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Fuck Seth Price
From one of the most influential artists of his generation comes a provocative, moving novella about what it means to be a creative person under today's digital regime. In the course of a gripping, headlong narrative, Price's unnamed protagonist moves in and out of contemporary non-spaces on a confounding and enigmatic quest, all the while meditating on art in the broadest sense: not simply painting and sculpture but also film, architecture, literature, and poetry. From boutique hotels and highway bridges to PC terminals and off-ramps; from Kanye West and Jeff Koons to George Bush and Patricia Highsmith; from the playground to the internet to the mirror, Price's hybrid of fiction, essay, and memoir gets to the central questions not only of art, but of how we live now
124 pages, Paperback
First published June 15, 2015
10 people are currently reading
422 people want to read
About the author
Seth Price
31 books6 followersSeth Price is a New York-based multi-disciplinary post-conceptual artist and writer.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
February 27, 2016
Fuck Seth Price!
March 14, 2016
Kind of like Bret Easton Ellis' writing except it's about art, it's smart, and it and was fun for me to read (haha).
"Writing, on the other hand, which had little connection to money and power, was only broadening its already considerable mass appeal, thanks to the proliferation of texting, tweeting, blogging, and so on, even as those same forces were emancipating writing from its long-standing narrative conventions."
"There was probably a fifth reason for making art lurking in the shadows, which was the desperate, barely acknowledged need to forestall death, but this went equally for all people and was a reason why humans had children, or built buildings, or collected stamps, or did anything at all, and therefore this motivation was everything and nothing, and not worth thinking about, or too painful to think about."
"Once you'd passed the hurdles of schooling, first employment, marriage, and parenthood, further progress was measured by means of consumption. This didn't have to mean a sports car or a new face: it was entirely possible to scorn midlife cliches in favor of something supposedly more sensible yet born of the same determination to make things better, for instance, a high-end mattress."
"Art-making was as much about physical labor as it was about wielding abstract symbols and codes. Art was a context within which you could pursue both ditch digging and symbol management, and doubtless somewhere there was an artist hard at work doing just that, since much contemporary art was explicitly concerned with reconciling the two realms."
"It might be useful, he thought, to consider this story of the network and the personal computer, a story that limned and animated our time, against the history of film, the predominant cultural and artistic technology of an earlier age. The history of film, or more accurately the moving image, also performed a three-part arc, veering from individualistic beginnings to a mass middle periods before finally returning to individualism with a vengeance."
"To his mind, many experimental writers were looking in all the wrong places. He wanted to tell them to stop aping strategies pioneered by long-dead avant-gardists, to forget the pursuits of difference and the scorn of normativity, and instead consider supposedly stable, mainstream areas of 'pure' or uncomplicated narrative deemed beneath poetic consideration, areas that, thanks to market-based dependence on the cutting edge of language and experience, were actually disentegrating, mutating, and emanating odd ripples: becoming not just weirder but poetic."
"He felt like he'd finally grasped the essence of art's future. It was architecture, which best understood how to combine technology, scale, visual singularity, and all the necessary financial and political underpinning, that was preparing the way."
"And neither would you, in the end, because like most artists, the majority of coders don't want to be managers, they just want to code. Get rich if possible, but really just code. In hindsight, you had been working for that big company all along, only without benefits, job security, or the other enticements of corporate employment."
"Young artists fresh out of school labored mightily to build not a deliberate, traditional career but an eye-catching IPO that could be snapped up by the market, meaning not the best, most trustworthy collectors, but the first-in-first-outers, the auction flippers, the bottom-feeding consultants, the fickle trend mongers."
"Everything could be turned upside down, and was, and still made sense, and who gave a shit? To taking a fittingly obtuse example, what did it mean that so many middle-class gay white men cultivated the speech patterns of lower-class straight black women? What it meant was an entrepreneurial opportunity. This culture knew only uses, not meanings."
"According to the digital way of thinking, anything could be transformed into anything else and no one need worry about being cheated because this alchemy relied not on cutting sophistry, economic sleight of hand, or cultural bad faith, but on the bland, automated, everyday magic of numbers. The hope was that everything would be reduced to a common currency, i.e., binary code, which would allow effortless transmission with no value lost on conversion. The dream of the cloud was complete meltdown, such that everything became liquid to be pumped here, injected there, siphoned from me, and redirected to you."
"Violence was intolerable to a highly developed society, but at the same time that society somehow needed violence to remain present. How to make something present and absent at the same time? In a highly developed culture, violence was dispersed into images, so that it might be held, passed around, bought and sold. Images typically represented the violence that was now done to others outside our society, whether in the imaginary selves animating our increasingly brutal moving pictures or, as with news and the internet, in the violence occurring in distant parts of the world to people who would never exist to us except as images."
"No longer did people see the self that gazed back, not because there were too few mirrors in this new world, but because there were too many."
"Writing, on the other hand, which had little connection to money and power, was only broadening its already considerable mass appeal, thanks to the proliferation of texting, tweeting, blogging, and so on, even as those same forces were emancipating writing from its long-standing narrative conventions."
"There was probably a fifth reason for making art lurking in the shadows, which was the desperate, barely acknowledged need to forestall death, but this went equally for all people and was a reason why humans had children, or built buildings, or collected stamps, or did anything at all, and therefore this motivation was everything and nothing, and not worth thinking about, or too painful to think about."
"Once you'd passed the hurdles of schooling, first employment, marriage, and parenthood, further progress was measured by means of consumption. This didn't have to mean a sports car or a new face: it was entirely possible to scorn midlife cliches in favor of something supposedly more sensible yet born of the same determination to make things better, for instance, a high-end mattress."
"Art-making was as much about physical labor as it was about wielding abstract symbols and codes. Art was a context within which you could pursue both ditch digging and symbol management, and doubtless somewhere there was an artist hard at work doing just that, since much contemporary art was explicitly concerned with reconciling the two realms."
"It might be useful, he thought, to consider this story of the network and the personal computer, a story that limned and animated our time, against the history of film, the predominant cultural and artistic technology of an earlier age. The history of film, or more accurately the moving image, also performed a three-part arc, veering from individualistic beginnings to a mass middle periods before finally returning to individualism with a vengeance."
"To his mind, many experimental writers were looking in all the wrong places. He wanted to tell them to stop aping strategies pioneered by long-dead avant-gardists, to forget the pursuits of difference and the scorn of normativity, and instead consider supposedly stable, mainstream areas of 'pure' or uncomplicated narrative deemed beneath poetic consideration, areas that, thanks to market-based dependence on the cutting edge of language and experience, were actually disentegrating, mutating, and emanating odd ripples: becoming not just weirder but poetic."
"He felt like he'd finally grasped the essence of art's future. It was architecture, which best understood how to combine technology, scale, visual singularity, and all the necessary financial and political underpinning, that was preparing the way."
"And neither would you, in the end, because like most artists, the majority of coders don't want to be managers, they just want to code. Get rich if possible, but really just code. In hindsight, you had been working for that big company all along, only without benefits, job security, or the other enticements of corporate employment."
"Young artists fresh out of school labored mightily to build not a deliberate, traditional career but an eye-catching IPO that could be snapped up by the market, meaning not the best, most trustworthy collectors, but the first-in-first-outers, the auction flippers, the bottom-feeding consultants, the fickle trend mongers."
"Everything could be turned upside down, and was, and still made sense, and who gave a shit? To taking a fittingly obtuse example, what did it mean that so many middle-class gay white men cultivated the speech patterns of lower-class straight black women? What it meant was an entrepreneurial opportunity. This culture knew only uses, not meanings."
"According to the digital way of thinking, anything could be transformed into anything else and no one need worry about being cheated because this alchemy relied not on cutting sophistry, economic sleight of hand, or cultural bad faith, but on the bland, automated, everyday magic of numbers. The hope was that everything would be reduced to a common currency, i.e., binary code, which would allow effortless transmission with no value lost on conversion. The dream of the cloud was complete meltdown, such that everything became liquid to be pumped here, injected there, siphoned from me, and redirected to you."
"Violence was intolerable to a highly developed society, but at the same time that society somehow needed violence to remain present. How to make something present and absent at the same time? In a highly developed culture, violence was dispersed into images, so that it might be held, passed around, bought and sold. Images typically represented the violence that was now done to others outside our society, whether in the imaginary selves animating our increasingly brutal moving pictures or, as with news and the internet, in the violence occurring in distant parts of the world to people who would never exist to us except as images."
"No longer did people see the self that gazed back, not because there were too few mirrors in this new world, but because there were too many."
August 1, 2018
An essay on contemporary art posing as a novel, only there is no plot involved. 3.5 stars because the author is very easy to read and isn't basically jerking off on a piece of paper and calling it an essay on art.
December 21, 2017
Sharp criticisms of culture and aesthetics, though often disjointed. Reads like a loosely connected art essay.
March 14, 2020
Not so much an exploration of the nature of contemporary art-making as it is an exercise in slathering art in putrid intellectual frosting.
August 13, 2022
he posted the pdf at his website http://sethpricestudio.com/bookarchiv...
June 6, 2023
Het begin is aanzienlijk sterker
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December 13, 2023great! smart guy i respect thinks abt all
the things i think abt. also today is seth price’s birthday so happy birthday 2 him as well! great!
the things i think abt. also today is seth price’s birthday so happy birthday 2 him as well! great!
Read
August 12, 2024at least estelle and i’s fanfic about seth price isn’t as bad as his fanfic about himself
September 9, 2025
2.5 stars. Has a pretty dumb framing, but some good art criticism in here.
May 5, 2016
It's not much as a novel, but Price's ruminations on art and its markets are well worth plowing through, if one is an artist or related field. Maybe art aficionados will like it, but it's disjointed and plot is sporadic and disconnected. I'm sure that's his point.
April 23, 2016
interesting, easy to read, accurate
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews