A sad day. I found out ‘maximalism,’ as a word, has already existed and was used as a negative term for novels by Pynchon and David Foster Wallace by some tight assed English guy. Here I thought a friend of mine and I had invented the term years ago while we were bullshitting about an art exhibit where every sense of the visitor would be employed… i.e.: you would simultaneously smell a rotting carcass, look at a painting or photo or video, listen to someone pounding on a sheet of metal with a live cat as someone else beat you on the ass with a hairbrush as you ate gummy worms dipped in yoghurt and hot sauce — smell, touch, taste, sight and sound all rolled into one motherfucking brain beating experience. Add strobe lights and a fog machine. Guaranteed to turn your brain to shit from over stimulation. Turns out some writer beat us to the punch.
Let that be a lesson to me. Never hesitate to pull the trigger and get it documented as soon as possible.
I was going to use ‘maximalism’ as the title for a comic book I was working on — a tongue in cheek acknowledgement of art school pretensions and too many hours in art history lectures. Now I find out it is old hat.
