There have been so many critiques of the Nets strategy ... or lack of same. So many references to them "mortgaging their future," the "waste of riches" in the past. These critiques are often accompanied by images of Billy King looking sad, Lionel Hollins looking exasperated or Mikhail Prokhorov looking stoic. They have a charry smell to them, you know, burnt out.
But not Alex Siquig, who writes for among others, the New Yorker and Vice. Oh no! There is nothing burnt out or warmed over about his critique in Vice, entitled "This Is Not Basketball: The Brooklyn Nets as Dada Masterpiece." Siquig sees the Nets as a piece of performance art. For those not familiar with the Dadaists, they were a group of artists, an informal movement that eschewed the aesthetics of art and its conformity. Tres avant-garde. It ultimately turned toward surrealism. (THAT, Nets fans can understand.)
As Siquig writes, "the informal Dada movement produced an array of bizarre offerings in painting, literature, sculpture, abstract collage. The Nets can be considered one such composition."
He goes on. Oh does he...
Over the past few years, the brain trust have done all they can to affirm their displeasure with the zeitgeist of the times and to violently row against the current. Their brazen luxury nihilism and lust for mediocre castaways with expensive-sounding names is a rebuke to true believers in the rewards of capitalism. All that money the looming Russian has burned accomplished no real mainstream success. Money is bullshit. Beneath the paving stones, the beach.
And on...
Transforming a team that twice made the NBA Finals in the previous decade into an exhibition of absurd futility would have satisfied Francis Picabia, the Dada pioneer who once said, "Wherever art appears, life disappears." The Nets are giving the finger to art and embracing the paralyzing truths of humanity, and they're doing it one goofy theme song and doomed 23-second isolation play at a time.
And on...
Andrea Bargnani is the furthest thing from museum art in the association. He's basically a humanoid stand-in for Max Ernst's Ubu Imperator, mechanically bouncing from one Atlantic Division frontier to the next, trussed together with mismatched parts, fighting a war in his heart that can never be won.
No, we cannot stop...
Thaddeus Young, a superstar journeyman, will put up garish numbers full of sound and fury, signifying nothing; he will keep the trains running on time, though the trains are empty.
Forgive us...
The hiring of Lionel Hollins is another apropos bit of anti-art. In a league where pace and space and pushing the tempo has won the day, bringing in an ass-backwards traditionalist whose greatest moment was rewarding Tony Allen for punching O.J. Mayo on the Memphis team plane is another ode to their Dada progenitors. The Nets know they cannot actually dare to dream in the middle of a nightmare, and so they have embraced the nightmare and are making it sing.
Siquig does see an end to this and laments it...
Dada luminary Jean Arp was a passionate believer in the loveliness of accidents, of the power of a piece of paper torn up and dropped to the floor. Sooner or later, someone will tape up these Nets and send them on a path to a tangible destination. So let us praise their deathbed moxie now, for all they've done for us these past few years, subverting a beautiful game with lowbrow aesthetics and incongruous dramatis personae.
There's so much more to enjoy in this. It is so full of affront but without the ESPN low-brow cant. (Oh how we would love to smack them!) We hope that Mikhail Prokhorov, patron of the arts, gets in touch with Mr. Siquig and offers him a position, perhaps an endowed chair, with our dear Nets. What a marvelous idea! Couldn't do any worse.