The Whet

The taxi pulls away from the straight lines of the city as it approaches the riverside, newly-built spirals of asphalt leading it towards a cluster of squat concrete buildings festooned in pennants and printed plastic banners. A stoplight on red curbs our progress, but not my sense that the event to come will suck. In fact, it's strengthened by a flock of what look like misplaced midwestern soccer moms crossing the road wearing batman t-shirts and hugging giant buckets of popcorn. They swivel to look purposefully at nothing, shoveling in the pochoclo with plump hands terminating in meticulous and retina-burning manicures.

"I guess this must be it."

And it was, even if it was less of an "it" than anything else ever managed to be. But before we go in I suppose it'd only be fair to hand out a little context; there's not all that much to go around outside the temples of half-assery and sleepy congregations that make up this city. You see, everyone in Buenos Aires is an artist. They know it just as they know they're proud, and hungry, and worthy (of what? well, what've you got, and what do the neighbors have? that + 1, hoy es el dia!). It's not limited to the young, to the female, to the left, to the anything. Are there artists in Miami and/or Italy¹? Yes? Does saying you're an artist cost money? No? Dale, entonces somos artistas. This being something of a worldwide delusion (although perhaps not quite to the degree), you'll be familiar with the artifacts of the fallout: unbelievably shitty murals everywhere, idem rinkydink "workshops" selling objectionable curios with reeeally long "titles", and a service industry rife with workers who don't think they should have to be there.

Then there are results like the Argentina Comicon, which shed ...it's really an abuse of the term to call it "light", but we'll push ourselves sickeningly through; a sad little light is thrown on the mechanism at play among the "artists". They're only charged, in their minds, with convincing each other of their artistness. They've no need nor any desire to convince themselves, or to show the rest of the world who they are and what they've got. We know this, because their Comicon did not involve any artists. I don't mean they had some panel whatever which was fulla film people or something and how dare they. I mean literally the entire² space had exactly zero instances of artists showing their work, attempting to sell it, talking to interested people, or otherwise participating. One room, let's call it the Popcorn Nexus, was where the local theatre conglomerate sold their butter flavoring buckets o' chum and you could sign up with your DNI³ to fuck with some promo-pushing gadget brought by Disney/local cable company/Sauron for thirty seconds. The other room, which I hereby dub Shuffle & Blow --no wait, that sounds like it could've been fun. Let's see...the Maze of Farts and Purchases. If you were there with me you'd be nodding your head now, I assure you. This room was nothing but tables arranged in completely disorganized rows and cul-de-sacs, naturally placed so closely together they created constant peoplejams, naturally all selling the same 5 - 10 things. You could buy: graphic novels, booklets of hentai, figurines, tshirts, or fucking katanas. No graphic novelists, no hentai inkers, no figurine painters, no tshirt designers, no katana...fuck, I'd've taken a fucking tasselknotter at that point. No artists, no "artists". Shop clerks with their shop stuff. Five to ten varieties, please ensure you stop to gawk and mill at every.single.table nevertheless.

But soft! What light through yonder fartmaze breaks! There was an outdoor area, a doublespoken cordoned-off parkinglot, selling weenies and more popcorn, with a coupla carnival rides for kids, disco blasting. And sure, something like 1.5% of the attendance was "doing cosplay". Most of it was bought, I suspect, at the pre-comicon-con, where you purchase generic blue cotton overalls and "luigi hats" while having your esophagus mechanically widened to accept the Second and Third Comings of the Popcorn.

"And they get away with it; if a kid from San Diego, one from Germany, a Brit, and an Argentine get together at some point and the San Diegan says 'I went to Comicon this summer', and the German and Brit chip in, 'Oh, me too!', and then the Argentine joins 'em, 'So did I! It was great!' they don't turn on him and feed the guy his beer bottle."

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1. Miami is to Buenos Aires what Barcelona is to Romania, which in turn is something akin to what a statue is to a pigeon. It's the mutually-agreed upon congregation spot away from the rookery, the somehow-logical destination for donating some of your filth and strutting around atop it so the other animals can see your swank. Alternatively, everyone being "Italian", it's right and good to do or be something if the thing is celebrated there. Which is how Buenos Aires ended up thinking it has great pizza despite its actual culinary preferences resulting in a sort of oil sponge decorated with julienned nonsense. [↩]
2. Two rooms, 2,000m2 between them, by the way. [↩]
3. Social security number, basically. [↩]