Acclaim
Press
The shock was the easy part to see. The writers who looked harder left a record.
The critical champion
The most serious champion of the work was Alfred Eaker, who made the case for Zex in two 2009 essays for 366 Weird Movies. Eaker died in 2023; his advocacy remains part of the record it helped create.
“A kindred spirit to Georges Méliès, Kenneth Anger, and Ernie Kovacs.”
“Horrifying, perversely amusing, and intensely contrarian — Zex at his most quintessentially bizarre.”
The local feature
In “The age of Damon Zex”, Melissa Starker of Matter News — the Columbus nonprofit newsroom — set his public-access provocations back in the DIY counterculture that made them, in conversation with the friends and artists who knew the work up close.
“He was someone who showed you can make weird things. We don’t have to be somewhere else to do that.”
In the canon
Brooklyn’s Spectacle Theater placed Zex in the national canon of public-access auteurs, programming him in the 2019 series “Public Access, Private Desires” alongside David Liebe Hart, Concrete TV, Harvey “Job” Matusow, Splendid Recipes — and reviving the work for an encore in January 2025. He is also listed as a notable artist by Marquis Who’s Who.
Local memory
“If you ask just about anyone who lived in Columbus at the time, they have at least one Damon Zex story.”
Artifact
