offensive art | Exile on Pain Street

Sitting through a boring movie doesn’t mean you’ll never watch another movie again. Hearing a tedious piece of music won’t ruin music for you. A dull comedian won’t prevent you from laughing next week. But one insufferable play can keep you from ever wanting to go to the theater again. Likewise, one banal art exhibit can scar you for life. Do you find that to be so?

I had a big laugh last May when this sink by “artist” Robert Gober sold at a Christie’s contemporary art auction for $4,197,000.

I’d never heard of this guy and thought the piece suffered from naked-emperor syndrome. This is the type of junk that alienates people from contemporary art. It’s a $4.2M joke played on the buyer. I’d forgotten all about the damn thing until I walked into the Museum of Modern Art and saw a career retrospective of Gober’s work.

I did a quick breath meditation and cleared my mind of all preconceived notions and previous judgments. I went in fresh. A white, blank slate.

I found the work so pretentious and uninspiring that I’m angry that my time was wasted. I’m getting all worked up again typing this. I want to take the MoMA curators and shake them. What do they see in this crap? C’mon down to the famous art museum and pay $25 to see a leg sticking out of a wall.

Or a leg sticking out of the wall with an anchor hanging from it.

Or a realistic, anatomically detailed, paraffin torso…

…with a music score written across his ass. What is this? It’s NOTHING.

I don’t get it. I don’t want to get it. I don’t want to be one of those precious deep thinkers who find metaphorical mystery in bundles of newspapers stacked in a corner. I guffawed at this because I’ve got the exact same installation in my garage.

Remember the $4 million sink? You want more? We got more! We got sinks with running water.

Sinks filling a room. (With bundles of newspaper. Fancy. Introspective.)

Giant sinks. Sinks within sinks.

Apparently, he went through a wallpaper phase. Here, we have a room covered with images of penises and vaginas. Aren’t you shocked?! Tee-hee. I guess I can’t bring the kiddies to this one.

The next room was covered with wallpaper containing images of a lynching while whitey-white man sleeps peacefully. Ooh. I feel so guilty.

The perimeter of the room is ringed with bags of cat litter for NO APPARENT REASON.

This was the one piece I liked. Even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while. A suitcase sits on the gallery floor.

Look inside and you’ll find a sewer grate.

Below the grate you’ll see that they’ve actually cut a hole in the gallery floor. A tabloid scene is below. The feet of a man standing in a pond holding a child. It’s a big surprise and the only thing I saw that showed a modicum of imagination.

I don’t need pretty pictures. Heaven knows those Francis Bacon smears are fairly horrific but I enjoy them. And I like pop art. It’s simple but fun. This stuff has no admirable qualities that I can detect. I am astonished at its popularity. MoMA owes me one free admission, those bastards.

Suppose someone is new to the art world and wants to expand their horizons. They walk into MoMA and see this crap. What are the odds that person will ever bother with art again? Especially contemporary art? On the other hand, they laughed at Degas for painting dancers who were tying their shoes and reading newspapers instead of dancing. What do I know?

Step aside, junior, and let some contemporary artists with vision and a fertile imagination

show you

how it’s done.

As always, feel free to disagree.

Typically, I don’t do back-to-back auction posts but there are extenuating circumstances. Some of the galleries at Christie’s were vacated after an auction last week so they put more pieces on display from this week’s Post-War and Contemporary Art auction. Here are a few more high (low?) lights and one piece that I found deeply offensive and depressing.

This frivolity is by Maurizio Cattelan.

Frank and Jamie. $1,500,000–2,500,000
Sold for $965,000. What a deal!

This was good for a laugh but, again, I have to wonder about the practicality of a piece like this. Where would you put it? In the foyer? The estimate may provide the biggest laugh.

But this isn’t the one that offended me.

This beauty is by British bad boy (no, not Banksy) Damian Hirst

Inviolability. $900,000–1,200,000
Sold for $1,205,000

I saw one of these in the Cleveland Museum of Art over the summer. A security guard yelled at me for taking a picture of it. You know what is is made of, don’t you? Butterfly wings.

Thousands and thousands of butterfly wings. He breeds them specifically for these pieces. Here’s the center.

The materials used are listed as “…butterflies and household gloss on canvas mounted on panel.” Here’s another piece that’s smaller.

Psalm 28: Ad Te, Domine. $150,000–200,000
Sold for $305,000

And the detail.

They’re beautiful but cruel. Yet, they didn’t offended me.

This sculpture is by Antony Gormley and I loved it.

Domain LXVI. $400,000–600,000
Sold for $545,000

There’s something about the way it stood in a pool of light and glistened when you walked by that really worked for me. It somehow manages the trick of being both slight and powerful at the same time. Obviously, this isn’t the one that offended me.

I was offended by this.

3-Meter Girl. $2,000,000–3,000,000
DID NOT SELL. Of course, it didn’t.

Horrible. This ugly objectification of women is courtesy of Takashi Murakami. Do you know how you’re supposed to respect other cultures and not criticize what they might consider art? That it’s okay to not like something, but to condemn is it in poor taste? Well, in the words of Le Clown, fuck that noise. Can anyone tell me what’s wrong with Japanese men? They seem to have a proclivity towards sex-up little girls. Do they feel threatened and intimidated by adult women?

All I kept thinking was that I’ve got two beautiful daughters at home and how, no matter what age, I wouldn’t want them looking at this. I wondered what it would do to their body image and self esteem.

Or, do I just need to lighten up? Go ahead. You can tell me. I can take it. I do like how this last photo came out, though. Good composition and shadowing.