The death of art

By Drew Millard

Everywhere I look at Governor’s School, there are art students, with their tortured souls, unique personal quirks, and realizations that in ten years, they’ll be penniless. These people love art so darned much, and it’s going to break their little sensitive hearts when they read what I have to say. Care to know why? Because I hate art.

Art is dead. For those of you keeping score, my vendetta against art begins now.

People like to claim that art is pain, but in my opinion, art is just a lazy person’s way of avoiding a real job. Now I know that I’ve made an exaggerated, bold (and undeniably ignorant) assertion, but undeniably, the concept of art oozes pretension and exclusion.

My thesis statement, for those looking for more concrete arguments than generalizations, goes something like this: People use the term “art” as a blanket statement to cover anything so perplexingly avant-garde that it becomes boring, from urinals to wheels on chairs to a photo of pandas defecating on the Burmese flag. Proponents of this type of art stress the importance of appreciation; “appreciation,” if I may opine, is code for “rationalization.”

Suppose I cut out the corner of my bed with a chainsaw and proclaim it ART. Now suppose you look at my art, and say that it’s no good. I can retort by simply saying that you don’t appreciate its esoteric nature inherent in the underlying metaphor of the motivation behind the art, and are therefore not intelligent enough to truly understand my tortured soul. This happens every day in the world, and it seems that the people who submit corners of beds are winning the argument more and more often.

And don’t get me started on performance art. Essentially, the claim is that anything can be performance art, as long as it is performed and has a message that should be understood by the viewer. When Yoko Ono debuted “Cut Piece” — a piece of performance art that essentially involved her cutting off all of her clothes with scissors — in 1965, that wasn’t art. It was a striptease. There is no way, other than through the consumption of very powerful drugs, that a woman, however homely and/or untrustworthy, disrobing in front of a crowd could be construed as anything other than this. And yet people paid to see this woman get naked in the name of art, and astonishingly, they didn’t throw dollar bills at her. I don’t know what her stated message was. I don’t think it matters, because she ended up with John Lennon and broke up the Beatles.

There once was a time when art had standards. If da Vinci ever turned in a painting of blue, naked, deformed women like Picasso did, they’d send him out on his ear until he could display something that showed some effort. The Last Supper. Now that’s a painting I’d buy. A little expensive, but still.

But now, it seems that society has grown bored with aesthetic perfection. These days, we feel compelled to look to the more abstract notions of human thought. Artists are expected not just to pour paint onto their canvas, but to pour their souls as well. Brush strokes now represent suppressed anger. When art wasn’t insane, brush strokes represented the fact that the artist was using a paintbrush and not, say, a Magic Marker.

I’m not calling for a cessation of all artistic activity, but I am calling for a return to artistic design. I want art to recall to the days when buying a piece of art meant buying something beautiful. I want the obvious brilliance of artists focused towards improving Art, not undercutting itself through unintentional self-parody.

I guess what I’m really saying is that I’m probably the least-cultured person at Governor’s School East, and kind of proud of it.