This Is Modern Art

"Hollow Laughter" is all about Modern art jokes. This should be pretty interesting but it turns out that a lot of the "jokes" are based on text. One artist (Richard Prince) actually built a career out of copying jokes from joke books onto, first, pieces of paper, and then more elaborately onto canvas when the initial venture proved successful. Another (Piero Manzoni) did well financially by putting 30 grams of his own faeces in cans, and labelling and signing them. Sarah Lucas turns up again here with a wax finger on a plinth. Fluxus, Andre Breton, George Maciunas, Guy Debord. Yawn. Sigh. Duchamp reappears, this time showing that "blankness, indifference and contempt" can win out in the end. Sean Landers and Magritte are mentioned. Martin Kippenberger gets about eight pages. Und so weiter. (I don't know what that means. An elderly German man says it in a novel by Willa Cather and it sounds nice.) The chapter ends with four more pages of Richard Prince's so-called jokes.