I will never forget the moment I saw it: I was wandering the top floor of the Museum of Modern Art somewhat aimlessly. I could sense the encroaching, restless feeling one gets after spending enough time in a museum to become bored—but not long enough for others to proclaim it an “enriching experience”—creeping in around the corners of my brain as I gazed at a life-size installation of a dishwasher interior stacked with brightly colored plastic dishes and plaster crumbs affixed; a penis replica constructed from broken egg shells and dyed with bald eagle sperm; a canvas depicting four large dots, all black, but with varying shades of gray for their backgrounds. I was finding it all rather underwhelming, but had not yet become outraged at any particular pretense…and then…there it was, lurking in prominence. Red Square, Slightly Rounded. I don’t remember the name of the (and I use this term VERY loosely) artist, nor can I locate it on the internet, but the painting has burned itself into an unflattering subdivision of my memory, and I have placed an approximation of the painting (which took me all of about four minutes to make, btw) to the left of this article. Look at its sad retardedness. How I hate it.

I was incensed to find such useless trickery in one of the world’s most established and respected museums. Just what the hell was MoMA playing at, anyway? Were they TRYING to make me feel stupid? Was it purposeful resentment of the normal man that made them hang in a position of high repute a painting that has no relative merit to the untrained eye? Of course, several friends who think themselves very erudite tried to repeatedly explain to me how, even though I might not see the genius, it is extraordinarily important that someone had painted this painting, even if its actual artistic merit is meager. In other words, to be clever enough to point out that this can be art is more important than it being “good” art. I guess then that we could say, by comparison, that although we might hate discovering the nutritionally-impaired Hot Pocket in our grocer’s freezer, it is nonetheless important to our society that somebody somewhere decided to manufacture it, and then market these pastry-covered floor sweepings into our mouths. Well, god bless you, Nestlé! Thank the heavens for you!

I think it’s all a scam, and the artist in this instance scoffed all the way to the bank as he cashed the check given to him by the MoMA man in the hounds tooth-jacket, with his hand on his chin, stroking his moustache, squinting his eyes, and saying over and over, “Hmmmm…” and “Ahhhh…” and “Oh, yes, yes, of course, of course”!

Such is the struggle that the average person has with Modern Art. Shame on you, average person! Don’t you realize how much of an asshole Jackson Pollock was? That means he was good! Artist + Asshole = Oh, yes, yes, of course, of course! Get it straight, you lousy world full of simpletons.

Jackson Pollock. Are you as confused about this cat as me? Look, I get what all of you knowledgeable bad asses are saying. I’m not completely daft. The guy did his dribbling shits thing all over the canvas with some vague shapes occasionally barfed out for the sporadic “wow!” factor, and it’s all about the textures, and it was oh so stream-of-consciousness, and sure, it might look great above your couch as long as the colors don’t clash abhorrently, but why are we giving such a small achievement any more than footnote status in the world of American art? And the critics will of course drag the Norman Rockwell’s down off the wall, snap them in two, pull down their critic drawers and basically crap all over them—and what do I know except that my Grandma freaking LOVED Norman’s work—but hey, at least he was DOING something, right? He could create something that we cannot perform ourselves—and a lot of it was cheesy, but much of it was not, and at least it varied, and had content, and could make me think—even if the thought was simply, “wow, boy scouts are fucking DUMB”.

But as far as I can tell, much of Jackson Pollock’s work is merely a lot of drunken repetition. There is more to the world than simply colors and shapes. There is also love, hate, pain, hope, and ideas—and Pollock seems to come up short in all that kind of crap. With this in mind, doesn’t his jazzy dribble seem overly cynical? This much I do know: the world has always loved a guy that drinks too much, smokes too much, and fucks too much.

Click here to see some much cooler shit than Pollock ever dreamed of.

PS and BTW—Saw this quote in the Times today, and it made me wants ta’ barf. It’s the whole reason behind today’s topic, as a matter of fact:

He flashed a slide of Ellsworth Kelly’s “Study for Colors for a Large Wall” on the screen, and the audience couldn’t help but perk to attention. The checkerboard painting of 64 black, white and colored squares was so whimsically subtle, so poised and propulsive. We drank it in greedily, we scanned every part of it, we loved it, we owned it…

Gross. Read the whole article by clicking here. It’s about something.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 at 2:49 pm and is filed under Chronicles, The Soapbox. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.