Short Imagined Monologue: The Artist Plays Basketball

Today on McSweeney’s, The Artist Plays Basketball: “Anyway, what I’m working on, my current project, right here, while I collect the ball against the fence, that shot was close, though shooting the ball is such a harsh idea, I’d like to challenge it—what I’m working on here is a kind of post-studio practice, and I’d like to involve the community in some way, though not like the other day, when I had to chase away those neighborhood kids when they tried to steal my keys and wallet off the ground, but in a different way. Though maybe if I videotaped myself, chasing away those kids? And if the audience couldn’t tell if it was totally real or staged? A skinny white guy in hip-nerd glasses, flapping my arms like a startled chicken or perhaps a thoughtful chicken, at an African-American teenager who is, from a place of understandable economic desperation, flipping through my wallet? Or maybe just doing so ironically? How would that sound, like as a grant application?”

Short Imagined Monologue: The Artist Plays Basketball