Make money, get prizes

Musk paying people for tweets reminds me of the old ads that ran in the back of comic books: "Make Money, Get Prizes … with Fast Selling American Seeds". (All those smiling kids.) More seriously I worry what Elon's fucking-up of of the platform is doing to literary and arts communities. For years events such as the Ngaio Marsh Awards have used Twitter for promotions and publicity. Locking out unregistered users breaks that model. (The function was reportedly restored for individual tweets or then again maybe not.)

But that's the zeitgeist. Tweeting makes you a "creator" and acting makes you a stand-in for a VR scan and writing will be replaced by AI or whatever -- call me back when it can park a car. We live in the age of billionaires' budget submarines.

New Jeff Koons interview on 60 Minutes… Jeff is a fave. Never got the vacuum cleaners but I was there for the basketballs onwards. I was delighted when I got to witness one of his Puppy sculptures in Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in 1991. An official told me a mischievous technician planted dope in the ears – the artist did not approve.

Koons on Rabbit:

It's iconic because it can represent so many different things. I can think of Easter. I can think of a politician with a kind of, a microphone, somebody making proclamations. I can think of a Playboy rabbit. But I think one of the most important things to me, the reason it's reflective, and reflecting you, reflecting me, you know, the viewer finishes a work of art. It's, it, it's about your feelings, your experiences. It's about your potential.

Also last week I tracked down an English language translation of Carlo Lucarelli's Carte Blanche (Europa Editions, 2009). Excited. Eerie to see Departure Lounge in the "if you enjoyed this book..." pages in the back.