IS IT ART? IS IT ADVERTISING?
Bill Jones and Ben Neill premiere
PALLADIO: a playable film
“In the future there will be no photographs. In the future there will be no objects at all…. In the future there will only be Art,” says the bombastic unseen narrator of Palladio, a new film by Bill Jones with live music by Ben Neill and live video remixing by Jones. That’s Art as Lifestyle apparently: The kind of Art which is experienced through portable media players…, Art as Style…, Art in the age of Steve Jobs where iPods are as cool as the commercials that sell them….
Johnnie is an Artist. We know this because he is seen brooding around NYC in stylish black jackets standing against shop windows and posing like a model in Central Park — pretty, young, and moody. Though we never actually see him create anything he is by turns a VJ, a painter, and eventually a rock guitarist. Picture Morissey as a VJ, but squint until he becomes a shameless label-whore. In his first scene he plays a concert at downtown’s a/v cabaret Remote Lounge, and his self-centered melancholia is compromised by his video accompaniment: a VJ remix of sampled television commercials — but not the pretty parts, just the advertising…, the parts where the corporate logo fades in and an announcer reads the market-researched ad-slogan. A tongue-in-cheek bite at sampler-culture.
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