While I really want to draw attention to certain arguments and things I think have a lot of cultural importance in the world, to say something resolute—like, this is this way or that’s that way—I find really hard to do. I don’t interact with the world like that, and I don’t feel like that about things in the world. My craft is exhibition-making. That is really what I do … I really value art, and it’s art for a reason.
—Simon Denny
Wandering round Simon Denny’s latest show, The Founder’s Paradox, at Michael Lett in Auckland, I find myself thinking of a similarly titled episode from Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History podcast,The Satire Paradox. In the episode, Gladwell discusses what he perceives to be failed satire: satire that does not make its position sufficiently clear and so loses its bite. He offers several examples. Tina Fey’s imitation of Sarah Palin comes under fire for being too charming, too easy for Palin to co-opt and turn into ‘good sport’ capital (one wonders what Gladwell would make of Thomas Sainsbury’s Paula Bennett, subsequently embraced by the politician). Gladwell also criticises Stephen Colbert’s caricature of a conservative pundit on The Colbert Report, suggesting that it was so ambiguous that it even managed to appeal to conservatives, who misread the show as a satire on liberals. …
*
Continue reading on The Pantograph Punch.
