It may be sold out but I am holding two tickets in my hot little hand right now. Oh, they look so nice!

You too can partake. Picture it: You sitting on the Walker lawn ona warm summer evening, sipping a beverage of yourchoice andlistening to the sounds of Andrew Bird, the New Pornographers, Cloud Cult and Bon Iver.

All you have to do is come up with an original one-line joke, submit it by June 4th, and make our galley speaker Joseph Scrimshaw laugh. Winners will be announced at our last Richard Prince gallery talk about jokes on June 5th at 7pm.

So, step right up andhit me with yourbest shot. First place winners also get two free tickets to Joseph Scrimshaw’s show at Bryant Lake Bowl entitled Adventures in Mating. Second prize is two tickets to Artist Designed Mini-Golf and a salty dog from the Walker shop. Not bad for second place!

Fire Away! And, never mind the Pat Benatar reference!

Here is a highlight from this week:

I’ve always heard when God gives you lemons, make lemonade. God gave me iced tea. What the$%# am I supposed to do?

WACTAC member Carson Giblette spent over two weeks assembling his amazing duct tape suit for the Prior Lake High School Prom.

I just wish he could have been a part of the WACTAC organized Un-Prom Fashion Show.

Via minneapoline. Thanks for the tip Megan.

This post was written by Marty Marosi, current Walker Art Center Teen Arts Council (WACTAC) member, about the 20 Under 20 exhibition.

Hello from St. Paul! This day is significant because it’s the second and last day of curating, and also the same for how many times I’ve been in St. Paul.

We’ve been putting the St. Paul show together by working with each piece like, well, let’s just say they don’t call ‘em ‘pieces’ for nuthin. We’ve looked at all the pieces in a giant group and picked out ones that seemed to work together. If an artist had multiple works, we considered it in its entirety. Then from there, we put it on the wall, and have been practicing a whole ‘mix ‘n match’ and trial and error process. Luckily we don’t make mistakes.

(Here’s a picture of Witt spouting off some philosophy)

Witt (WACTAC superfan) is workin like a dog over here, he paces back and forth all the time. With how long the spaces are in this warehouse, each trip takes alost 20 minutes. He hasn’t eaten anything all day except doritos for lunch and toast for breakfast. But I think he’s milkin it a little bit because he said he ate just ‘a piece of toast’, leaving much to the imagination as to the scantness of his meal. Nonetheless, I saw him sporting the tired-man’s beard a couple days ago and I think he needs to just kick back and let the WACTAC’rs do some work for a change.

While David puts his life on the line to hang up all the art, I get the real cush job of documenting our progress and eating snacks to sustain myself. David is the real strong-silent type, but we like having him around.

Putting all this together has been a trying process, both emotionally and physically. At one point I thought my body wouldn’t take another kit-kat after eating so many during the initial curating phase, but I endured.

Before we got to this point, we spent countless hours down in the WACTAC bat-cave looking at what seemed like, and probably was, thousands of artworks. It was like No Exit down there. Sartre said ‘Hell is other people’ and the temperature became infernal with all the bodies in the room. One benefit, however, was how much muscle mass I gained from raising my arm for multiple votes and re-votes.

Overall, this has been a great experience. It’s been a long and elaborate process, but that makes the fruit of our labor that much sweeter. We hope this contest and show will be successful in continuing our objective to reach other teens (and tweens) out there who want to get involved with the art world.

If you have a chance, check out the series of 20 Under 20 events happening in the coming weeks.

As part of the Richard Prince: Spiritual America exhibition at the Walker, Education is sponsoring a series of three tours relatedto broader themes in the show.

This Thursday, Paula Rabinowitzwill lead the second in our series American Mythologies: The Art of Richard Prince Part 2 Fetish. She’s the chair of the English Department at the University of Minnesota, professor of cultural studies, feminist theory, and visual culture. She’s written several books including They Must Be Represented: The Politics of Documentary, and Black and White and Noir: Americas Pulp Modernism. She’ll explain to us why anyone would read a book like Student Nurse in the first place and how the act of collecting is itself a fetishistic practice.

She’s in the midst of reading prose and meeting with students as finals approach, but I did get her to answer some of my questions in anticipation of this Thursday’s tour.

What is the history of pulp fiction novels and the artists who painted the covers?

The history of their production and reception is very complex–dating from the 19th century in France and US where books were not really bound but covered in paper, then the emergence of paperbacks as we know them through Penguin in Britain, and finally with the emigration of some Penguin publishers to the US just before WWII, here. Pocketbooks was the first US paperback publisher–followed by many others–including Signet, started by someone originally associated with Penguin.Copyright precluded any use of the “bird” insignia so the title of the publisher is a joke as it uses a medallion–a signet–but the name is a homonym for cygnet–a baby swan–deep insider literary joke. Paperbacks were distributed through magazine and candy sales methods rather than through usual booksellers distribution processes; they were sold at candy stores, train and bus stations and so forth across the country–even in places without bookstores. The range of materials published is vast–from trashy nurse novels to Freud or Faulkner (both of whom would have trashy covers) to appeal to a broad reading public.The cover artists–for instance Robert Jonas and James Avati (known as the Rembrandt of paperback)–were influential designers and superb draftsmen (almost all men–though the back covers of Dell books often had maps drawn by Ruth Belew), who incorporated modernist and realist influences. Again they too appealed to wide audiences–books were published in runs of close to half a million minimum.

Can you make a comparison to the artists who painted the pulp fiction covers and Richard Prince’s art in terms of high art/low art?

Cover artists were concerned with bringing attention to the product being sold–their works were meant to be eye-catching, to be lurid and informative (sort of) yet they were meant to be reassuring, in that the images, colors, format were regularized and familiar–they were parts of a series. People knew what to expect. I think Prince is tapping into this idea of replication and familiarity–witness recent Christie’s advertisement in the New York Times that one of his nurse’s is being auctioned and expected to bring in six to eight million dollars.

What was behind the stereotype of the femme fatale/caregiver image that is portrayed in the nurse paintings?

Sex and Death–night work (like a prostitute) but within an institution (like a prison guard)–care and trauma. Birth and death–uniforms (especially in 1930s-1950s iconography) that cross health (doctor’s whites) and religion (nuns’ habits ) I could go on and on–and will on Thursday.

Collecting is an essential part of Richard Prince’s artistic practice, and you’ve said there is a fetishistic aspect to that. Why?

Same but different–countable, uncontrollable–secret and widely available (at least for those of us without money who cannot collect art)–obsessive.