Exactly.
MoMA’s new short reveals everything right about the art world today. Savor it, then, because much of everything else is wrong.
Ross Bleckner’s BS
Ross Bleckner, painter and now UN goodwill ambassador, recently traveled to Gulu district, Uganda, to teach former child soldiers and abductees how to paint.
Using thousands of dollars’ worth of paint, brushes and paper shipped from New York Central Art Supply in the East Village, Mr. Bleckner, 59, worked with a group of 25 children — former abductees and ex-soldiers — for more than a week at a Roman Catholic aid center. The children made 200 paintings that will be sold at a benefit at the United Nations headquarters next month at which Mr. Bleckner will be appointed goodwill ambassador. Several of the luminous paintings are now on view in the front window of the clothing store Moschino in the meatpacking district, whose company is providing money to support the Gulu project.
Fantastic. Use the suffering of children for commercial gain. What a great way to desensitize the masses to the problems in northern Uganda.
“One of the things we realized about a fine artist, a painter, in this role is that the work that emerges from it really needs no translation, no dubbing like a documentary or music — it’s immediately accessible to anyone who sees it,” said Ms. Monasebian, whose office estimates that human trafficking generates $32 billion a year in profits, third only to drug and arms trafficking.
Wow. . . this is unadulterated ignorance. Artistic work actually does, at times, require explanation. J.D. Salinger, for instance, suggested people nowadays are too dumb to understand his subtext. And art, as it relates to painting, is sometimes confusing to laymen. Take Jackson Pollack. Most people do not “get” his work right away — sometimes never. People tend to say “my kid can do that,” but what they fail to grasp is Pollack’s deep understanding of color: you can’t approximate Pollack’s work because you don’t have the color mastery that he had. This knowledge is not intuitive.
In addition, children’s paintings, too, can be abstruse. Sometimes, especially within therapeutic play contexts, a child might draw things that require professional interpretation (for instance, relative size of self compared to others, relative size of genitalia); moreover, remember Columbine and Virginia Tech? These situations all show that we are poor interpreters of obvious attempts to communicate. It is not immediately accessible.
“What this mission accomplished is what I call microcreativity,” Mr. Bleckner wrote in a catalog of the children’s work. “It is a personal interaction which gives someone the tools to create something that they can be proud of, and which can help them on the arduous path to restoring their dignity and sense of self-worth.”
What my mission in Uganda accomplishes is what I call EMPLOYMENT and EDUCATION. It’s a personal interaction which gives people the tools to FEED THEIR FAMILIES and BETTER THEIR LIVES — things they can be proud of, which can help them on the relatively easy path to restoring their dignity and sense of self-worth.
I don’t understand this continuing celebration of mediocrity. It’s as if we’re all too easily fooled by flash and sparkle. It’s like we’ve left intellectualism and probity thrashing in the wake as we sail forward for the sake of sailing forward. Where we are going is uncertain.
Pricasso Paints
Pricasso paints with his ass and sausage (indicative of his clever work, actually). Hope he washes his hands. Frequently.
Just watch:
WARNING: Lots of man-ass in this one.