Contents:
1-Paintings
(TemperSawaCharlieRavenAdriaVoltaireSean)
2--Richard Nixon, Vanity, Naked Girls, and the Intellectual Poverty of the Art World
3-Frequently Asked Questions
1-- My Paintings
(print available in the SG
store)
(print available in the SG
store)
2-Richard Nixon, Vanity, Naked Girls, and the Intellectual Poverty of the Art World
"God damn newspapers, they're a bunch of sluts!"
-Richard Nixon
So I was at a reading for a book my friend just wrote about naked internet girls.
One of the topics that came up during Q and A was unpaid naked internet girls and their possible motivations.
So the women up there talked about the tempting appeal of approval and how people just love admiration. You know, the idea that the girls just love attention and getting coments on their photos blah blah blah.
Now usually I think this when I hear that kind of thing_"Gee I'm glad I'm not like that and don't care what people think."
Not that I'm not vain, I am. It's just, I usually think, a very functional kind of vanity. I, like probably a lot of other people, like a lot of other guys I talk to, think of vanity as a means to an end. i.e. I only take showers and put Clearasil on my zits and own a mirror because otherwise I'd never get to have sex. And, access to sex being an absolutely defensible and noble and reasonable goal, I feel ok about it.
The idea of wanting strangers I don't want to fuck to want to fuck me, on the other hand, has always seemed like a weird and alien kind of vanity that I am glad I'm not victim to. That is, given the choice, I would rather have sex with the sexy than be one of them.
This idea generally extends to the whole idea of approval in general. It only seems appealing as a way to get other things done. I want the approval of the UPS guy only inasmuch as it means he won't fuck up my deliveries, I want my neighbor's dog to approve of me so I can walk down the steps unmolested. Otherwise, fuck the world.
The rest of this entry is about how maybe I'm wrong about me and in exactly what way.
So I am also reading this book about Richard Nixon.
Among many other borderline unimaginable acts, Nixon actually ordered Henry Kissinger to tell reporters that he, Nixon, was : "A man who in terms of his personal style is steely subtle and almost gentle."
Along from being a little creepy, this is what you'd call vain.
Now the thing about Nixon is that, now that everybody's pretty much heard all the tapes, everybody, including the people who like him, agree about what kind of guy he was:
He was a guy who would do pretty much whatever he thought was necessary to make sure what he thought was right would happen.
This is why we hate him. This is why they love him.
The point here is when informed people look at him we all see exactly the same guy, we just have different opinions about whether, say, preventing a democratically-elected socialist from taking power in Chile or ensuring the re-election of Richard Nixon were things worth breaking the law over.
Anyway, about his vanity_I might (and probably would) say that Nixon was just vain and creepy, but a supporter of Nixon could say that Nixon knew that making the public like him was vital to getting his message across. and that getting his message across was vital to getting his policies passed, and that getting his policies passed was vital to creating the kind of world he thought we should live in.
So maybe Nixon is vain, but maybe he was just functionally vain. Like, I-need-people-to-think-these-good-things-about-me-because-I-am-the-agent-of-important-change-and-need-to-control-public-opinion-in-order-to-effectively-change-things.
This is, at any rate, probably what he told himself.
Now, me...
So I read a good review of my most recent show and it made me mad.
I'll say up front_it was a positive review, and all things considered, I am glad it was written and thank the person who wrote it and it was one of the sort of reviews where even the review appearing at all was probably helpful and good to me personally, and there were no factual errors (which is an all-time first for a review that wasn't submitted for fact-checking) and Thanks!
But it made me feel a little off. This was not a brain reaction, this was a gut reaction. Like a sort of seasick feeling that had very little to do, at first, with my conscious mind.
It took a second to chase down exactly why I felt this way, but the series of reactions boiled down to this (in order of appearance):
-this review is kind of dumb
-it doesn't matter that it's dumb
-nevertheless it still bothers me that it's dumb
-it bothers me that I care that this review is dumb
Dumb how?
Well it begins by asking a semi-rhetorical question whose answer is painfully obvious and unrelated to any point the author's making, goes on to characterize absolutely functional characteristics of the work as somehow a marketing ploy or as part of its appeal, weirdly confuses the terms "art work" and "art career", claims I'm making some statement that only someone who had just confused the two could make, and triumphantly finishes off by claiming my art ultimately begs a question which no-one on earth could possibly imagine is an actual question in need of answering. (Like seriously, as much of a no-brainer as "This show forces us to ask ourselves--What's bigger, an elephant or a hedgehog?")
I want to emphasize that the thing is not so much poorly-written as it is just poorly thought out. The author makes a bunch of points and poses a bunch of questions that are totally irrelevant to any real person's approval, disapproval, or interpretation of the art.
In other words, it's dumb in roughly the same way that nearly every single art review ever written is dumb.
I'm not complaining here about "not being taken seriously". Kind of the opposite, actually_it seems the more seriously an artist is taken, the less sense the arguments people write for them make.
When you're writing about a show at a coffee shop, the only way to convince people to go see it is to explain that it has this in it and that in it and it's all completely made out of _______ and therefore is seriously the most amazing and beautiful thing anyone will ever see; when you write about a show at the MOMA you get away with saying that the artist is involved in a unique and multivalent investigation of the hermeneutics of hybridized identity, so y'know, go see that.
And the frustrating thing about all this is, it doesn't matter at all.
And the author of the review about me writes like they know that, or, more precisely, is so used to the fact that art reviews are not part of any rational, ongoing debate that it'd never occur to them to try to write or think with any coherency about what s/he's writing
People write bullshit about art. No-one responds to it. The art gets more well-known, the writer gets more well-known. Both maybe get paid.
The only problem all this bullshit creates is that its been going on for so long that nothing anyone writes is in any way useful in helping us eliminate all the crappy art that keeps being foisted on us and has been for so long that most smart people stopped paying attention to any of it decades ago.
In other words, writing about art long ago ceased to be a tool for helping people think.
I know this. All sane people in my business do.
By rights, therefore, I should enjoy the fact that I got a good review and not be sitting here at 3 am getting pissed at someone who was trying to write me a good review for not making any fucking sense.
But something in me is vain. I fantasize that I should tell this person to try to write something about my show, good or bad, that proves they actually judged it based on some vaguely human criteria or that brings up a question that someone somewhere actually wants answered. I then fantasize that if people do this for me, it will start a wonderful trend that will help every other artist and the whole rest of art forever and one day people will be able to find good art as easily as they can find good music.
Here is the point: this will never happen, wanting this is irrational, and yet some gut-level thing in me wants it and is depressed about not ever getting it. Regardless of all the other, much more important, things in my life that are basically very very nice and that I can't complain about, I can actually sense this petty little need for some irrelevant jackass somewhere to actually try and think before they write stuff down about my show_and this need is apparently based on the, very flimsy, ground that it will somehow help the world be better. This is vain as fuck.
I should shut up and not worry and not care and just make what I love to make and pick up my checks and remember that I cannot change anything.
3--Frequently Asked Questions
spoilerized to save space
1-Paintings
(TemperSawaCharlieRavenAdriaVoltaireSean)
2--Richard Nixon, Vanity, Naked Girls, and the Intellectual Poverty of the Art World
3-Frequently Asked Questions
1-- My Paintings
(print available in the SG
store)
(print available in the SG
store)
2-Richard Nixon, Vanity, Naked Girls, and the Intellectual Poverty of the Art World
"God damn newspapers, they're a bunch of sluts!"
-Richard Nixon
So I was at a reading for a book my friend just wrote about naked internet girls.
One of the topics that came up during Q and A was unpaid naked internet girls and their possible motivations.
So the women up there talked about the tempting appeal of approval and how people just love admiration. You know, the idea that the girls just love attention and getting coments on their photos blah blah blah.
Now usually I think this when I hear that kind of thing_"Gee I'm glad I'm not like that and don't care what people think."
Not that I'm not vain, I am. It's just, I usually think, a very functional kind of vanity. I, like probably a lot of other people, like a lot of other guys I talk to, think of vanity as a means to an end. i.e. I only take showers and put Clearasil on my zits and own a mirror because otherwise I'd never get to have sex. And, access to sex being an absolutely defensible and noble and reasonable goal, I feel ok about it.
The idea of wanting strangers I don't want to fuck to want to fuck me, on the other hand, has always seemed like a weird and alien kind of vanity that I am glad I'm not victim to. That is, given the choice, I would rather have sex with the sexy than be one of them.
This idea generally extends to the whole idea of approval in general. It only seems appealing as a way to get other things done. I want the approval of the UPS guy only inasmuch as it means he won't fuck up my deliveries, I want my neighbor's dog to approve of me so I can walk down the steps unmolested. Otherwise, fuck the world.
The rest of this entry is about how maybe I'm wrong about me and in exactly what way.
So I am also reading this book about Richard Nixon.
Among many other borderline unimaginable acts, Nixon actually ordered Henry Kissinger to tell reporters that he, Nixon, was : "A man who in terms of his personal style is steely subtle and almost gentle."
Along from being a little creepy, this is what you'd call vain.
Now the thing about Nixon is that, now that everybody's pretty much heard all the tapes, everybody, including the people who like him, agree about what kind of guy he was:
He was a guy who would do pretty much whatever he thought was necessary to make sure what he thought was right would happen.
This is why we hate him. This is why they love him.
The point here is when informed people look at him we all see exactly the same guy, we just have different opinions about whether, say, preventing a democratically-elected socialist from taking power in Chile or ensuring the re-election of Richard Nixon were things worth breaking the law over.
Anyway, about his vanity_I might (and probably would) say that Nixon was just vain and creepy, but a supporter of Nixon could say that Nixon knew that making the public like him was vital to getting his message across. and that getting his message across was vital to getting his policies passed, and that getting his policies passed was vital to creating the kind of world he thought we should live in.
So maybe Nixon is vain, but maybe he was just functionally vain. Like, I-need-people-to-think-these-good-things-about-me-because-I-am-the-agent-of-important-change-and-need-to-control-public-opinion-in-order-to-effectively-change-things.
This is, at any rate, probably what he told himself.
Now, me...
So I read a good review of my most recent show and it made me mad.
I'll say up front_it was a positive review, and all things considered, I am glad it was written and thank the person who wrote it and it was one of the sort of reviews where even the review appearing at all was probably helpful and good to me personally, and there were no factual errors (which is an all-time first for a review that wasn't submitted for fact-checking) and Thanks!
But it made me feel a little off. This was not a brain reaction, this was a gut reaction. Like a sort of seasick feeling that had very little to do, at first, with my conscious mind.
It took a second to chase down exactly why I felt this way, but the series of reactions boiled down to this (in order of appearance):
-this review is kind of dumb
-it doesn't matter that it's dumb
-nevertheless it still bothers me that it's dumb
-it bothers me that I care that this review is dumb
Dumb how?
Well it begins by asking a semi-rhetorical question whose answer is painfully obvious and unrelated to any point the author's making, goes on to characterize absolutely functional characteristics of the work as somehow a marketing ploy or as part of its appeal, weirdly confuses the terms "art work" and "art career", claims I'm making some statement that only someone who had just confused the two could make, and triumphantly finishes off by claiming my art ultimately begs a question which no-one on earth could possibly imagine is an actual question in need of answering. (Like seriously, as much of a no-brainer as "This show forces us to ask ourselves--What's bigger, an elephant or a hedgehog?")
I want to emphasize that the thing is not so much poorly-written as it is just poorly thought out. The author makes a bunch of points and poses a bunch of questions that are totally irrelevant to any real person's approval, disapproval, or interpretation of the art.
In other words, it's dumb in roughly the same way that nearly every single art review ever written is dumb.
I'm not complaining here about "not being taken seriously". Kind of the opposite, actually_it seems the more seriously an artist is taken, the less sense the arguments people write for them make.
When you're writing about a show at a coffee shop, the only way to convince people to go see it is to explain that it has this in it and that in it and it's all completely made out of _______ and therefore is seriously the most amazing and beautiful thing anyone will ever see; when you write about a show at the MOMA you get away with saying that the artist is involved in a unique and multivalent investigation of the hermeneutics of hybridized identity, so y'know, go see that.
And the frustrating thing about all this is, it doesn't matter at all.
And the author of the review about me writes like they know that, or, more precisely, is so used to the fact that art reviews are not part of any rational, ongoing debate that it'd never occur to them to try to write or think with any coherency about what s/he's writing
People write bullshit about art. No-one responds to it. The art gets more well-known, the writer gets more well-known. Both maybe get paid.
The only problem all this bullshit creates is that its been going on for so long that nothing anyone writes is in any way useful in helping us eliminate all the crappy art that keeps being foisted on us and has been for so long that most smart people stopped paying attention to any of it decades ago.
In other words, writing about art long ago ceased to be a tool for helping people think.
I know this. All sane people in my business do.
By rights, therefore, I should enjoy the fact that I got a good review and not be sitting here at 3 am getting pissed at someone who was trying to write me a good review for not making any fucking sense.
But something in me is vain. I fantasize that I should tell this person to try to write something about my show, good or bad, that proves they actually judged it based on some vaguely human criteria or that brings up a question that someone somewhere actually wants answered. I then fantasize that if people do this for me, it will start a wonderful trend that will help every other artist and the whole rest of art forever and one day people will be able to find good art as easily as they can find good music.
Here is the point: this will never happen, wanting this is irrational, and yet some gut-level thing in me wants it and is depressed about not ever getting it. Regardless of all the other, much more important, things in my life that are basically very very nice and that I can't complain about, I can actually sense this petty little need for some irrelevant jackass somewhere to actually try and think before they write stuff down about my show_and this need is apparently based on the, very flimsy, ground that it will somehow help the world be better. This is vain as fuck.
I should shut up and not worry and not care and just make what I love to make and pick up my checks and remember that I cannot change anything.
3--Frequently Asked Questions
spoilerized to save space
VIEW 8 of 8 COMMENTS
The idea of wanting strangers I don't want to fuck to want to fuck me, on the other hand, has always seemed like a weird and alien kind of vanity that I am glad I'm not victim to. That is, given the choice, I would rather have sex with the sexy than be one of them.
+1