Learn about our newest title, The Pioneer Detectives
The Millions turns 10 years old this year, and to celebrate, we’re trying something new. The Millions Originals will give our talented writers a platform to publish as ebooks longer, magazine-quality pieces that will explore a variety of unusual and interesting topics. They cost just $1.99 and provide a jolt of entertainment that we hope will be worth much more than the price. Our ebooks will generally run about 15,000 words (a good deal longer than most magazine articles, but not nearly as long as a book). So please, hop on over here to learn a bit more about our first title and to buy it from the ebookstore of your choice. Or, read on for an excerpt, if you still need convincing.
To kick off our new series, Dublin-based staff writer Mark O’Connell has penned an exploration of the Internet-era obsession with terrible art – bad YouTube pop songs, Tommy Wiseau’s The Room, and that endless stream of “Worst Things Ever” that invades your inboxes, newsfeeds, and Twitter streams. What, exactly, draws us to these futile attempts at making songs, movies, and art? What are the essential ingredients that render a ridiculous failure sublime? More importantly, what does our seemingly insatiable appetite say about our aesthetic impulses? In setting out to answer these questions, O’Connell uncovers the historical context for our affinity for terrible art, tracing it back to Shakespeare and discovering the early 20th-century novelist who was dinner-party fodder for C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Read on for the first chapter of The Millions‘ first ebook original, Epic Fail: Bad Art, Viral Fame, and the History of the Worst Thing Ever. – C. Max Magee, editor, The Millions
* * *
1. Behold the Monkey
In the Sanctuary of Mercy church in the town of Borja, in northern Spain, there used to be a fresco by the 19th-century painter Elías García Martínez. It was a fairly standard Ecce Homo scene, portraying the scourged Christ—the crown of thorns, the expression of serene forgiveness—in the moments before crucifixion. No one much cared about this fresco. It was the unremarkable work of a minor painter, of little or no interest to art historians, and the priests and parishioners of the Sanctuary of Mercy clearly didn’t hold it in especially high regard either. Until recently, Martínez’s fresco was in a state of severe decline, with most of the paint having rubbed off around the middle of Christ’s torso and some pretty serious chipping and flaking going on toward the right-hand side of His face. Because no one else had bothered to do anything about it, and because the church seemed uninterested in commissioning a professional restoration, an 81-year-old parishioner named Cecilia Giménez decided to take matters into her own hands. She had lived in Borja and worshiped at Sanctuary of Mercy all her life; even if the fresco was not a parish priority, she saw artistic and devotional value in it and was upset to see it fall into disrepair. She did her best with her limited talents, but the restoration attempt was not successful, and the fresco looked considerably worse by the time she was through. The attempt was so badly botched, in fact, that she wound up becoming internationally famous because of it. For a while there, Cecilia Giménez was probably the most talked-about artist in the world.
Chances are you’ve seen the result of her work, in which Martínez’s Christ is transfigured into what looks like a beady-eyed baboon wearing an ushanka. It very quickly became an iconic image; the Spanish took to calling it Ecce Mono (Behold the Monkey), while in the English-speaking world it became known simply as “the Jesus fresco.” For much of the late summer and early autumn of 2012, you couldn’t go online or open a newspaper without seeing it. People were obsessed not just with the aesthetic monstrosity of the restoration itself but with the idea of the devout and well-intentioned octogenarian who had created it. Twitter timelines filled with jokes about Giménez and links to articles about her, and tribute Tumblrs featured smudgily simian faces gimmicked onto the Mona Lisa, The Last Supper, Van Gogh’s self-portraits, Warhol’s Marilyn, Michelangelo’s David, Munch’s The Scream. The Financial Times, Der Spiegel, The New York Times, and Libération all covered the story of the restoration. The chief art critic for The New Statesman skittishly considered its supreme incompetence on Sky News. And here was the poor woman herself, grilled by television journalists, poignantly insisting that she had the full permission of the parish priest and that, anyway, she hadn’t finished the retouch yet; she had been called away mid-job to go on a trip with her son. (“When I got back, the whole village was there, and I couldn’t defend myself! I said, ‘Let me finish it,’ and they said not to touch it!”). More than 23,000 people signed an online petition to have the piece preserved in its current, profanely post-Giménez form. In a more or less textbook illustration of postmodern irony, the Church of the Face-palm Fresco became a site of tourist pilgrimage, a sacred location beyond the event horizon where ridicule becomes veneration. “The truth,” as one local small-business owner put it in a television-news interview, “is that we should be thanking her because of how much it has helped catering trade in the town. We were having economic problems, and now, thanks to this woman, we are recovering.”
Anyone who had read Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise would have found it difficult not to think of the famous scene in which Jack Gladney (professor of Hitler Studies) and his colleague Murray Siskind drive out into the New England countryside to visit a tourist attraction known as “the Most Photographed Barn in America.” They stand back from the crowd of tourists, observing them as they take photographs of a building that is noteworthy solely for the frequency with which people like themselves take photographs of it. In the epigrammatically deadpan idiom of DeLillo’s characters, Murray refers to the scene as “a religious experience in a way, like all tourism.” They are, as he puts it, “taking pictures of taking pictures.”
What was being enacted here, in the little town of Borja, was a kind of exponentially ironic pilgrimage. The object of fetishization was not so much the icon as the very act of fetishization itself—of participating in, and contributing to, the fame of the thing being venerated. More troubling, though, was the fact that this involuted self-regard was also characteristic of the precise way in which Cecilia Giménez herself had become famous. The consideration of her fame, in other words, was itself a major element of that fame. The woman herself became caught up in the seething vortex of our cultural self-fascination.
* * *
The Face-palm Fresco Affair is a definitive example of our obsession with a particular kind of bad art. Its watchword is “Epic Fail”—the collective cry of elated online schadenfreude that greets each new disastrous attempt to create art or entertainment. The success, through captivating dreadfulness, of R. Kelly’s R&B opera buffa Trapped in the Closet. The brief but intense fame of the impressively atrocious American Idol contestant William Hung. The meme mother lode that was Insane Clown Posse’s attempt to illuminate the wonder of everyday “Miracles” (“Fuckin’ magnets: how do they work?”). The Irish mother-daughter-and-son country trio Crystal Swing, whose viral success with their transcendently lame and somehow insidiously creepy video for “He Drinks Tequila” saw them appear on The Ellen DeGeneres Show without any apparent awareness that they were an object of fun. Every day brings some new fantastic artistic outrage, some new Greatest Worst Thing Ever. There is now an entire echelon of viral celebrity populated by people—your Crystal Swings, your Giménezes—who have become known for their resounding failures.
I suspect that had the Spanish fresco simply been the anonymous work of an unknown guerrilla retoucher—if there wasn’t a body to be seen to undergo the indignity of the slapstick—the story would not have been nearly as compelling to nearly as many people. The personal element is crucial, and this is what accounts for the paradoxically humanistic and cruel constitution of the Epic Fail. It is predicated not just on the appreciation of the failed artwork but also on the aesthetic fetish for a particular misalignment of confidence and competence. We insist, in our judgments, on a sort of cultural habeas corpus. We don’t just want to look at the horribly disfigured Jesus fresco or listen to the horribly misfired effort at a pop song; we want to look at the person who thought they were talented enough to pull these things off in the first place. And I think part of our perverse attraction to these people and to the bad art they make is a particular sort of authenticity. Vigilant self-consciousness is both a primary component and a primary product of our online culture; an entire generation of Westerners (i.e., mine) has become preoccupied with the curation of permanent exhibitions of the self. We hate ourselves for the inauthenticity of these exhibitions, even if we wouldn’t have it any other way. And so the Epic Fail is, among other things, a paradoxical ritual whereby a pure strain of un-self-consciousness is globally venerated and ridiculed.
To watch an interview with Cecilia Giménez is to glimpse the strange and flamboyant cruelty of this phenomenon. The scale, the intensity, and the bewildering modernity of the attention that has been imposed upon her is something by which she is very clearly mortified—an essentially Catholic term, this. Soon after the restoration attempt went viral, she retreated behind closed doors and took to her bed, in the grip of a sustained anxiety attack. According to her family, they were having trouble getting her to eat anything. Perhaps, then, it’s worth thinking about what is truly emblematic of our contemporary culture here—and where the real Epic Fail actually is. Is it the smudged, monkey-faced Jesus and the exultantly amused response it provoked, or is it the debilitating case of viral celebrity now afflicting a frail old lady who just wanted to do some small good deed for her church?
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And here I thought sex appeal was predicated on noun antecedent agreement.
Some quick (hopefully grammatical) thoughts:
a.) Have noticed a steep decline in accuracy over the last ten years in books, magazines, etc. I find it sad, and imagine a flotilla of laid-off proofreaders, fact checkers, and editors all sailing into the Bermuda Triangle, arguing passionately about the proper use of “shall” vs. “may.”
b.) I’ve worked with some folks who aren’t primarily writers, but are stuck having to write something anyway. I think there’s something to be said for “rigor,” taking the time to obey the basics of grammar and checking your spelling. It sends a message under the radar to the person receiving your communication.
c.) There’s nothing wrong with a stylistic decision to “break the rules” when you think it improves your flow. The problem is laying an egg with deliberate goofs such as “Cease” the Day, “Caviar Emptor,” etc.
d.) Orwell’s essay is wonderful and well-worth reading. Very ironic to be afraid of appearing elitist or snobby if you take an interest in good grammar and verbal precision. That’s much too simplistic. The danger Orwell warns of is the risk of being bamboozled by messages created by a power “elite” (who are very aware of the tools they are using) to keep the masses under control.
I agree with Moe. There are far too many errors in all kinds of published material released today. Whether it is a Burger King ad, a magazine article, a newspaper website, or even a novel released by major publisher, almost everything seems to have mistakes these days. It’s almost like no one cares anymore. Too many writers/editors are rushing to get things published that there is not enough quality control.
One very quick response, related to Mr. Tower’s comment that “no one care anymore.”
About ten years ago, there was a group of “official” condolence letters sent out to families of soldiers killed in Iraq. They were cheap copies, with a computer-generated signature by some high-level mucky-muck, and contained several proofing errors. The “message” these letters conveyed was primarily one of indifference and contempt. It would have been better not to have sent them at all. I often use this as an example with students of what “not” to do.
[My comment, last two lines: “often use this as an example with students of what “not” to do.]
I think this might be a little “off” but I like the sound it makes. If it was a quart of milk, it would likely have a January 6 “use by” date.
I thought about writing a longer reply, but the writers at the Language Log have said it better and more thoroughly than I ever could. Read everything under the tag “Prescriptivist Poppycock.” I think you’ll find that in several places in your essay, you’re complaining about “usage” rather than grammar.
Uh oh. That sounds like the home turf of the linguistics folk. They scoff at grammarians and flay, slice, and dine on the tender flesh of the novelists and playwrights. God forbid what would happen to a poet who made a wrong left turn and ended up over there!
Moe Murph
(Secretly Fears She’ll Never Figure Out the Difference Between Grammar and Usage)
I’ve translated my frustration into cash. A surprising number of people have purchased the mugs, plates, and greeting cards to affirm their superiority or to passive-aggressively correct a friend with a grammar gift.
http://www.grammarstuff.com
[Re: On the spectrum of world problems that need bemoaning, is bad grammar really one of them? Yes. Yes it is.]
“Grammar is not a time of waste.”
Bart Simpson
Stateless Springfield Resident/
US Envoy to
Canadian National Grammar Rodeo (1996)
“Fast forward twenty years and I am seeing these same people advertise themselves on OkCupid. I love to travel. Its just my thing. Reluctant non-conformist, verging on the anarchist. AKA, “a prick”. Aka a truant, since this guy obviously skipped that class on punctuation and its placement.”
Are you sure these people aren’t Canadian or British, though? Not to defend people who call themselves non-conformists because personally I find that insufferable, but in most British-influenced schools, punctuation is more likely to go outside of quotation marks if it isn’t an actual part of what you’re quoting.
The lack of apostrophe in “its” I have no excuse for, of course.
It’s not clear to me whether Ms. Maazel actually means “degradation of our culture” when she writes “depredation of our culture,” though I rather suspect she does. If so, she confirms the maxim that every article or comment decrying errors in spelling, usage, grammar, or semantics itself contains an error in spelling, usage, grammar, or semantics.
For me, the worst offender right now is Independence Blue Cross in Philadelphia. Their advertising slogan is:
LIVE FEARLESS.
In the words of Dave Barry, I am not making this up: http://www.ibx.com/htdocs/custom/advertising/2013.html
With radio ads proclaiming the “Faces of Fearless,” all this is doing is teaching Philadelphians (who were never rocket scientists to start) that it is all right to sound like an ignorant nut.
@Cappio — Maazel isn’t decrying accidental typos. She’s decrying what she observes to be a systematic decline in communicative precision presenting itself with deplorable frequency. But you probably knew that.
I’ve learned to quash most of my rage about bad grammar or usage or spelling OR WHATEVER since typos are inevitable and so much of what is “right” is in fact arbitrary. Grammar, after all, is supposed to be descriptive, not prescriptive. Or so my linguistic anthropology classes would have us believe.
However, aggressively bad copy-editing is a whole different animal. Movie titles that eschew hyphens, the Fatburger sign that is selling some item for “$5 dollars,” newspapers and blogs that don’t proof themselves, the Burger King ad you show above–that’s ad agencies telling us that the language they use isn’t worth their time to perfect, or it’s copywriters being paid to suck. And that’s just frigging offensive.
Excellent synthesis (grammar, linguistics, and plain common sense)! Love your comment, Skiki!
People who frequent the Millions site are word-people. Slovenly drafting would rightly be as irritating to them as badly poured beer to a great bartender or sloppy joints to a master carpenter.
Depredation or degradation? Let’s compare!
“Bad prose writing heralds the [plundering/ravaging of|attack on] our culture.”
“Bad prose writing heralds the [contempt for|disrespect/humiliation of] our culture.”
They both work!
Both “less” and “fewer” calories are wrong, but fewer is more wrong. Saying something has fewer (or less) calories is akin to saying it is fewer (less) degrees outside. The correct phrase would be less energy or less caloric.
Comma, quotation marks. Dammit.
No two ways about it: grammar policing is class policing. I think it’s a bit paranoid the grammatical mistakes by corporations is an attempt to “institionalize” bad grammar. Much more agregious is the content of corporate messages–the corrosive deployment of euphemism to sell an unhealthy product. But please stop equating the correct use of SEV as an arbiter of intelligence. I have no patience for SNOOTS.
I am awesome. I’m like Gary-mother-fuckin’-Oak.
“We are more discreet about our prejudices. In sum: we are different from the British.”
As a british person who gets to observe the US via tv shows, film and reddit, I found that comment so ironic I laughed out loud.
This is a very enjoyable and well-argued piece. There’s just one sentence that I’d really disagree with, and that’s the contention that, “We don’t have a monarchy.”
Ah, but you do. And a bigger monarchy than our own.
American is governed by an ultra-wealthy elite — about one per cent of your population — that considers itself divinely appointed to run the country almost exclusively to its advantage. It doesn’t pay its fair share of taxes, and its wealth and privilege is handed down to its descendants, again without being fairly taxed, thus perpetuating this monstrous tyranny.
The only difference is that the members of the British monarchy are not so hypocritical as to describe themselves as “Libertarians” or better still, “Republicans.”
So yes, language really does influence thought, and corrupted language lends itself to propoganda.
Erik, I must disagree.
In the same way that a yard consists of fewer inches than does a meter, a stalk of celery consists of fewer calories than a hamburger.
No?
As for degrees, well, compare two thermometers which show a discrepancy. Can’t one read 3 degrees fewer than the other?
I was surprised to see a grammar zealot use so many incomplete sentences in one short article!
I was just about to point out the hypocrisy of a professional writer ranting about bad grammar while propagating the use of fragments, and then I came to the end of the comments and saw that Mr. Wood beat me to it.
“Physician, heal thyself?”
This isn’t a very good argument. The “different to” example, for one, is just an arbitrary style choice and its use isn’t a sign of imprecision. Saying ‘different than’ or ‘different from’ instead (besides sounding clunky to my British ears) would clarify nothing. The reluctant non-conformist’s dating profile is a little unclear, but that’s more due to his word choices: is he reluctant about not conforming, or is he a non-conformist who is also reluctant about other things?
Stephen Fry’s contribution to the less vs. fewer debate:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7E-aoXLZGY
So, as others have, I won’t belabor the fact that all language is mutable and to rail about its mutability is futile, precious, and just a bit silly.
But I think its worth noting that if the point is precision of word choice, the author has made a really horrible choice by conflating “England” and “the British Isles” together. In no sense does the one equate the other.
Here’s more fuel to add to the plea for good grammar.
Language is the very method with which we structure our thinking. Sloppy grammar is indicative of sloppy THINKING.
It’s as simple as that.
There’s a *reason* why grammar was taught so strenuously in school. It was to foster better thinking processes. It’s no wonder so many sound so dumb, good grammar is considered a luxury rather than a necessity.
And we are all the poorer for it.
I try to hold myself to higher standards, but I have worked for supposedly qualified editors who employed “set” instead of “sit” and used “between you and I” rather than “between you and me.” It drove me nuts! I’m sure I’ve made mistakes but would prefer they were brought to my attention, especially in a professional setting. (Or sitting.)
; )
So “media that institutionalizes bad grammar” is right but “30% less calories” is wrong? Let’s call the whole thing off.
Seriously though, the tendency of English to singularise* plurals is of long standing. Queen Victoria wrote “are there any news?” but “news” is now firmly singular. “Media” has become singular except to a few oldies like me. And “calories” is still plural although it is a measure of a continuous quantity, energy, and a clear candidate for becoming singular.
On the other hand, I agree that anything other than “different from” jars horribly because we always says a “differs from” b, not “differs to” or “differs than”.
But a lot of this stuff is a matter of dialect, and we wouldn’t want to suppress anyone’s native dialect, would we?
*Posting from UK and preserving my native dialect.
It’s hard for me to support this argument, especially when it has been taken to such extremes. Proper grammar and usage IS important, it should be taught and it should be stressed but living in a world where many people are still illiterate seems a much more urgent problem for me.
I am just very afraid that if we take up arms for grammar then it will alienate and ostracize people who are not allowed access to resources or don’t have the luxury of good grammar.
I appreciated most of the points the author made in this article. I did not like the statement, “we are, I fear, dumber than the British.” It wasn’t necessary and actually, I think our 200 plus year old country, got its language from the British. We changed our spelling of certain words and “dumbed down” the language. Otherwise, I agree. I think we, in the United States, have lowered the bar considerably overall.
I have trouble understanding some of the reactions here to what is (at least to me) the accurate observation that proofing standards ( word usage, grammar, etc.) have been sliding for quite a while now. I think it’s more of a matter of greedy cost-cutting of editors and proofreaders than anything else.
I think the knee-jerk name calling (snobby, elitist) and the referral to a whole separate problem (high illiteracy rates) are missing the point. One issue does not negate the other.
I also think that the fear that this will “alienate and ostracize” those who “who are not allowed access to resources or don’t have the luxury of good grammar” is misplaced and patronizing. I happened to grow up in a loving working-class home with a strong “Boston” accent that could cut glass, sloppy diction, and a flamboyantly profane and slatternly manner of comporting myself. I made a decision to modulate my own accent and style when I moved to Washington DC (I loved languages and was blessed with a good ear) not because of any shame about my accent or “people”, but out of a decision that some modulation would make my spoken message easier to deliver to a diverse and multi-national audience. Many of these people did not speak English as a first language. I love my English, and love to study and know the correct word to use. Why is this drive “snooty?” I think it is a positive force.
I’m especially irritated by the phrase “the luxury of good grammar.” While I believe the writer means well by this, why the heck is grammar a “luxury?” Is the stolid worker such a mute animal that he has no time for such frippery? Go back again to Orwell’s article! Any tool for effective communication can only help the worker. And remember the quotes of Emma Goldman. Workers need roses, not just bread. I won’t come to your Revolution if you won’t let me dance!
Finally, I remember visiting Astoria in Queens during Christmas Week 2002. The streets were teaming with people come there from all over the world, from Ethiopia, Pakistan, Korea. I looked into the street-level children’s reading room of the public library and found it absolutely packed with people. When I went in, one of the librarians remarked that the children’s books were absolutely read to shreds, their pages thin at the edges from turning. She said these people crowd the reading room because “They want their children to learn.” Rather than dismiss grammar and usage as frippery and any discussion of it as dismissive of “the anonymous poor,” how about push for more library hours? How about volunteering with people “without resources?” Come on, Millions people, get to it!
Moe Murph
(Still Sometimes Slatternly But 59% Less/Fewer Profanities)
How bizarre! Here we have a “grammarian” bemoaning a silly rule for US English and Ms. Maazel doesn’t know that periods go inside the quotation marks in US English even when the period refers to the sentence overall, not the quotation! (Do a search on “prick” and “well educated” to find the problems.)
If she really wants to get after bad writing, she needs to refer back to the ninth century and criticize that schlum of a writer, King Alfred the Great, who broke the fewer vs. less rule, probably because it wasn’t invented for another eight hundred years or so after he died.
Also, why abbreviate “also known as” with small letters. Is it acceptable to not write “AKA” because nobody bothers to do so on Facebook? I don’t have a problem with it either way, but that’s just me….
Finally, who in their right mind thinks that “too little vitamins” means vitamins that are too small? That’s an interpretation even more ungrammatical than King Alfred’s grammatical felony.
Only 1 local supermarket has a lane for “12 items or fewer,” the all designate the lane for “12 items or less.” The worst part is nobody notices.
Compound adjectives are only hyphenated before, not after, the nouns they modify.
“The machine is well oiled.” but
“It is a well-oiled machine.”
“I am well educated.” but
“She is a well-educated person.”
Correction to original essay, first paragraph: the word “media” is plural (singular is “medium”, so it will institutionalize, not institutionalizes.
That aside, poor grammar and punctuation drive me crazy. My pet peeve is poor apostrophe use before an s suffix.
I know a grade school teacher whose spelling and punctuation is poor and pronounces “jaguar” as “jagwire”. How can we expect much of the kids?
Today at work I saw a hand-written sign on the coffee maker that read “I know you here me in your dreams, but make sure to wait until the green light is on”.
Grammar also makes you crazy because it makes you worry that you’re crazy to think about it. However, correct grammar is a happy club: I thought I was the only one who heard “different to teeth” and gritted my teeth every time.
Grammar is community.
Jeanne, I volunteered in a public 8th grade English classroom for a little while, and I was astounded to find that the English teacher spelled grammar “grammer.”
“Big Taste” instead of “Strong Flavor” may not be ungrammatical, but it’s bad English.
Billy Wood, occasional incomplete sentences are perfectly acceptable in well-written prose. What grates is when you can tell the writer doesn’t know any better.
Funny to me because the Ad Men usually have the best grasp of how our language is used in the living day. They don’t always stick to the rules because the language is always changing. Perhaps we should follow them. Ours is a living language. Efficiency over all.
so the final paragraph finally attempts to arrive at what the problem is with bad grammar, and offers ‘little vitamins’ and ‘stronger to the storm’ as perniciously ambiguous phrases that will lead us to a more brain-dead society. so disappointing. nobody is concerned about the size of the vitamins in their dogs’ bowls, and ‘stronger to the storm’ seems to be an irrelevant extrapolation of what might happen, god FORBID, if british usage invades this side of the pond. please don’t use orwell’s work in vain.
It appears the advertising community has released itself from all responsibility to provide properly worded ads to the viewing audience. For the general public to use improper verbiage can be viewed as individuality. For the advertising community it is a crime to lead the public into incorrect usage. Yes, I think the advertisers should be held to a higher standard. Please allow us in the trenches to express ourselves as we may when we communicate with each other, but show us howl it should be done when we watch your ads.