McGetty
by zunguzungu
At the Getty, you have a variety of fine dining options. One of them is the Getty Cheeseburger, which is primarily distinguishable from normal cheeseburgers by the skilled deployment of “Getty Sauce.” Getty sauce is, as far as I can tell, none other than the “special sauce” which makes the “Big Mac” the hautest of high cuisine, identical down to its tender salmon shade. And while the burger is of a slightly higher quality, I think, there’s something charming about this evolutionary convergence.
The ways a museum becomes a treasure house of western culture in the name not of the public but of a famous American “industrialist” is, of course, weird enough when you think about it, and says something about how weird the process of naming things by buying them is. Nowhere more clearly than in a museum like the Getty do you get the sense of a culture defined by its things, an idea of “the West” defined by the art-objects we consume (or should consume). Yet the museum is dedicated not to the artists who made them, or to the culture heroes whose Spirit drove History on its rendezvous with Hegel, but to an otherwise unlovely soul, J. Paul Getty. Perhaps it’s because that “should” carries so much weight? After all, the “we” that comes into existence by reference to our things is a product of a careful cultivation of a sense of taste, a discriminating discrimination by which we tell who is us and who isn’t. And out of that discrimination comes people who are more us than we are, the true patrons of the arts who buy things instead of merely consume them.
Thus, perhaps, J. Paul Getty rises to the top, naming and possessing a thing to which he would otherwise have no claim. Like old people trying to be nice enough to their grandchildren to get into heaven, art is a money laundromat for washing all that blood and dirt off. Yet, like the eternal return of the repressed, or M’s long odyssey through C on the way to the bosom of M, it’s hard not to note that the Getty Cheeseburger tastes an awfully lot like a familiar icon of world capitalism. Good thing it’s wrapped in a museum, instead of wax-paper.
Well what really gets me on that list is the “Made” turkey burger. Most other versions are “unmade?” My mind boggles, trying to carry that reasoning further.
And hello! We have traded places. No Tartine for me though, alas.
Will you be around at MLA?
It does seem, now that you mention it, that the peculiar junction of cultural fetishism and commodity fetishism keeps the hot side hot and the cold side cold more miraculously than any of the pastel styrofoam shells whose wishful thermal compartments (ever thwarted by an enthalpic cosmos) revealed in the average burger what was ever present in the Big Mac: duality, the doubleness of the commodity form rendered in beefy flesh.
So…kind of what you said. I’m only fussing because I want a couple of those lyrically ironic sentences for Christmas.
mmmm… tartine… mmmm… wishful thermal compartments of an enthalpic cosmos…
Back in Berkeley, now. And a pox on MLA and all its devices!
Eric, you crack me up! One whole month of reporting on hueciranrs, then getting hit by one, has obviously taken its toll on cranial function. nothing like a little humor to decompress.
Surprising to think of something like that
Great idea. But I’d want the California one to stop somewhere eqitiustanidsh between LA and San Fran (maybe Fresno?), so I could head north more easily once I got there. I’m hoping to never fly again, I hate the whole airline industry . . .