Dead Letter Art

i don’t want to paint any more

News from Wednesday, September 10, 2008 @ 1:00 PM

All night i slumbered without thinking and awoke with a blank, vast void within my skull. my mind being more like a well-used dishrag than a sponge, containing stains and residues of past acquired knowledge, was in such a state to refresh itself from the artesian springs of finger-dirtied pages read again and again. while soaking in a passage from Concepts of Modern Art (Richardson & Stangos, Eds.), i was struck by a passage describing Dadaist exhibitions which described the abhorrent, yet appealing, reaction of the throngs who flocked to see their work and the manner in which the non-art was displayed. it was nearly identical to my recent experience in visiting the Portland Art Museum – the current works being the Contemporary Northwest Art Awards.

the parallels were uncanny, aside from the fact that the NW artists assumed they were creating art and in that respect were maliciously deceptive – for the Dadaists never claimed that their exhibitions were art at all, and only the ignorant were so fooled to approach it in that context. on the other hand, that deleterious appropriation of the term Art quite caught me off guard, and i found myself insulted and demeaned like those hapless rubes of the 20th Century. obviously there is a faction of the public(?) who feel the current exhibit contains art of unqualified and deserving success – enough to present them with fantastic designations, like “Winner of the Arlene Schnitzer Award“, and laud them with bouquets of money.

i would describe the scene in detail, but i know you would soon grow bored with descriptions of the infantile artworks, assemblages of found objects, and installation pieces lovingly displayed in a glorification of stupidity and unrelenting self-loathing that people must find fascinating, and thus deceiving themselves, revel in their ‘understanding’ of art and the fabled aesthetic of ‘beauty’ or perhaps ‘creativity’.

And how many people do you suppose entertained themselves looking at the works without the slightest light of recognition leaking into the closed tombs of their minds; without realizing they were taking part in a supreme and sarcastic irony?