“Los Angeles is 72 suburbs in search of a city.” —Dorothy Parker
Last weekend, Lily Monbouquette and Eric Bach, Los Angeles’s cutest couple, had their wedding in New Orleans. It was a gorgeous, moving affair in the Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden, adjacent to the New Orleans Museum of Art. They read their vows under weeping willows adorned with Spanish moss and giant sculptures by Jean-Michel Othoniel composed of blown-glass beads circling tree trunks and branches like bracelets and necklaces. Only a few of the guests could name the artist, but all agreed the setting was perfect. One of the perks of being an aging art gallery director is that people in these settings ask me what the art means.
“They’re meant to evoke anal beads,” I whispered to the mother of the bride.
“They’re beautiful,” she replied, correctly.
The marriage of nature and art and two of the best people I know was a whiff of the sublime that imprinted itself deep into my heart. It was also a strange mix of ingredients. How did this moment, combining two lovers, an ancient tree in a park, and some elegantly subversive sculpture feel so true, so authentic, when a slight tilt in any direction could have pushed it towards fraught or cloying. Far from being an “Ode on a Grecian Urn” moment, it forced me to consider my personal notions of authenticity in art and culture, and my love of those things.
The day prior, I met the artist Keith Boadwee at Elizabeth’s, a local restaurant, for lunch. Boadwee was born and raised in New Orleans, and he currently lives in the Bay Area. He was visiting his mother, now in her 90s, for a few weeks. Elizabeth’s was decked-out with garish hand-painted panels and canvases. One, celebrating the chef, occupied an entire wall. It was a crude portrait of an obese man (the chef, presumably) wearing an apron with a baby pig in one hand and a butcher knife in the other, “EAT HERE OR WE’LL ALL GO HUNGRY” painted out in all caps underneath. Another, smaller panel had the text “BE NICE OR LEAVE” painted in bubbly, joyfully uneven typography, and another (a personal favorite), read “BE GAY AND STAY.” Each was bordered by upcycled bottle caps embedded in their surfaces. They looked and felt authentically New Orleans to me, but that probably had something to do with ubiquity; similar work was hanging in nearly every other place I visited.
“That’s Dr. Bob,” Boadwee explained. “Everybody here has multiple pieces by him, and the tourists all take home works as well. He makes a killing! He has a whole factory down the road.”
Dr. Bob is so popular that there’s a Dr. Bob imitator named Rex, who, according to Boadwee, also makes a killing.
“A perk of Bob being mega-successful,” Boadwee said, “is that his imitators only elevate and enhance his relevance.” The existence and visibility of Rex further emphasizes the existence and visibility of Dr. Bob. Omnipresence is truth, truth omnipresence—that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know?
In between sighing over wedding pictures and doomscrolling world events on my flight home to Los Angeles, I pondered my own authenticity, and how much of my life has been spent searching for truth in a niche cultural movement, only to abandon it when too many others found beauty within it, as if the mainstreaming of a moment sapped its purity.
I used to think that one of the perks of being an aging hipster is that when the fashion of one’s salad days cycles back into vogue, there are ample opportunities to twist a mustache and talk about the way things were more real the previous time around. I deeply relished every opportunity to turn up my nose and snort about The Dare and whatever else the kids are hashtagging as “indie sleaze” on Instagram these days.
“Back in my day, there weren’t camera phones everywhere, and things were actually sleazy,” I’d mumble to myself, jealously scrolling through their party photos on an Iphone. “I remember the same creepy old man offering me money for sex week after week at Club Transmission in Hollywood. That was sleazy!”
The fun was real, though! Pure! Everyone was in a band, and club nights featured rock acts, then DJs, then everyone would stumble over to house parties that went till breakfast. I vaguely remember those days with great fondness. I also remember that the indie scene of the early aughts was written-off by the older generation as a shallow retread of the Velvet Underground’s peak years, and they considered us rich-kid culture vultures scavenging the record bins for a feeling, then wearing that found feeling on our sleeves and claiming cultural significance.
I guess what I’m circling is: authenticity pursued for authenticity’s sake is just a snake sucking its own dick. Truth in beauty can be choreographed in a moment at a dance club, with a thousand bottle caps stuck into a board, or under some giant anal beads hanging with Spanish moss from a weeping willow tree, so long as those present are truly present, not negotiating the moment as an opportunity to twist a mustache, turn up their noses and snort.
