1977 film Why Cars? uncannily prefigured 9/11. Through rupture, collision, and shock, Burns’s work remains less prophetic than provocatively attuned to history’s unfolding disasters.
