Everybody’s an Artist
WARNING: This one’s pretty much a screed. You might want to mouse to a different blog.
I’m sick, sick (and tired, tired, to complete the cliché) of every no-talent exhibitionist being labeled an "Artist" by the lemmings who man America’s media ramparts and call themselves reporters.
I think you know what I mean — Rap Artist, Performance Artist, Hip-Hop Artist, Jazz artist, Keyboard Artist, Impersonator Artist, Installation Artist, Graffiti Artist, Make-up Artist, and on and on.
Do the media pimps ever describe Leonardo as a "Painter Artist?" Or Jascha Heifetz as a "Violin Artist?" Or Laurence Olivier as an "Actor Artist?" Or Franz Kafka as a "Writer Artist?" Or Wallace Stevens as a "Poet Artist?"
Like, I mean, give me a break! There’s some joker out there named Lorenzo Villoresi who’s identified as a Perfume Artist. I’m not saying Lorenzo isn’t a "parfumeur extraordinaire" as one admirer refers to him, but since when does a concocter of toilet water merit the title of Artist? And would you believe there are a cartload of jerks whom nobody has ever heard of like "Nine" and "Boogaloo Shrimp" and "Afrodizziac" and "TOAD" who have been christened "Breakdance Artists," often with such worshipful modifiers as "Famous" and "World Renowned" preceding their status. Sure, a kid who can whirl around on his butt may be entertaining, but an Artist? Please!
Here are some samples culled from New Hampshire’s own beloved Union Leader newspaper:
· "Aerial Silk Artist Svetlana Golobova." Apparently, this broad makes her living by draping herself in billowy silk sheets while hanging upside down from a trapeze and fooling around with the sheets in some fashion or other with her hands and whichever foot is free at the moment.
· "Hula Hoop Artist Alesya Hulevitch." This one’s spent her childhood perfecting the art of rotating ten hula hoops at once around various segments of her anatomy. I used to have a cat named Mousse who could do fabulous contortions if you dangled a slice of nova over his nose, but I never thought of him as a Nova Artist.
· "Elvis Tribute Artist Dave Robinson." This asshole, who looks like something out of Madame Tussaud's Waxworks, has reached his tiny pinnacle of artistic accomplishment by spending his parents’ money on a form-fitting silver jumpsuit and paying a beauty salon worker to tease his locks into a foot-high pompadour.
And by all means, let’s not forget those twin paragons of Modern Art, the great Karen Finley and the even greater Spencer Tunick.
Karen’s contribution to the wide world of aesthetics consists of stripping herself bare-ass naked before an emotionally disturbed audience of New York City art critics, feminists, and homosexuals, then sousing herself with foodstuffs (chocolate, honey, molten ice cream sandwiches) followed, occasionally, by a candied yam or two smeared in and about her privates. For this stunning rebuke of all things bourgeois and Y-chromosomed, she has been immortalized as the "Chocolate-Covered Queen of Candied Yams Up Her Butt Performance Artist,"
Spencer’s world-famous accomplishments are many (but unvarious). All involve his thrilling knack for assembling and photographing masses of naked live human flesh (unlike our German friends talent for creating, assembling, and photographing masses of dead naked human flesh). His crowning achievement, which earned him a place in the Guinness Book of Records if not the Louvre and established a new standard for crap, was his amassing of 18,000-odd nude Mexicans, many of them overweight and flabby, for a Mexico City photo-op. (Let’s hope not too many of them needed to urinate during the event.) Small wonder he has earned the coveted title "America’s Leading Dickhead and Douchebag Photographer Artist." (He’s currently being vetted by Thorbjørn Jagland for the 2010 Nobel Prize in Shit-Art. There’s a slight delay while Thorbjørn makes sure he’s a card-carrying Maoist revolutionary.)
It all makes me long for the good old days of Christo, the famous Landscape Draping Artist; his wife Jeanne-Claude, the almost-as-famous Money-Raising Self-Promoting Bitch Artist; Tupac Shakur, the prominent Rap, Rape, and Drive-By-Shooting Victim Artist; Terrell Owens, the Wide Receiver Who Got Slammed Down Mocking the Dallas Cowboy Logo Artist; Quasimodo, the Deaf Parisian Bell-Ringing Hunchback Artist; and John Belushi and Chris Farley, the Beloved Dead Comedians Who Choked on Their Own Puke After Speedballing Artists.
Ah well. As my friend John Pope of Reader’s Digest used to say to me after a martini or two, "Norman, don’t get your balls in an uproar."
Norm Mack, Blog Artist, Peterborough, NH, dog@myfairpoint.net
I’m sick, sick (and tired, tired, to complete the cliché) of every no-talent exhibitionist being labeled an "Artist" by the lemmings who man America’s media ramparts and call themselves reporters.
I think you know what I mean — Rap Artist, Performance Artist, Hip-Hop Artist, Jazz artist, Keyboard Artist, Impersonator Artist, Installation Artist, Graffiti Artist, Make-up Artist, and on and on.
Do the media pimps ever describe Leonardo as a "Painter Artist?" Or Jascha Heifetz as a "Violin Artist?" Or Laurence Olivier as an "Actor Artist?" Or Franz Kafka as a "Writer Artist?" Or Wallace Stevens as a "Poet Artist?"
Like, I mean, give me a break! There’s some joker out there named Lorenzo Villoresi who’s identified as a Perfume Artist. I’m not saying Lorenzo isn’t a "parfumeur extraordinaire" as one admirer refers to him, but since when does a concocter of toilet water merit the title of Artist? And would you believe there are a cartload of jerks whom nobody has ever heard of like "Nine" and "Boogaloo Shrimp" and "Afrodizziac" and "TOAD" who have been christened "Breakdance Artists," often with such worshipful modifiers as "Famous" and "World Renowned" preceding their status. Sure, a kid who can whirl around on his butt may be entertaining, but an Artist? Please!
Here are some samples culled from New Hampshire’s own beloved Union Leader newspaper:
· "Aerial Silk Artist Svetlana Golobova." Apparently, this broad makes her living by draping herself in billowy silk sheets while hanging upside down from a trapeze and fooling around with the sheets in some fashion or other with her hands and whichever foot is free at the moment.
· "Hula Hoop Artist Alesya Hulevitch." This one’s spent her childhood perfecting the art of rotating ten hula hoops at once around various segments of her anatomy. I used to have a cat named Mousse who could do fabulous contortions if you dangled a slice of nova over his nose, but I never thought of him as a Nova Artist.
· "Elvis Tribute Artist Dave Robinson." This asshole, who looks like something out of Madame Tussaud's Waxworks, has reached his tiny pinnacle of artistic accomplishment by spending his parents’ money on a form-fitting silver jumpsuit and paying a beauty salon worker to tease his locks into a foot-high pompadour.
And by all means, let’s not forget those twin paragons of Modern Art, the great Karen Finley and the even greater Spencer Tunick.
Karen’s contribution to the wide world of aesthetics consists of stripping herself bare-ass naked before an emotionally disturbed audience of New York City art critics, feminists, and homosexuals, then sousing herself with foodstuffs (chocolate, honey, molten ice cream sandwiches) followed, occasionally, by a candied yam or two smeared in and about her privates. For this stunning rebuke of all things bourgeois and Y-chromosomed, she has been immortalized as the "Chocolate-Covered Queen of Candied Yams Up Her Butt Performance Artist,"
Spencer’s world-famous accomplishments are many (but unvarious). All involve his thrilling knack for assembling and photographing masses of naked live human flesh (unlike our German friends talent for creating, assembling, and photographing masses of dead naked human flesh). His crowning achievement, which earned him a place in the Guinness Book of Records if not the Louvre and established a new standard for crap, was his amassing of 18,000-odd nude Mexicans, many of them overweight and flabby, for a Mexico City photo-op. (Let’s hope not too many of them needed to urinate during the event.) Small wonder he has earned the coveted title "America’s Leading Dickhead and Douchebag Photographer Artist." (He’s currently being vetted by Thorbjørn Jagland for the 2010 Nobel Prize in Shit-Art. There’s a slight delay while Thorbjørn makes sure he’s a card-carrying Maoist revolutionary.)
It all makes me long for the good old days of Christo, the famous Landscape Draping Artist; his wife Jeanne-Claude, the almost-as-famous Money-Raising Self-Promoting Bitch Artist; Tupac Shakur, the prominent Rap, Rape, and Drive-By-Shooting Victim Artist; Terrell Owens, the Wide Receiver Who Got Slammed Down Mocking the Dallas Cowboy Logo Artist; Quasimodo, the Deaf Parisian Bell-Ringing Hunchback Artist; and John Belushi and Chris Farley, the Beloved Dead Comedians Who Choked on Their Own Puke After Speedballing Artists.
Ah well. As my friend John Pope of Reader’s Digest used to say to me after a martini or two, "Norman, don’t get your balls in an uproar."
Norm Mack, Blog Artist, Peterborough, NH, dog@myfairpoint.net
Posted by dome of glass at 11/13/2009 11:36 AM 
Categories: Social Commentary, Media, Humor, Art
Tags: derision anger
Categories: Social Commentary, Media, Humor, Art
Tags: derision anger
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