A few days ago MoMA uploaded a video of their “salon” on the topic of “White Male”. It could have been called “White Male: The Enemy” and the content would not have needed to change. I find this sort of thing in 2019 not to be the more enlightened, open-minded, generous, just, and progressive…
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Runaway Rant: A Problem with Morality and Art
I just wanted to get out one thought here, folks, which is percolating in my mind over my morning coffee. In general, morality is defined by others, and art makes its own definitions, hence they work at cross purposes. How much are we, as individuals, self-defined, and how much defined by everything outside of ourselves?…
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Abominable Ideas About Art #2: All Art is Political
The art world is filled with bad ideas that are repeated like scripture, and accepted as truisms. Most of them presume to make sweeping statements about all art, and establish a hierarchy with their chosen art at the pinnacle. I’ve dismantled a bunch of the worst of these ideas in lengthy articles, but here I’ll…
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Abominable Ideas About Art #1: Making Money is Art
The art world is filled with bad ideas that are repeated like scripture, and accepted as truisms. Most of them presume to make sweeping statements about all art, and establish a hierarchy with their chosen art at the pinnacle. I’ve dismantled a bunch of the worst of these ideas in lengthy articles, but here I’ll…
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Runaway Rant: Believing Beliefs, Mass Shootings, & Art.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. … Excerpt…
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“Painting is No Longer a Window”: The Revolutionary Expunging of the Visual Imagination
Painting is no longer a window on an imaginary world. or Painting is no longer allowed to be a window on an imaginary world. There are some ideas that are so ingrained, repeated so often, and are impressed on us so early, that we accept them before we even have the chance or ability to…
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Confession: I am a Renowned Conceptual Artist.
This work by me appears in the video: The Case for Copying, by The Art Assignment / PBS Digital Studios, at @7:00. The purpose of the video is to defend the sometimes maligned contemporary art practice of appropriation, and when giving historical context it returns to Duchamp’s “Fountain”, and then quickly segues to my appropriation…
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Movie Review: The Price of Everything (Art of by and for the Rich)
When I say things that I like to think are to some degree hyperbolic, such as that the art world is a sea of toxic, relativistic, bullshit, this is the art world I’m talking about, and I fear my colorful exaggeration is a woefully inadequate understatement. This film is about the blue chip art world,…
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“It’s OK to Paint” is Hate Speech.
Just going to share this without comment, which doesn’t mean I’m endorsing it or taking any side for or against. I think I’m afraid to formulate an opinion. Sometimes I wonder if I’ve slipped into some parallel dimensions where, well, everything seems backwards or like a parody. I am perhaps softening up to the idea…
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Rant: Why Are My Views Anathema to the Art World?
“I must confess that the other mods and I find ourselves strongly disagreeing with you in almost all cases…” ~ Head Moderator of the Art-History subreddit. I received the above message some months ago after the Art History subreddit censored an article of mine I shared which was critical of Banksy’s stunt in which one…
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At Eternity’s Gate: An Abominable Portrait of Van Gogh
At Eternity’s Gate is to the painter, Vincent Van Gogh, what the paintings in the movie are to his own: an atrocity. I’ve been excited to see this movie for a long time, mostly because it stars Willem Dafoe as Van Gogh. The only actor that might have been more fun to cast in the…
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Authoritative Art Video Self-Refutes by Unwittingly Featuring One of My Pranks
[Note before I get started. I’m not a tortured artist, and have no mental illnesses or addictions. I’m not even prone to depression. If there are no extenuating circumstances, I’m told I can be annoyingly chipper, especially in the mornings. The way I usually choose to deal with things is with light humor.] I was…
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Runaway Rant: Can you Separate the Art from the Artist?
The question has come up a lot recently about whether or not we can separate the artist from the art, and it’s usually in the bad sense. The conclusion comes first, and it’s that a bad person can’t be a good artist. We then work on our arguments, which have to be correct, because we’ve…
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Runaway Rant: That’s Not Reality
What makes my runaway rants rants is that I write them in one go, initially without editing. I will go back and fix my more egregious typos, misspellings, and so on, but not change the flow. The ideas come one after the other, without an outline. It’s a way to keep it simple, but also…
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Art is not a conversation piece for mental masturbation!
Sometimes I say or do something that’s so obvious to me that I can’t believe nobody else has done it or said it. Apparently the above is an original quote by me [I also made the graphic.]. You can even take out the “for mental masturbation” part, and “art is not a conversation piece” is…
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Schoolmarmy Regurgitation of the Correct Political Opinion is Not Performance Art
Righteous political posturing is not synonymous with significant artistic achievement. The art world is so afraid of the political moralists that it is compelled to make any trivial political protest into front-page art news, and refuses to criticize it, even as art. Allow me to put a little perspective on this boring-ass, preachy, completely unoriginal…
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What Is the Secret to Making It as an Artist? Bad News, Folks….
According to an article in artnetnews, the key is merely to be picked up by a big name venue early in your career. Sorry everyone else, your actual art is irrelevant, and THAT is F’ing pathetic. This is super depressing shit, and stupid. News flash: terminal myopia is not the right metaphor for visual art…
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Runaway Rant: Why is the Art World So Toxic?
My last article was an attempt (I like to think a successful one) at disentangling the verbose “theory” of Roland Barthes that “The Author is Dead”. I shared my article in a couple Reddit forums, one being “philosophy” and the other “art theory”. There were a lot of responses, most the initial ones fairly reasonable,…
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“The Death of the Author” Debunked.
The belief that “the author is dead” is one of the unquestioned bad ideas that has become gospel in the art world. It’s usually just asserted — along with its companion notions that originality is impossible, and the artist’s intent is irrelevant — as if to deny it is as hopelessly naive as denying evolution.…
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The day I decided the art world was a toxic sea of relativist bullshit
WARNING: I wrote this in the course of a day, when I was in a particularly dark mood, and not worried about hyperbolic excess. I then shelved it as too negative. later I reconsidered it, and saw it had some good, honest bits, and a few passages with rhetorical flair. Now I share it as…
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Runaway Rant: Why I never Wrote a Manifesto
This is an easy one. Generally, a manifesto is a declaration of what art should be and that everyone, or anyone relevant, should somehow follow. It is by nature prescriptive. It is also constitutionally against my nature. I rather believe that art should be idiosyncratic, and each individual should have his/her own approach, style, content,…
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Against Competitiveness in Art, and a Defense of Digital Art
“Digital painting isn’t painting.” ~ Charles Thomson, co-founder of Stuckism. “I can appreciate digital art, I just don’t want it on my wall.” ~ Bill Schafer, gallery owner of the Hyaena Gallery in LA. “I just don’t like digital, computer generated art. All of it I’ve seen comes across as kitschy and more for a…
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Runaway Rant. Instagram – Tit for Tat – Spammy artists…
Sometimes I wake up and it just seems like everything is stacked against me, though not me in particular. As people like to say, “it’s not personal”. No, it isn’t. It’s an affront to the personal and the individual. It’s calculatedly indifferent. It’s clinical. It’s commercial. It’s about power and money, money and power. It’s…
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Quotas for Art Museums. It’s here!
QUOTAS FOR ART MUSEUMS Are quotas a good idea for art museums? Should museum collections be based on race, gender, and sexual orientation/identification? The Baltimore Museum of Art is doing something very similar to that: selling off works in the permanent collection by white males, and replacing them with new art by marginalized persons. Some…
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Egg On Egon Schiele
Maybe Egon Schiele was a bad egg, and maybe not. Maybe I watched too many Frankenstein movies as a kid, because whenever people get out the torches and pitchforks I find myself sympathizing with the “monster”. What if he’s just misunderstood? I tend to think it’s better to be the person weighing the stone in…
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Reflections on 5 Years of Blogging, and a Few Insights
A small graphic from WordPress appeared a couple days ago notifying me that I’ve been blogging for 5 years. Two things come immediately to mind when faced with that fact. One is that I’ve continued to blog, and expand my site far beyond what I could have ever conceived when I started. I have 560…
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Pretty Dumb Bombast: Hirst’s New Shit
From birthday parties, to showers or a night out with friends, you can reserve our splatter room for a fun get-together. All can join in to make one large masterpiece or everyone makes their own piece of art, there is no age limit or skill required!! There are formulas, or templates one can use to…
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Instagram Gem O’ Th’day #5: Troy Brooks
Because I find some of the most striking visual art when prowling through people’s Instagram posts. @officialtroybrooks Troy Brooks always paints elegantl, extremely elongated, idealized, beautiful and frightening women. One of the things I most like about his art is that I like it in spite of myself. By that I mean that it’s not…
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