An Art Journey From Good to Worse

You know when you're searching for one thing on the internet and it just leads down a rabbit hole of weird and interesting discovery? This happens to me sometimes and I end up with about 20 windows open with pages of things I want to know more about.
The other day I saw a painting by Franz von Stuck that reminded me of Edvard Munch's Madonna and I wanted to know more about him.



This led me to looking up pictures of paintings by von Stuck and a bunch of other artists listed on the Wikipedia page for Symbolism, most of whom, I'm guessing, people who actually took art history or painting classes probably know about. To be brief and not list all the ones I thought were super-cool I'll just say that I enjoyed almost all the art that I ended up looking at. Since I know fuckall about visual art I'm not even sure how legitimate Symbolism is as a term to classify a type of painting (I mean, the Wikipedia page is big and all, but symbolism is kind of a broad term, isn't it?) so I've just decided that it means paintings with things I like in them like snakes eating horses, whimsical boats and leapord people.

In looking into the work of Félicien Rops, one of the few painters I'd heard of in the list, on google image search I ran across the work of Stu Mead. I discovered that Mr. Mead is a very controversial artist, mainly because he's an open pedophile and all of his work basically sexualizes little girls (as a quick spin on his Myspace page will demonstrate). The controversy drummed up by his paintings and the long conversation about objectification in art it invites is kind of beside the point, I think. The overall effect of looking at his paintings, to me, was that of looking at somebody's homemade pornography, meaning that my feelings of revulsion were quickly overwhelmed with feelings of boredom. Just because it plays with taboos and you put it on a canvas doesn't mean it's any more interesting than some lonely guy's hand-drawn Futurama porn. (On a side note, there was a kid on my pre-season soccer trip in junior year of high school who got caught looking at Futurama porn on the internet. That's called tragi-comedy).

Anyways, apparently there's a book called Apocalypse Culture II that contains an article about Stu Mead and other artists who are controversial. The article (which, always being curious about controversy in art, I found on the internet) is written with a tone that I've come to be familiar with in reading about things of this nature in books of this nature. It's the reverential, sanctimonious tone of someone who came to a freakshow, decided to stay there and has lost sight of the reasons it was billed as a freakshow in the first place. The taboo becomes normal when you make it your sole focus. The rest of the world just doesn't get Stu Mead and I don't get why - isn't it cool how controversial this is? asks the writer, a self described "musician (Boy from Brazil), transformist, eroticist and a self-taught art aficionado." Ugh, ugh and ugh. Oh man, you're into Nazis too? Wild! Who could've guessed??

Speaking of which, the article lead to a couple of other artists, notably Blalla Hallmann, who apparently hates the US, the Vatican, Nazis and consumer greed, yet he is obsessed with making paintings about them. It all begins to stink of something deranged and hypocritical pretty soon. But I'll let the eroticist and self-taught art aficionado tell it:

"Blalla despised the Art world, whose stars, Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke and Josef Beuys were seen as brown-nosing valets to the rich. Remarking that every paintings these guys were selling was money he wasn’t making, Blalla believed that the aforementioned artists were stealing from him."

I wonder why the American art world isn't lining up to throw money at paintings accusing them of being greedy, Nazi bastards from someone who bills himself as "the ambassador of hate?" And I wonder why this criticism is coming from someone who sounds like a greedy, misanthropic bastard himself? The questions just pile up.



All that said, I actually thought Hallmann's paintings were pretty cool. His schtick worked for me, partly because I think his composition and style are neat. He sounds like a paranoid lunatic and thoroughly unpleasant person who, like Stu Mead, has found that he can pay bills just by selling his obsessions to a small niche of the public that like having their buttons pushed.

All this leads to a collective of artists that call themselves Unpop, whom I spent more time looking into than they deserve. The other artist mentioned in the article above was a woman called Beth Love, whose paintings I think are pretty interesting, if undeniably disturbing.



Unfortunately, she and the rest of Unpop seem like pretty foul people. While I like her work, all the other art on display was terrible in thought and execution. More importantly, the whole thing reeks of that kid from Ghost World - you know, the one who thinks he's hot, dangerous shit because he has a zine that focuses on serial killers and Nazis and torture and freaks and yadda yadda (he also publishes pornographic art by a pedophile who creates computer images of little girls because he can't have the real thing. Hmmm...). Unpop is all about offensive jokes under the guise of art and, like the loner in your art class with a trench coat, they're rebelling against you so they're impervious to criticism. They don't care what you think, neuter! You just can't handle Unpop!



It all pisses me off because I do fall for real artists who take the risks that the Unpop people think they're taking. The problem is that there's a thin tightrope between the Scylla of self-rightous, self-aware envelope-pushing and the Charybdis of pure, stupid exploitation. What most of Unpop doesn't realize (and would have you believe that they don't care) is that shitty paintings of golliwogs and screenprints of Joseph Goebbels are useless to the world at large. Offending the public in and of itself is not art (or at least not good art) because after the initial shock and revulsion there's nothing really to think about. It's more offensive because bandying about racist or misogynistic imagery just to get a reaction gives artists who can incorporate those images into something thoughtful and meaningful a bad name. It makes it harder to defend artists who aren't afraid to push boundaries as not just exploitation. Why even give Kara Walker a second look?
And, really, what is uglier than a group of aging white males from privileged backgrounds making rape and race jokes to each other, especially with the sanctimonious idea that they are seeing the world in it's true colors and everyone else is just too diluted or dumb to agree. Man, it makes me angry!

What's the antidote? What happens when we take paintings that deal with hot-button issues off the table? The answer may surprise you: