CULTURE
Eat My Art

By MJ Stephens
www.madjoy.biz

I know you don’t give a shit about ART. Artists have done their damndest over the last century to make sure most people don’t give a shit about ART. They have been on a superiority trip since the Renaissance. They thought they could improve their social class by playing hard to get. Then they discovered they could improve their social standing even more by playing hard to understand.

Art is a status symbol like clothes, houses and transport. It is a sign of wealth and power, and always has been. Artists have always flattered the egos of their patrons by making something rare that only the rich possess.

When the industrial wealth class became patrons, artists started making art that was incomprehensible to most people, to the lowly masses, and that means you. This flattered the intellectual aspirations of their middling patrons. The industrial rich are told by the artist that they are more superior people, more deserving of their inescapably ill-gotten gains, not only in light of their obvious abundance of Calvinist virtue, but also on account of their intellectual superiority, and because they possess art which the masses don’t understand. (If three billion people live in poverty then your wealth is inescapably ill-gotten.)

Well the emperor has no clothes, nor brain, nor heart. Maybe plastic bottles on a wire are simply plastic bottles on a wire. Sometimes trash is trash. Art is what the social arbiters say is art. Museums are making it up as they go along. Art, social structures and taboos are all arbitrary.

What then? We can make up what’s ART, and we can make up what’s Culture. I vote for a shallow economic structure. No more wealth fetish ART.

[Warning: Inescapable art reference approaching.]
See photo above.

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