Artsy Fartsy

I recently visited Washington, DC’s Hirshhorn Museum, hoping to ogle my favorite piece of art, Ron Mueck's “Big Man,” a disturbingly lifelike rendition of a giant obese naked man who looks like he’s having the worst day of his life and might, at any moment, squash your voyeuristic little ass. He’s gorgeous. Definitely the most beautiful giant obese ugly angry naked man I’ve ever seen.




It’s so accurate in it’s detail that you can see the veins beneath the skin of his scrotum. Or at least I think you can. It’s been years since I saw him, and he’s out on tour now. But instead, I was treated to a new exhibit from abstract expressionist Blinky Palermo. If you are not familiar with abstract expressionism, here is how you recognize it: if you were to walk by it on the side of the road on trash day, you would not for a moment consider it out of place. You would never suspect that it was anything but garbage.

Kurt Vonnegut’s Bluebeard masterfully skewers the outrageous pretensions of the art world, and in particular the idea that “art” that is indistinguishable from garbage is not garbage, as long as enough elitist wankers in black turtlenecks say so. Vonnegut is the little boy who declares the emperor to have no clothes. And, unlike the Big Man, the emperor's scrotum holds no fascination for me.

My good friend and fellow irate malcontent, Larry Nocella, once wrote a hilarious zine about a guy who cannot contain his bowels and lets loose a massive dump in an art museum, only to have it hailed as a work of genius by the type of people who routinely declare pieces of shit to be works of genius. Heck, I’ll just give some unsolicited promotion to Larry with a link. You’ll laugh!

http://www.larrynocella.com/files/xc03_new.pdf

Vonnegut makes the same point, and though it takes longer and there are no silly pictures, the final effect hits the reader like a brick in the face, only in a good way. You should read the entire thing, yesterday, if possible, but here it is boiled down to its quintessence: Art that is about nothing but itself is about nothing.




Bluebeard is a true work of art, and long after anyone gives a rat’s ass about Blinky Palermo’s spray-painted two-by-fours (I shit you not, this was one of the pieces of “art.” It wasn’t even a well spray-painted two-by-four. If you were on your way to a hardware store on trash day to buy a two-by-four, you would still walk right past it, I swear), they’ll appreciate this artistic citizen’s arrest. I have no doubt that it will outlast the smile on the Mona Lisa.






Now there’s a nice piece of art too. Almost as nice as a big fat naked guy.