Club of Joe Schmo

The double agent AKA the professional LARPer. By day, handling wealth objects and working registrars. By night, fabricating objects that could operate with the same facticity and immediacy as the readymade. Objects that could behave as things, deployed into a cohort of other things, perhaps signaling the psychopathy of things, of a stockpile/an archive/the museum. A sore thumb meticulously crafted to elucidate the hand’s gangrene. I am a collector / And things, well things / They tend to accumulate.

Allegiance seems to always be marked by its precarity, and precarity begets the asset. No value without speculation, no worth without conjecture. The movie trope of the perp storming through an airport terminal going about an act of quick change is fitting here since they usually end up looking like an art advisor. People flip like how art is flipped like how houses are flipped. Or like how the biggest short worked to short the biggest.

2 kids in a trench coat AKA a khaki totem, trying to watch a rated-R movie. They tower over the rest of the queue, coming in at an impressive eight feet. A tall glass of water adorned with the prerequisite fedora. This is the type of verticality I like—gnarled, contorted, and dubious. Phallic in silhouette but really nothing more than a mast of virgins. A hilariously failed infiltration that maybe works better as an imago of anonymity and accessibility. I like to think of this trope as the monolith’s booger-eating but endearing sibling, insofar that they are situated at opposite ends of the same spectrum of verticality—the monolith, doted over by post-minimalists and corporate architects alike; the kids in a trenchcoat, poster children for the aesthetics of aspirational professionalism and all that it may or may not afford.

BALENCIAGA SS23 AKA perversion-chic. Models rendered as the latex foot soldiers they always were, fetish objects for hire flaunting their stuff through the arena of the stock exchange. The various uniforms of the wealthy criminal clash for the ultimate business casual look—Monday afternoon’s trench coat meets Friday night’s gimp mask meets the swank villainy of wire frame glasses. Moral repugnancy always looks best when it's flagrant, when the only real codification is good ole’ tailoring.

The model’s sashay and the executive’s march are reframed here as one and the same. A shared linearity is revealed, a gait that exudes urgency but never breaks a (visible) sweat. No, no, this is a sheen brought on by textile, not bodily fluid. The proverbial slippery bastard is only ever as slippery as their attire affords. A cast of slippery bastards probably looks something like this: