(1) Dave Hickey (December 5, 1938 – November 12, 2021) was an American art critic who wrote for many American publications. He taught art at the University of Nevada Las Vegas from the late 1980s to 2001 when he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. He returned in 2005 to teach English as the Schaeffer Professor of Modern Letters until he left to take up a professorship of criticism in the Department of Art & Art History at the University of New Mexico in 2010.

(2) Ripper Jordan website, September 19, 2009

(3) Merism is a rhetorical device or figure of speech, in which a combination of two contrasting parts of the whole refer to the whole.

(4) Catachresis is another rhetorical term for the inappropriate use of one word for another, or for an extreme, strained, or mixed metaphor often used deliberately.

(5) Jack the Ripper was an unidentified serial killer who claimed 5 victims. They were active in and around the impoverished Whitechapel district of London, England in 1888.

(6) Michael Jordan (b. February 17, 1963) is a former American professional basketball player and businessman. He was active in the NBA between 1984 and 2003, playing for the Chicago Bulls. He was integral in popularizing basketball and the NBA around the world in the 1980s and 1990s and becoming a global cultural icon through his skill and sponsorship by Nike, developing the popular Air Jordan basketball shoe. He is considered the greatest basketball player of all time.

(7) The River Jordan, also known as Nahr Al-Sharieat, is a 160 mile-long river in the Levant (Middle East) that flows north to south through the Sea of Galilee and drains into the Dead Sea. The river passes by or through Jordan, Syria, Israel and Palestine.

(8) The Mandela Effect is a phenomenon where someone recalls something that did not actually happen or recalls it differently from the way it actually happened. Suggestibility, activation of associated information, the incorporation of misinformation, and source misattribution have been suggested to be several mechanisms underlying a variety of types of false memory. The term was coined by paranormal researcher Fiona Broome, who reported having detailed memories of South African anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s, despite his release from prison and becoming President of South Africa from 1994 to 1999. Mandela died in 2013.

(9) The Stanky Legg is an early 2000’s, instruction-heavy, hip-hop party dance move created by ‘The GS Boyz’. The dance involves hair slicking and head rubbing, pulling up your socks and a lean and drop among other suggestions, but most importantly dipping low with one leg out to the side.

(10) The 2007–2008 financial crisis, or the global financial crisis (GFC), was the most severe worldwide economic crisis since the Great Depression, which lasted a decade from 1929. The crash was caused by the conflation of predatory lending in the form of subprime mortgages targeting low-income homebuyer and excessive risk-taking by international banks. A major affect was the bursting of the housing market bubble which plummeted house prices in Las Vegas by 60%.

(11) First Friday is a name for various public art events in cities primarily throughout the United States, that occur on the first Friday of every month. In Downtown Las Vegas, the event was launched in 2002 by Cindy Funkhouser to present artists' work and to promote the district. The event was focused around antique store The Funk House. Over the past 20 years, First Friday has developed into a large street event, reaching crowd volumes upwards of 10,000 visitors at its height. The arts aspect of the event was centered around the Arts Factory, then run by Wes Isbutt who had a hand in developing the Arts District, along with Brett Sperry who owned the adjacent Art Square. In 2011, Downtown Projects (aligned with Tony Hsieh’s Zappos) took over the running of First Friday. The event is still run as a 501(c)3 foundation and their website is www.ffflv.org

(12) The full title for this season of MTV’s Real World is Real World: Go Big or Go Home. It marked the thirty-first season of MTV's reality television series and featured a roster of eight roommates living together. The season started with seven cast members until the additional roommate was introduced in the ninth episode. The filming took place in a converted penthouse suite at Gold Spike in Downtown Las Vegas. Ripper Jordan featured their button paintings, grass baseboards, and shelf sculptures in various rooms in the penthouse.

(13) Las Vegas’s cultural sphere was very fortunate to have writers such as Kristen Peterson, Scott Dickensheets, Jarret Keane, and a bit later, Cindi Moon-Reed, Jenessa Kenway and Dawn-Michelle Baude covering art events in Las Vegas. Each writer took time to visit and review art exhibitions taking place, primarily in the Downtown Las Vegas Arts District. This period of writing created a frisson that hasn’t been seen since.

(14) Trifecta Gallery was run by Marty and Pete Walsh and their formally-attired dog Spud. Trifecta began in 2003 and occupied a small north side gallery space in Wes Isbutt’s Arts Factory, moving to a larger Southern, Charleston Blvd-facing space in 2010. The gallery was dissolved in 2015 and the Walsh’s moved to a rural area outside of Dublin, Ireland.

(15) A great example of Ripper Jordan’s bridging of high and low art (cf. Varnedoe and Gopnik, MOMA 1990), combining the blue chip, second-generational abstract painter Ellsworth Kelly (1923 – 2015) and Charles M. Schultz’s (1922 - 2000) comic book children grouped as ‘Peanuts’. Ripper Jordan’s tondo-formed EP paintings conflate the isolated hair of the Peanuts characters with Kelly’s minimalist shaped canvases of the 80s. It’s fun to note that Ripper Jordan’s EP series prefigures Kelly’s more vivacious aluminum cutouts, such as ‘Black Form I’ of 2011.

(16) Sam ‘Ace’ Rothstein is played by Robert de Niro in the Martin Scorsese-directed Casino, released in 1995. De Niro’s character is based on Las Vegas mafia gangster Frank ‘Lefty’ Rosenthal who ran the Stardust, Fremont, Marina, and Hacienda casinos for the Chicago Outfit from 1968 until 1981.

(17) Research has discovered that the fresco garland was painted by one of Raphael’s assistants Giovanni de Udine (1487–1561), but for effect I’ve kept Raphael’s name, as using Udine may cause even more confusion in this bramble of information.

(18) This is a gambling strategy in which the bettor places wagers on both sides of the same bet at different lines, attempting to win both, and ensuring that at least one of them will win. Whether this strategy works doesn't come with a simple answer, as the answer depends on how frequently your attempts actually result in a ‘middle’. I’m sure there’s a formula for the rate of success according to the quantity of bets made and the odds to win or break even, but those are for much more patient minds than mine.

(19) Robert Hughes notes in American Visions, “The impossibility of competing with streetscape sometimes reaches the proportions of farce, and one place where it necessarily does so is Las Vegas. One cannot imagine public 'art,' let alone a museum, on the Vegas strip. It would have nothing to do there except look high-minded and insignificant. Here the idea of art simply evaporates, it flies off in the face of the stronger illusions with which this place is saturated: sudden wealth, endless orgasm, Dean Martin. Vegas is the Disney World of terminal greed, and part of its appeal to the Pop sensibility was that it contained an infinity of signs all plugging the same product: luck. Now the product is abstract. Only the signs are real and so [Las] Vegas sums up American giganticism, not because it’s big, but because it pretends to be. Its monuments, the city lights, are conceived on a scale much beyond anything that most artists ever get to work on, so really, the town is a work of art … lousy art, but art all the same. And no wonder that this festive junk food for the eye has had such an appeal to artists and critics.”

(20) DoubleThink, invented by Orwell, explored the contradictory nature of totalitarian rule, censorship, the loss of individuality, the power of propaganda and the consequences of a surveillance state. Some of the slogans in the novel that exemplify this are: War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength.

(21) Ripper Jordan seems to be of the genus of the mid 90’s slacker period of artists such as Sean Landers. ArtForum writer Andrew Hultkrans described Landers thusly: “His rantings—on video and in writing—vacillate schizophrenically, recalling now the naked love/death obsessions of institutionalized singer/cartoonist Daniel Johnston (whose verses include “I’ll never marry/I’ll never wed/No one wants to sleep with you when your flesh is rotting”), now the steroid-fueled megalomania of novelist Mark Leyner. Landers is both a maudlin auto-confessor and a pornography-warped pervert. A sap whose sentimentality is balanced by his ability to find God in D Cup magazine.”

(22) The Selfish Gene is a 1976 book on evolution by Richard Dawkins, who uses the term "selfish gene" as a way of expressing the gene-centered view of evolution (as opposed to the views focused on the organism and the group). The term meme is a shortening of mimeme, which comes from Ancient Greek meaning 'imitated thing’. A meme has now come to mean a viral idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme. In popular language, a meme may refer to an Internet meme, typically an image that is remixed, copied, and circulated in a shared cultural experience online.

(23) Doge (pronounced DOHJ) is a slang term for ‘dog’ that is primarily associated with pictures of Shiba Inus. These photos may be photoshopped to change the dog's face or captioned with interior monologues in Comic Sans font. The primary meme and iconography associated with Doge was the Shiba Inu named Kabosu, whose photos taken by her owner Atsuko Sato in early 2010 went viral across the internet, spawning numerous memes and larger trends in the following decades. Starting in 2017, Ironic Doge formats gained prevalence over the original wholesome version as the memetic character continued to evolve.

(24) Jason Momoa Sneaking Up On Henry Cavill refers to a series of object label image macros and photoshopped memes of a photograph of actor Jason Momoa attempting to surprise fellow-Justice League co-star Henry Cavill at the premiere of the DC Comics superhero film Suicide Squad.

(25) As of Monday, November 11th, 2024, the Ripper Jordan Facebook page had 44 followers. A member of the collective started an Instagram page to post supplementary images from their archives. The Facebook page can be found at: https://www.facebook.com/ripperjordan. Their Instagram handle is: @ripperjordanart.