cklarock

My painting training was fairly traditional -- by modern standards, it was nearly draconian. I don't consider myself especially good, but if I could paint like anyone, it would probably be Diego Velazquez or Rembrandt Van Rijn.

So yeah, I love the Old Masters. At the same time I'm a hip-hop kid; I love graff, and I love street art. I especially love Doze Green. I used to watch him paint at the Future Primitive parties. Imagine the X-ecutioners rocking their routines while Doze is doing his thing.

For the record, I don't really hate Neckface. When I first ran across his name, it was because he kept tagging my building with his sloppy shit. It's amusing to me that he's built a rep and some fame behind what he does, but honestly I don't really care. More power to him; if people like his stuff, then that means that he's in touch with some idea, visual culture, or other gestalt that they share, and that's a good thing. </Martha Stewart> Hell, it's even a great thing.

But he still sucks.

Now, I know that post-modernism put the final nails in the coffin of objective good and bad in painting (the sound you just heard was me rolling my eyes), so I'm not going to go there; but no matter how relativist we want to get, there is still such a thing as objective skill. This quality would involve things like draftsmanship, composition, mastery of material, control over technique, etc. It would not involve things like intent, narrative, "relevance," and all the other mushy concepts so near and dear to art critics and unskilled artists.

So, aside from this axis of more or less skilled, there is also an axis that would represent like and dislike. This would cover all the fuzzy notions mentioned above, and while fun to argue about, it is ultimately the province of each individual to sort out their own preferences. To illustrate this, I made an example chart:



We could have rational debates about any given artist's point on the vertical axis, but their position on the horizontal is essentially just my personal taste.

You will notice that there is a line that could be called the Suck Demarcation Point. Some artists are so unskilled as to just suck, and this does not necessarily determine any individual's liking or disliking of the art. I like some stuff that sucks, and I don't like some stuff that clearly does not suck. I won't bother justifying this preference as if it mattered, because it really doesn't. It's okay to like anything, even if it sucks.

Note: "naive" art can be very skilled, as exemplified by nearly every four-year-old you know.

I spend 96% of my time in lover mode, 3.95% of my time in fighter mode, and only .05% of my time in hater mode. I only hate that which really threatens me, so artists don't count. But the art-world dick-riding is just stupid. It doesn't make me a hater to point out when shit is just stupid. Or does it?

See, Neckface is not the "new voice" of shit. He's doing what hella other people are and have been doing (mostly on the backs of their spiral-bound notebooks in high-school), but he's been annointed as the next guy for whatever random reason one socially maladjusted graff writer gets picked while another gets overlooked. It definitely isn't the quality of his work. I'm sure The Tipping Point would have something interesting to say about the issue-- that Neckface reached a sort of critical-mass with a grass-roots following and that has spilled over into the more mainstream world of gallery shows, public commerce, etc.

There is a lot of hipster cache attached with him as a representative of some kind of movement, and it's kind of silly, that's all I'm saying. Graffiti -- as "outsider" art -- is one of the more vibrant movements going on today. As a good-old-fashioned Kansas populist, I think that any art movement that takes the ability to make art and removes it from the context of (restrictively expensive) higher education is a good thing.

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From Wooster Collective:

"Here's the situation: A large segment of the most hardcore graf and street artists also have day jobs to pay the bills. Who doesn't. But many of them now work in traditional ad agencies or design shops. Their identity on the streets is kept secret in the workplace.

"So as more ad campaigns begin to co-opt graf and street art in the ads themselves, more graf writers are finding themselves in a bizarre situation - they're now working on projects that co-opt the very same shit they they get arrested for."

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Wanna see my new shit? I got this table for my DJ setup two days ago (the UPS man fucking hates me).