Death of Art

Literary Nonfiction. Latino/Latina Studies. Hybrid Genre. DEATH OF ART dissects post-capitalist, post- Internet, post-death culture; our ability and affinity to be both disembodied and tethered to technology, allowing us to be in several places at once and nowhere at all.

"The future is trash. Recycling it, re-arranging it. Making it beautiful again."

"Lately I had been thinking about writing a memoir because everything else I've ever written is a memoir while pretending to be something else and I figured it was time I did something else, which was a memoir. So much of my life is predicated on pretending or performance. Language had become another performance for me. One in which I could show off and show myself. At the same time."

Chris Campanioni starts by cutting out his face in every fashion editorial he's ever been in. The confession begins. Unless it's another performance, moving from the Lower East Side in 2015 to the Cannes film festival in 2011, Beverly Hills 90210 and the Day-Glo gaze of the Late Eighties and Early Nineties. The quality of a photograph is called into question in a culture that is oversaturated with them. The desire for image to be replaced by a different, more symbolic charge of the written text and physical utterance is a call to restore faith in art's sustainability. Death meets birth for its eventual renewal.

In re-evaluating the genre, Campanioni also re-evaluates our cultural capital, as well as our current modes of interaction and intimacy, exploring narcissism through the lens of self- effacement, pop culture, the cult of celebrity, and the value or function of art and (lost and) found art objects.