The end of civilization?  Douglas Gordon’s The End of Civilization.

Tattoed artist and camera operators.  It’s a location shoot, has its own making of video and looks like Hollywood.  Calling James Franco.

Who?

This is meant to look like the end of what?  Piano burning somewhere near Hadrian’s Wall looking from England to Scotland or the other way.  Keep the barbarians out.  Troggs went north to play the Wick Assembly Rooms September 1968.

The piano’s on fire.

Likely to come to mind right off the bat about lit on fire musical instruments is Jimi Hendrix putting a match or whatever to an accelerant doused Stratocaster at the Monterey Pop Festival June 1967 as outro to the Wild Thing cover.  The event, the year, a messy boundary?

Read that.  Hoskyns, Waiting for the Sun, page whatever.

One side you’ve got Tony Bennett and the other side the Grateful Dead.  One side Barnett Newman and the Stations of the Cross and the other side Walter de Maria and a lot of earth, dirt.

The piano’s iconic?  A lot of value.

A long way from a contoured slab with a bolt-on neck.  Got turned legs even.  Who’s gone after a Bechstein or ones by other makers and what’s the difference between George Maciunus and Jerry Lee Lewis?

Lithuania and Louisiana.  George better branded, believe it or not.  An afterlife of trademarks.  And fire again.  Publicity for The End of Civilization about ancient torches and the 2012 Olympic torch.

What’s it looking like now when art of the sixties and seventies gets scavenged for, becomes, infrastructure, hip infrastructure to carry content?  Content’s king (art seen to stand up only by by way of association with social, theoretical and critical regimes in turn slaves to commerce?).  Anxiety that there might be nothing to say?  So you might read, I did, that the art explores the ideas of human transformation and the role of metamorphosis in our shared cultural images of embodiment, and we better be happy for some art that can, read this as well, explore the aesthetics and politics of American regionalism, abstraction in art, and public space, and the uses of narrative fiction as a vehicle for engagement and critique.