last fifty years. I’ve seen with growing disgust the fetishization of art, the vast inflation of prices, and the effect of this upon artists and museums.”68 What Huges describes is mainly what the mainsdreamers seek: to succeed in the art world by becoming into a celebrity icon available for mass consumption. In the following text, I describe how this transubstantiation presumably occurs in the unfolding dream logic of the mainsdream. By following the story of Terry Painter L’Artiste, the three main phases that the comic book presents of the protagonist’s life (the painful commonplace aspirations, the paradoxical climax within and of the mainsdream, and inevitably then the fallen artist) will serve as a structure and guide to the three moments in which the mainsdream does occur. Under the name of Terry, I will describe several cases that the Mexican mainsdreamers live in order to clarify the peculiarities of the mainsdream as it is expressed in one specific group and place. As a reminder for the reader, my mainsdreamers here are the generations of young artists who were born during the late 1970s and early 1980s in Mexico, and who suffered from the many serial socioeconomic failures that the country faced in that epoch. These people were mainly educated by the American mainstream media, and were caught up in the treacherous currents of the neoliberal development policies and philosophical assumptions. In this way, Terry will depict more than a part of everyone who aspires for fame and fortune: he is a portrayal of an artist living a high-speed lifestyle that travels between common dreams and dead ends especially indicative of a moment and a place I know myself all too well. Let me introduce you to Terry, our protagonist of the mainsdream in the Mexican contemporary art scene.
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idem
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