Welcome to ArtDick

Art criticism can be pretentious. Most IS pretentious. This is coming from someone who just had to Google the word "criticism" to get the correct spelling. This blog will house no genius but it is long on opinion and that's the same goddam thing that every well respected curator, gallery director and art critic has. Have you ever looked up the word "art" in the dictionary? It's a clusterfuck. There are no answers there. And if the dictionary can't tell us what art is, then we'll be goddamed if we're going to let to the bespectacled weenies who prowl the white box galleries of Soho tell us that what we think about art is wrong.

Art has an ego. There's no denying that. Art also has it's reasons. Since the dawn of time man has used art as a means of communication. Cavemen drew pictures on the walls to tell the future spelunkers of the world about how their day went. The Venus of Willendorf was a fertility idol or something. In early Christian times everybody was totally fucking illiterate so pictures were how people "read" the Bible. Then one day art failed to serve a purpose. Someday someone sat down and painted a flower, and it wasn't an object of worship and it wasn't a map and it wasn't illuminated and it wasn't conveying any logical information. And someone walks up behind the dude who drew the flower and goes "what the FUCK is that?" and dude goes "Um, its a flower?" and other dude goes "Yeah, but WHY?" and ever since then art has been explaining itself to society. It sucks to have to explain yourself. In the 1960s Mark Rothko called the typical audience of his art "vulgar eyes". He and the famed art critic Clement Greenberg thought that any sort of "authentic art" required some sort of preparatory work, and at the very least an incredibly open mind. Now that's bullshit. We should all be able to view art in elementary school. Industrial lather operators can go the museum and wax eloquent about Piss Christ if they want to. But Rothko and Greenberg's stance comes for a vast well of artistic insecurity based on CONSTANT requests for explanation and definition and validation. It's like when you go home for Thanksgiving and you just want to eat Turkey and hang out with your little cousins who idolize the shit out of you and then your aunt who totally loves you and just want to talk to you sits down and goes "So ARTHUR tell me about your life!!" and your life, which before you were confronted by this loving assault seemed great, but as soon as you're forced to explain it to anybody else it seems like you're totally doing it wrong and you have to make a bunch of shit up to pad your story and then you get frustrated because you just fucking LIED to Aunt Patty about applying to Grad School and then you resent Patty for making you lie and suddenly your gently aged aunt and her graying bowl cut are no longer endearing but rather a monster which is trying to eat your brain and you hate her and your life. That or it's like when you tell a joke and someone says "I don't get it". i fucking hate that. So imagine being an artist, and realizing when you're little that you just love to create stuff but then you go to art school and people start trying to get you to explain and defend your art. And then society is waiting for you when you graduate, and the art establishment who actually loves you and wants you to succeed sits down next to you and says "So ARTHUR tell me about your life!!" and Society becomes a monster who wants to eat your head. Artist have to go through a LOT of bullshit to become successful. They don't just show up in galleries. They work their fucking asses off and put there proverbial dicks on the chopping blocks time and time again to get a shot at actually making money. So when you walk into a gallery, and you see a piece that looks like a crumpled up piece of paper and you smirk at it and snicker, and the gallery manager gives you a condescending look you don't deserve it. And the gallery manager should not have looked at you that way. But if the gallery manager is worth his or her salt at all they're on the artists' side, and they're pulling for them. They know what the artist went through to get into the gallery, so hopefully that condescending look is on their behalf. And if the gallery is any good there's an excellent chance that if you walked up to the gallery owner and asked what the fuck was up with the crumpled up piece of paper they'd tell you about the artist's motivations, and you'd probably respect it. But the conversation rarely gets that far because most people don't feel comfortable trying to understand art because of the ego. And why should they? Because art is fucking awesome, that's why. Art is a physical extension of humanity. It's part of us. It's a creation based on something the human mind conceived of, and what are we as humans if we can't create what this big grey bullshit inside our skull comes up with? It's our contribution to this planet. We're constantly taking from it. Art is what we can give. It's time to get past arts prom queeny exterior. The prom queen was just a girl too. The quarterback had premature ejaculations just like all the other dudes at school. We're all in this shit together. Might as well talk about it, right?

We're not a part of the art establishment, but we have as much to say as anyone and maybe we can even shed a new light on things. A new, sophomoric, vulgar ignorant light. But a new light all the same. You know how when you need to say something you need to get a weight off of your chest? Well we think the lack of communication between the art establishment and the average viewing public is more like a weight on your dick, because that sucks more than a weight on your chest. So therefore we need to get something off our ArtDick...