The relevant quote to our situation being:
“Being snobby about what music people like or what kind of bike they ride isn’t any better than caring about what jobs people have or where they went to college. What part of judging people by how much money they don’t make is morally superior to judging people by how much money they do?”

So, inherently our distaste for these fetish events stems from their shallow and deceptive representative form. While those involved are experiencing “fun” it is only an ideological form of the experience. It is a hierarchical structure that has more to do with status fetish than it has to do with experience feelings of joy or adulation in experiencing a work of art. They experience the “fun” because their ideological background allows them to believe that this is the right way to “have fun,” by building a false set of hierarchical relationships in which they can act more morally superior for having experienced that which others have not. “They do not know it, but they are doing it.”

My friend goes on:
“There are these old steel rings along the edge of the streets in Portland that people used to tie their horses to a long time ago. Then a couple kids a few years ago started tying little plastic toy horses to them and people started to talk about it and then when you saw one you were like “Oh hey there’s one of those horses, that is so cool that they do that.” I and was always like “Why is it so cool.” I mean it was kinda cute the first time I saw one, I guess but then other people started doing it and it just really angered me. I started carrying around a little bottle of lighter fluid and melting them.”

He is of course referencing the Portland Horse Project. We both of course agree that art can be an important force in the world, but we feel that while projects like this might be “cute” initially, their popularity is the result of a commodity fetishism for an inherently empty capitalist subject. What message is there in these horses tied to old steel rings? Are we to learn something about modern society in remembering it? No, apparently not. The deepest the Horse Project goes in defining the “why” to their art is the statement: “We’d like to make this project one of those quirky Portland things that people remember and talk about…”

While one can argue that art is only truly art when it has no functional utility, this does not mean that art in and of itself has to be meaningless. The meaninglessness of such artistic installations speaks of a grave helplessness in American artistic culture. A helplessness tied to the fetishization of the act. The act of creating a memetic theme such as tying toy horses to old horse ties will guarantee one a high place in the so-called “hipster” hierarchy. But the memetic theme does not speak to any problems nor does it care to solve any. In this way, while not being a bought and sold commodity, it has still been commodified and is now a fetish of the consumer. Obviously, the only way to reject this farce of an artistic outlet is the anarchy of flames or destruction. Smashing the veritable symbol of the empty capitalist artistic regime.

He goes further:
“One time somebody was talking about those god damned horses at the train station downtown and about how some of them are burned and melted and then claimed that he was the one doing it. Talking about how that was his form of expression and artistic remixing. I fucking screamed at him. That pissed me off so much. Not so much that he was taking credit for something I was doing but that he was making it into just another useless stupid art thing.”

And that quickly, the act of rejection has been recuperated, turned into its own “artistic expression.” An expression of what? How can this be considered artistic? At once it is a violent and political act, but so quickly it is torn asunder, turned once again into a meaningless commodity of fashion and fetish.

We will never know the names of the true heroes because they did not want their names to be known. They only wanted freedom. Freedom from this satirical elitist underground hierarchy of kitsch bands, hemp jewelry, and Ron Paul bumper stickers.

Authors Note: I am aware of “hipster” generally being a throw-away word, however it fits the purposes of generally describing people who are young, urban, and “hip.” It may evoke images of a particular subset that is totally unrelated to the whole group at large, but this most definitely is meant to represent a larger group of those who are young and urban. Here is a possibly relevant link.