I always wondered what this day would be like! With a world-wide famous star’s death, what could I say? Should I connect it to art and talk about Keith Edmier, who collaborated with her to produce a hot-or-not couple of sculptures?

And then came the bigger news! Jaw still sore from dropping. The King of Pop, the simultaneous culmination of disparate genres, subcultures, and concepts – R.I.P.

Being “death,” it was inevitable, of course, and in his case already a time-stopping advent with irresistible, yet unspoken anticipation from generations of audiences. Then again, he seemed like some otherworldly prodigy orbiting beyond the earthbound struggle between youth and age, for whom plastic surgery and maniacal oblivion defeated wrinkling and sagging, meted out to the rest of us commoners, in gradually disfiguring a previously angelic face.

Pointilistically styled, he was perpetually enshrouded in sunglasses, transfiguring that incognito device into icon-making accessory. Presiding over armies of howling Japanese teens, he transcended “man” and shimmered as “bejeweled Merlin from outer space.” He gave the slip to physics, stunningly striding forward while sliding backward; and he taunted gravity by leaning 45 degrees. Moonwalker was clearly fictional, yet it paradoxically confirmed Jacko as a palpable phantasm, a human-turned-demigod. Preternaturally gifted, benevolent, humanistic, and prophetically post-racial, was he an emissary from the heavens, or the evidence of boundless human potential?

Then it got weird. The rest was a mind-boggling barrage of profligacy and perversion that bowled us through Macaulay Culkin, Neverland, out-of-court settlements, ancestral demigod Elvis Presley’s daughter, inexplicably conceived babies, babies recklessly dangled from balconies, the twisted remnants of a human face, and thousands of offensive jokes ready to occupy a coffee-table book, quickly followed by Volume II.

Michael Bilsborough, Munch&Macaulay Mash-up

So it’s no wonder Jacko became an icon of contemporary art, so fixated on irony, race relations, political correctness, dystopic pop culture, and the technology-compatible body.

We could start our timeline with Andy Warhol’s Michael Jackson, which might set a new auction record for Warhol, if the recent eBay activity is any indication,

Warhol, Michael Jackson, 1984

followed by Jeff Koons’ hysterical, life-size porcelain Michael Jackson with Bubbles,

Jeff Koons, Michael Jackson with Bubbles, 1988

which requires a note about Richard Phillips nine-foot tall canvas Jacko (after Jeff Koons),

Richard Phillips, Jacko (After Jeff Koons)

and then some prescient female artists tuned into a new Jacko generation,

as Meredith Danluck debuted a Michael Jackson video about meeting the King of Pop,

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

and Dawn Mellor revealed a life-long oeuvre of diva-worshipping MJ drawings in a show at White Columns, Other Peoples Projects – Studio Voltaire, London,

Dawn Mellor's MJ drawings

but only after Tara Mateik’s must-see PYT

\’ >PYT‘ >PYT

Oh, and then there’s the cut-up by the venerable Mark Flood!

After Mark Flood

I’m writing this in mourning, so please forgive and notify me: no doubt I’ve omitted many other examples of Michael Jackson art. Where do we go from here? I imagine his corpse will be taxidermied, cryogenically frozen, hawked on eBay cell by cell, or submerged in a tank (like the basketballs, not the sharks).

To save money like everyone else, I’ve committed to doing my own laundry. The inconvenience is a drag, but I like using the “Not-Going-Anywhere-for-a-While?” time to read. My laundry book this week was THIS, a collection of artists’ writings, edited by NYC artist Susan Jennings. 45 artists have contributed poems, lists, conversations, letters, manifestos, and more. (Did you already see this in the Wall Street Journal?)

Welcoming the thesis-driven and the anecdotal, THIS encompasses theory and practice. Fia Backström conducts a rigorous survey of blondes, channeling post-colonial thought, Brigitte Bardot, and an art historian’s index of references. A blonde herself, Fia digs up a fascinating passage from the travel diary of Michel Leiris, his account of a brothel visit in “exotic” Ethiopia. Fia observes, “He had seen himself from this other into his own body, seen from within. He was in perspective, no ground zero.” A different take on the male gaze occurs as Lydia Dona takes us out of the streets and into the museum to describe a metaphysical, metaplastical trajectory of Mondrian, through which Mondrian “pulled the spectator into the space formed by the projection of his unconscious gaze, only to push him away again,” making the spectator a stranger in the strange land of “perception, recollection, and signification.”

Which Would You Rather Come Home To? (Hint: One is Aging Better)

Vargas Suarez Universal delivers an intimate recollection of Mark Lombardi, the late conceptual artist whose research-based maps of power brokering and financial channels famously alerted the FBI, which seized the drawings from the Whitney Museum for its own research. Vargas Suarez Universal recounts Lombardi as a rigorous artist with enlightened views of art history and lineage (and a pothead?).

Craig Kalpakjian conducts a thorough, thoughtful report on the life of Lev Sergeyevich Termen (León Theremin) who invented the Theremin, sci-fi essential and Pixies accoutrement. The Russian inventor also applied his mastery of electromagnetic fields to surveillance and espionage. Termen also married an African-American dancer, Lavinia Williams, despite the scorn and miscegnation panic of his high-society audience. That was nearly forty years before Loving vs. Virginia.

Sam Gordon contributes a time capsule entry of five art wonders of the world, charging young artists to get political while placing the Bush/Iraq War protests in an art historical context. “Where are the Gran Fury and Guerilla Girls of the Bush 00′s?” Sam overlaps with THIS fellow Huma Bhabha; they both note the protest signs against George W. Bush, “Bush pull out. Your father should have.”

Other highlights include:

• Dan Torop on a schism between users of programming text editors Emacs and those of Vi. Art history is filled with rivaling camps: neo-classical painters vs. the romantics, Apollonians vs. Dionysians, Picasso vs. Matisse, Mondrian vs. diagonal lines, mods vs. rockers. Computer programmers also are divided when acknowledging which of the two is the more elegant, intuitive program. “Within the Vi culture, Emacs is considered bloated and awkward,” he shares, and later adds, “What Emacs users hate about Vi is its austere disdain for gratuitous luxury.”

• Ingrid Calame finding the taxidermy in collecting art: “I thought of making art as creating a lineage similar to living a life. An artwork as the product of this process, felt like a corpse – a memento of ideas. So it felt somewhat morbid to be invested in collecting these shells, investing in the body while I had been focused on the spirit.”

• Christie Interlante, “It Might as well be Evian,” which convinced me to flush less frequently and to take quicker showers, though I won’t compromise on being thorough. She reminds us that natural resources are as limited as a print editions, when you think about it, and definitely more precious.

Christie Interlante, "Eyes for Me"

Sean Landers – hey, when does he get a new york museum retrospective? who else reflects the “me generation” crisis? – closes the collection with a rant, I mean, an insanely egomaniacal tour de force:

“God in heaven bestow upon me the power to create and perhaps if I take nothingness and work it between my two hands and create something-ness that act will elevate my existence above that of ordinary cosmic dust. My hands in my mind in my sadness about the briefness of life will create objects so poignant that my life will have not been lived in vain. And this act is what separates humanity form that of insects, of bacteria, and I am one man, but one man greater than others because I create and I create with such love and meaning, what I make speaks of your dilemmas.”