Especially abstract art. Check it:
Exhibit A, Snowball Family
Exhibit B, Black and White
Aren’t they awesome?
Lucky me, I don’t have to go far to view the artist’s work, because they’re hanging on my refrigerator. And new work rotates in all the time, because my four-year-old is always busy.
I admit I think my children are perfect. I do. I admit I think their artwork is marvelous. But I’m telling you, if I said Black and White was Mark Rothko’s latest piece, you’d have totally believed me.
And you know for sure it’s better than this total piece of shit from Thomas Kinkade:
Why does it always look like there’s a blistering inferno inside every house he draws? That’s not soothing. It’s terrifying. Save the baby, my God, somebody save the baby! The house is going to explode!
Frankly, I’m partial to Snowball Family. I like his use of white space. I like the off-center playfulness. I like that early 60’s retro flavor. And I understand the idea the artist was going for here.
A lot of abstract art is shit, though. How does it get into galleries? There was once an exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago that featured two TVs stacked on top of another, playing a video of a clown taking a dump and reading a newspaper.
I know some of you have seen this. I can’t be the only one.
The piece, called Clown Torture, really irritates me. Not only because it features clowns, which is across the board repellent, but also because the artist could not even justify what he inflicted on the viewing public. “Artists are clowns,” was the premise, or something dumb like that. I confess it was memorable, because here I am still talking about it, but let’s be fair: not all memories are good memories.
Last year I saw that damned Clown Torture in Vanity Fair‘s art issue. Ironically, I was sitting on the toilet when I turned to the page that was doing a puff piece on Bruce Nauman, the frighteningly influential modern artist who weaseled this craptastic idea into the Art Institute.
“No!” I shouted. “Not you, too, Vanity Fair! Why am I the only one who sees the artist has no talent! Why!”
Now, I don’t have an issue with conceptual art, exactly, but if you’re going to shoot footage of a pooping, newspaper-reading clown, you should try to come up with a concept better than “Artists are clowns.” I would have accepted, “I hate people and I want to punish you for existing.” That I can understand.
Take Christopher, painter of Black and White. Do you know what his concept is? It’s what he sees when he opens his eyes just a little bit. Each white splash is a flutter of his eyes.
Where is his exhibit, I ask you? His MacArthur Grant? Pooping clowns, indeed.
The piece across from Clown Torture was another conceptual dealie featuring 168 pounds of individually wrapped hard candy dumped in a heap on the floor that the public was invited to take and eat, one piece at a time. When the candy was gone, it was replaced again, and so it went. The piece was inspired by the artist’s boyfriend, who, at the time he was diagnosed with AIDS, weighed 168 pounds. The slowly disappearing candy represented his wasting away from his illness. The last candy taken represented his death.
I liked this very much. I liked being able to see that much sorrow and love represented in a big pile of candy.
What makes good art good? What makes it shit? And what exactly is it about Thomas Kinkade’s paintings that suck so hard?