The Artist as Self-Booster

FOR THOSE OF YOU WHO DO NOT make your way through comment threads, or click through to off-site links, here is the comment by Banksy referred to earlier by reader Sam at the end of a comment thread: // // Whether you agree with it or not, you have to admit it is a bit rich coming from a product of high hype like Banksy. His own work is notable more for its location—on walls or the façades of buildings—than its content.  Continue Reading
Post-Bollocks

Randy Pausch gave good advice to his computer science students at Carnegie Mellon: When you know you are in pissing contest it, get out of it as fast as you can. So in the Pauschian spirit, I offer this delicious cartoon, sent by Mr. Eyeballs as both a free gift and a chastisement. The previous post grew, in some curious way, out of Arty Bollocks, the earlier waltz over artistic pretension. Just how things sidled into corporate greed, is a bit murky. Continue Reading
Art Institutes, Debt & Education

The Art Institutes, the largest collegiate system for design education in the world, began in 1921. The Art Institute of Pittsburgh was the flagship school, a model for the complex which has grown to some 45 schools in North America. It specializes in design: graphic, industrial, game, and related applied art fields that have a chance of leading to—wait for it!—employment. That seems to stick in the craw of some readers. There are dark hints that something unsavory is afoot if [1] it is a for-profit system and [2] Goldman Sachs owns a controlling share in it. Continue Reading
Arty Bollocks

Reader Sam has done us all a great favor by emailing the link to Arty Bollocks Generator. The site provides an instant Artist Statement for anyone applying for a grant, preparing for a show or cobbling together a CV. Gallerists, too, will find it useful for composing the kind of press releases vital to so much contemporary art work. You know, the ones that explore the relationship between gender politics and low-fat ethics. // The Generator provides a 4-paragraph template with arty variations on each paragraph. Continue Reading
Byronic Hero, Then and Now

Where is Byron when we need him? This is what George Gordon Lord Byron, sexual magnet and progenitor of the Byronic hero, looked like: // / Oh, the melancholy tilt of the head, the dark eyes shining with sensitivity, his pale skin so delicate, so caressable! And that mouth! Small wonder Byron was the toast of London’s social circuit in 1812, celebrated and sought after.  Woman, especially, thrilled to the handsome, capricious, lame-footed man who exploited female emotionalism with calculated aforethought:
Who does not write to please the women?
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