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There’s Always One at Every Party
There’s Always One at Every Party
There’s Always One at Every Party

There’s Always One at Every Party

Artist (Born 1978, United States)
Date2010
MediumSingle-channel video
DimensionsDuration: 9 minutes, 13 seconds
Credit LineCollection of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Museum purchase, The Friends of Art Endowment Fund
Object number2014.18
Status
Not on view
Copyright© Cory Arcangel
Category
Label TextWith software, hardware, and the internet as his media, Cory Arcangel investigates memory and temporality. The Modern’s There’s Always One at Every Party, 2010, grew out of an admiration for the work of the comedian Jerry Seinfeld, whose eponymous 1990s sitcom provided raw material for Arcangel’s video. Seinfeld challenged television comedy conventions, introducing not necessarily likeable characters, storylines that intersected in unexpected ways, and single-camera framing over then-standard multicamera arrangements. Arcangel’s supercut compiles every Seinfeld scene related to a storyline in which one of the protagonists, Kramer, publishes a coffee table book about coffee tables—a self-referential joke. Episode subplots play on a loop: Kramer has an inspiration, experiences the ups and downs of getting published, promotes the book, and, in the series finale, gets a movie deal.

Paralleling the concept of a coffee table book about coffee tables, There’s Always One at Every Party is about Seinfeld itself, both as show and phenomenon. Arcangel builds on the legacy of artists, beginning with Marcel Duchamp, who have questioned the value of “original” art.

Arcangel’s remix encapsulates Seinfeld’s examinations of relationships and cultural practices. At the same time, it highlights fractures between the persistence and obsolescence of media tropes. As quickly as Seinfeld upended sitcom norms, new shows rendered its innovations passé. Still, decades after its final episode, Seinfeld endures as an icon of American culture. For contemporary viewers, There’s Always One at Every Party manifests an increasingly perceptible distance between the never-aging characters on screen and outdated cultural markers like fashion and brand names as the loop plays, endlessly.

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