Seeking Failed Artists for Associate Position by Joe Eichner
We’re looking for a talented, driven, career-oriented individual who’s willing to give up on their dreams for the betterment of this hip, multinational tech corporation. If you’re looking to smile on the outside while dying a slow, grueling death on the inside — this is the job for you.
Applicants will preferably have had hopes of “making it” in one of the following fields: acting, creative writing (poets preferred — you had no real ambitions anyway, and wasn’t that the beauty of it?), painter, oboist, street performer, or photographer. Performance artists will be considered, as long as they unambiguously state on their application that this is not a “meta piece of performance art.”
Job-seekers should be violently opposed to the Microsoft Office suite of products, bottom-lines, right-wing politics, the gender binary, and their parents’ traditional conceptions of “success.” Proficiencies in Habermas’ notions of the “public sphere,” elementary Kant, and Kafka’s parables are a plus — even a working knowledge (i.e. the ability to say “that’s so Kafka-esque” when appropriate) will suffice, and might even be preferred.
We would hate for you to be pretentious, but if you don’t regularly call other people pretentious — this might not be the job for you.
As the position will require the facile deployment of new media forms, please outline your ironically detached usage of social media, wherein you simultaneously make fun of the medium while using the medium itself. (Note: if you do not have a Facebook, please let us know why this bespeaks a certain “authenticity” missing in today’s globalized, media-saturated world, and why this proves you’re not as desperately alone as everyone else.) Video artwork is a plus, particularly if there is no discernible plot and if it quotes Nazi propagandist films as a means of commentating on the pseudo-Marxist approaches of certain Scandinavian policy makers. Show us — without telling us — how your work’s subtle use of recycled film stock actually mirrors the very modes of production it rails against.
It’s important that you fit in with our firm culture, so please note that while we do have an in-house beer tap, it only contains Samuel Adams varietals. Also, a ping-pong table is set up in the back room—and yes, to answer your question, we do know that we are merely clichés of ourselves. Regular outings to sporting events will be had; however, we expect you to stand outside of the arena chain-smoking American Spirits and muttering something about “the sad state of American populism” under your breath. If you’ve got a penchant for hate-fucking people you vehemently disagree with, we ask that you send a detailed letter of recommendation from your dialectical therapy psychiatrist that speaks to your inability to “really get close with someone.”
Please include, along with your CV, a cover letter written in the style of David Foster Wallace a la “Consider The Lobster,” since it’s the only thing we’ve read by him and we assume you were planning on doing so anyway. Please begin by acknowledging the fact that you are writing a cover letter while you are, indeed, writing a cover letter. Applicants who simply turn in a piece of paper with the words COVER LETTER type-written on its face will automatically secure a spot in the second round of interviews (conducted via Morse code), but do know that this will have compromised your artistic integrity, as well as your sense of self.
After all, isn’t that the whole point?