On artists

Or: Obnoxious Horseshit

Okay, so admittedly when I first saw the Rent-a-Negro website long, long ago, I thought it was funny. And it is. Or rather, it would be if it were just a goof that someone thought up while drunk and joking around.

Alas, I suffered the misfortune of listening to Ms. Damali Ayo on NPR tonight, and having heard the background to the web site, I now find her and all her work obnoxious. Far from being an amusing prank, this woman actually makes a living and takes seriously this pretentious shit.

My objection is not really particular to her. She is part of a larger class of people who are basically parasites to society in a far more egregious way than the poor or the people on welfare. These people are commonly know as "artists."

Note that my problem is not with art but with _artists_. Art can be interesting, thought-provoking, beautiful, and stunning. Artists, unfortunately, are self-involved, pretentious, condescending, self-important pricks who overestimate their value to the world.

Case in point: Ms. Damali. She went on and on about how people view race, and how she was challenging people's perceptions by doing assinine shit like pandhandling for slavery reparations, and how people "really should think about race more." She made the point, which she seemed to think was profound, that when you see a white person walk by, it's "a person," and when you see a black person go by, they're "a black person."

You know what? Fuck her. And fuck artists who think like that. They seem to be under the delusion that because they're artists, they somehow have a deeper understanding of the world and see it from a different perspective. And they don't. If they have a different perspective, it's because they've spent too much time admiring the depth they perceive in their own thoughts and getting other people like them to do the same. And that's not insight. That's fucking egotism and intellectual masturbation.

It reminds me of a conversation I had a while ago (yes, with the same person who wants more time to watch tv). We were discussing the fact that there's a class of academics who are under the mistaken impression that anybody gives a shit about what they're doing besides other people doing the same thing, and moreover that what they're doing matters. In general, it doesn't. From my perspective, at least the social scientists who are doing empirical studies are actually learning something objective about the world and about people, but even their research has little to no bearing on how anybody views the world or governs. Even that tiny useful sliver, however, evades the "conceptual artists" (like Ayo) and social theorists and the like who actually get paid to come up with arbitrary ephemeral horseshit that has no bearing on the real world nor any effect beyond their incestuous little academic community, and, as if that weren't bad enough, have the fucking balls to talk about their work like they found the cure for cancer.

Stop it. Please. You're all fucking pompous douchebags.

Now, as I said, I don't necessarily have a problem with art (though the next artist to draw a black square off-center on a white canvas, call it art, and claim it "challenges traditional notions of visual art and forces the viewer to confront themselves in their role as audience, thus inviting an entirely new dialectic between the painting and the viewer" should be strung up by his testicles (or whatever relevent sensitive bits he, she, or it may have) and then quartered. That's not art. It's a fucking rectangle.) But artists need to understand that all they do, at best, is entertain their audience. That's it. End of story. No greater social purpose or contribution, no expanding of human knowledge, and no forcing of dialog. You draw a pretty picture, I pay you, and then you go the fuck away. That's how this works. If you want to actually make a difference in the world, go do something useful. Go to law school and do civil rights litigation. Get involved with a non-profit advocacy group. Go do miscellaneous community service to feed someone or build them a fucking house. But I swear to god, one more pretentious conceptual art piece that you talk about like the second coming of Christ and I will smear you in meat sauce, throw you in a pit with Rush Limbaugh, G. Gordon Liddy, and Ann Coulter, and enjoy the fucking carnage.

So Ms. Ayo, with all due respect, shut up and go do something useful. If you give such a shit about race, go actually do something about the issue and stop taking up valuable air time.

(oh, and for anyone who might be retarded enough to try to make the "yeah, but, see, she got you talking about it, so she is making a difference!" point, just stop right there, Scooter. My roommate has gone on _at length_ on numerous occasions about how proud she was of a dump she took. Just because she talked about it doesn't mean it's a goddamn epiphany.)