Bash Compactor: Donkey Show

  Both the politically conscious and the sexually adventurous got a little action at the unveiling of Politics, a large-scale satirical painting by Molly Crabapple last week at the Museum of Sex.The event started out with everyone perusing exhibitions of homemade sex machines, male physique pictorials and Real Doll sex toys—and ended with a viewing of the final Presidential debate. I needed prodding, the idea of seeing Obama and McCain’s grinning faces in the place where scratchy black-andwhite porn retrospectives would usually be, put me a bit on edge. “Are you coming to the debate room?” One slightly tipsy partygoer asked, “It’s full of master debaters.”

I took some time to chat with Crabapple, professional artist and founder of Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School, about the fall of Playgirl magazine, her recent tour of the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki and, of course, how offended she is by Sarah Palin’s city-phobic rhetoric. “This whole idea of small towns growing only good people makes me want to vomit. I was born and raised in New York and somehow that’s supposed to make me less authentic, less decent—I fucking hate that shit!” Politics, the artist told me, with its politically cartoonish depiction of donkeys and elephants engaged in a full-scale clusterfuck with debauched farm animals, “represents the swirling media circus of our political system”.

“I thought it’d be bigger,” I thoughtlessly observed. “They don’t make paper bigger than that!” While she posed for photos with sister act Zoe and Kim Boekbinder, of the band Vermillion Lies, I chatted with the artist’s mother— who showed off her political affiliation by rocking a pair of black O-shaped earrings— and ran into Fleshbot editor John Leavitt, who seemed a little weary of the whole porn world, “My eyes glaze over after the 48th cock.” — C. Edwards