High Art

by Ed the Sock, July 23, 2001

You know something? I hate artists. There’s no more pretentious, preening, self-absorbed people on this planet than those who think they’re tuned in to a higher power than the rest of us. With their stupid berets, and black clothes, and snobby attitudes and inability to make an income.

And worse, I hate how they think that they somehow have license to engage in any form of disgusting behavior and call it art.

I’m not talking about the guy with the lousy paintings of horses on black velvet. I’m talking about the guy who swallows dyes and shoots colours out his anus on a canvas. The one who explodes cow carcasses. The jackass who pees in a bottle and drops in a crucifix. In any other circumstance, these people would be locked up for observation. But slap the word ‘art’ on it, and they are no longer the sick freaks...we’re the blind heathens who can’t see art...all of a sudden, we’re the ones with the problem, not the guy who craps paint.

Like Jesse Power and Anthony Wennekers, two sacks of **** who were arrested last week for skinning a cat alive and capturing it’s slow agony on videotape. If this was two teenage boys, there‘d be a great hue and cry and everyone would blame Marilyn Manson. But no, these two were ah-tists, so this inhuman cruelty has turned into a debate on the nature of art.

These two artistic geniuses say they tortured the cat to death as a performance art piece to demonstrate against the cruelty of the meat industry. That’s like demonstrating against child abuse by bludgeoning the Olsen Twins. But their whacked-out justification for it isn’t the problem, it’s the fact that ANYONE WOULD BUY THIS CRAP!

But they do. Attach the label “art” to something, and for these useless ah-tists, the odious becomes the avant-garde.

Here’s what two art gallery officials had to say about the cat-killers:

“I don’t support the killing of animals for food or art. But whether it is art is not for us to answer.” (Jubal Brown, co-director, ArtSystem)

and

“The actions on the videotapes are abhorrent, immoral and illegal. But it is not our role to be arbiters of what is and what isn’t art.” (Bill Pusztai, chair of student union, Ontario College of Art and Design)

Not to go out on too much of a limb here, but I think that to most of us, I think something that’s abhorrent, immoral and illegal wouldn’t be art, especially when it involves inflicting pain on a living creature. But we’re just lowbrow bourgeoisie, we don’t have the capacity to understand art like these gifted individuals.

Hell, maybe if Paul Bernardo called the videotaped killings of two schoolgirls performance art, people like these two would be demonstrating against the persecution of an artist?

Someone needs to bring these flakes back to the real world. Calling something like this art is like spraying Chanel number 5 on a log of shit.

Who’s role is it then, to answer what is and isn’t art? Who is to be the arbiter?

I’ll tell you who -- me! And anyone else who hasn’t stewed their brain with too many lattes! Art can’t be a smokescreen used by cowards to make their psychoses seem acceptable. There is right and there is wrong. Torture, whether it’s to a political prisoner in Central America or a cat in Toronto, is wrong. Sure, art is sometimes about suffering, but it should be the suffering of the artist and those who have to look at their crappy output, not the subject.

True, not all artists are this screwed-up. There are a number who have come out against the killers and urged a boycott of the ArtSystem gallery - who, by the way, are still considering a show of the cat-killer’s work in August. Maybe you too can join in the debate within the arts community. You can find said artists right next to the ac-tors slinging java at Starbucks and stocking shelves at Wal-Mart. Try to catch them in-between clean-ups in aisle five.

And boycott ArtSystem, the student union art gallery of the Ontario College of Art and Design.

I’m Ed the Sock.