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I can’t tell you how many times haters have emailed me with: “you suck!” or some iteration. They tell me: “I’m an artist, and you suck at it.” I think that entitles me to “expert at suck” status. Or a “neo-modern suckiness” expert, if you will. So, here goes. Modern Art Sucks. Okay, some of it is tolerable to the eye but a lot of it is garbage. I mean, actual garbage.
A guy named Will Kurtz titled one of his exhibits “Keep America Great Again.” It was produced in 2016. It was a raccoon standing next to an actual trashcan overflowing with trash. The night janitor threw Kurtz’s OrangeManBad trash in the dumpster. The janitor left the rabid-looking raccoon.
A Canadian woman put out some creepy-looking waste on a city bench. It consisted of a decapitated doll, with what looked like green pipe cleaners for legs. She said it:
“invoke[d] the forgotten identities and traumas of aboriginal children using found toys and aboriginal poetry.”
I don’t get it. Neither did the city. It tossed it all on the trash. The “artist” named Pepe Chan called the dumpster toss “violence.” Her garbage was violent on the eyes.
Gustav Metzger’s “Recreation of First Public Demonstration of Auto-Destructive Art,” consisted of a chair and a bag of trash. The janitors took his title literally. They tossed it in the dumpster. Although the Metzger trash was rescued from the trash, he declared his trash, trashed.
No recitation of Modern Art can pass without mentioning Pablo Picasso. Every leftist’s favorite commie (he was a literal commie and a thief), Picasso sucked everything I consider “art.” Picasso got all sorts of commie awards, like the ironically titled Lenin Peace Prize, so he was good at that. Picasso tried all sorts of things. Analytic and Synthetic Cubism were just two methods he successfully sucked at, but monetized like a true capitalist. Although he was an award-winning commie, Picasso was great at amassing a fortune, cheating on his wife, and fathering children.
Remember when an artist duct-taped a banana to a wall? It was purchased for $120,000. Then, another artist tore it off the wall and ate the banana. The banana eater was a performance artist. I applaud his performance.
Do you think a big rock cannot be “art”? The Los Angeles County Museum of Art thought it could. It shelled out $10,000,000 on a 340-ton granite rock titled “Levitated Mass.” The “sculptor” is Michael Heizer. Mr. Heizer spent years looking for the “right rock” and he found it, sitting in a Riverside quarry, surrounded by other rocks, not worthy of “sculpture” status. He didn’t sculpt the rock, he found a rock, like a 6-year-old finds a rock, and brings it home to mom. But the county of Los Angeles paid Heizer 10 million dollars for his rock.
Michael Heizer is an “Earth artist.” He was rarely seen because, for the last 40 years, he had been working on “City” in the Nevada desert. It’s now complete, at a cost of 40 million dollars. From the air, it looks like a Star Wars set, designed by a 4-year-old. He’s best known for “double negative,” which is two bulldozed trenches in the remote desert of southern Nevada.
This brings me to the latest abomination, which some call art and I call garbage. It’s the newest sculpture rendition of Martin Luther King Jr…or something. The artist is Hank Willis Thomas, and he isn’t an untalented sculptor. Unlike Picasso, some of his work has some appeal, but not the mess he did for the city of Boston. It’s awful. From above, it looks look a giant jelly donut with hands, but no jelly. From another angle, it resembles butt cheeks being pulled asunder. At least Boston picked a black artist–but man, it is awful.
In Washington, D.C., the MLK memorial sits between the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials and is a three-story depiction of King. But it doesn’t look like King. I mean, it kinda does – like my cartoons resemble the people I draw, but I’m a cartoonist. I’m not alone in thinking it doesn’t depict King.
There was also the choice of the sculptor–Lei Yixin. Lei is Chinese. Before being selected to sculpt King in stone, he sculpted Mao for the ChiComs. At least he didn’t find a 340-ton rock, call it “King Rock,” and bill the feds for 10 million dollars. Nah – the memorial cost 120 million dollars, and the rock from which Lei carved pseudo-King? It also is a Chinese import. Nice work, if you can get it.
Modern Art? It sucks. Cartoons? Now, those are art.
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