Momus // Marfa’s Two-Step: The Uneasy Landscape of Minimalist Heaven
I was lured by the promise of a sepia-tinged ideal: west Texas golden hours and wide-open spaces.
A visit to Marfa had long been on my bucket list, though admittedly I booked my ticket with little more than a rough idea of the town beyond its abundance of Judds, Chamberlains, and of course Elmgreen and Dragset’s Prada Marfa (2005).
What I was not expecting was a town that, in its maximalist approach to celebrating Minimalism, underscores many of the acute disparities of our present political and economic moment. Marfa, as a concept as much as a physical site, stages the cultural cleft between the jet-set “haves” and locally bound “have-nots”.
