This year the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP) convention was held at the University of Maryland, College Park. The hotel bar may have closed suspiciously early, but artists and academics bonded into the night over aesthetic anxieties, their new matching ASAP T-shirts, and 3 a.m. GrubHub deliveries. This edition of Shoptalk features a mix of folks invested in art, concerned with technology and temporality, and caring for each other across the vast desert of the present.
1. “This is my resting conference face.”
2. “I’m sick of all these new identities. I’m going back in the closet.”
3. Person 1: “We have a dongle.”
Person 2: “I have a dongle.”
Person 1: “It’s the royal ‘we.’”
4. Person 1: “You blew up this year. How?”
Person 2: “I did my hair.”
5. Person 1: “I think your HDMI cord is old.”
Person 2: “Everything about me is old.”
6. “Word on the street is that the flu and pink eye are going around this conference.”
7. Person 1: “I got my girlfriend a hat that says ‘vicious top’ and she wouldn’t pack it for this conference.”
Person 2: “That’s more of an ASA hat.”
8. “I’m like the Kevin Bacon of the academy.”
9. “I saw so many friends this weekend, I didn’t even have conference sex.”
10. We’re not post-19. We haven’t even entered the 20th century.”
11. Person 1: “I’m staying longer because I have Columbus Day off. [Coughs] Sorry, I had some something in my throat.”
Person 2: “Was it settler colonialism?”
12. “I see escalators, but I have no idea where they go or how to get home.”
13. Person 1: “We don’t talk about the Denver conference.”
Person 2: “That’s because no one remembers the Denver conference.”
