time to confess- i hate conceptual art.  performance art chokes me.  there.  it is the truth.

and i believe it is time we jailbreak art from the deep confines galleries, dealers and critics are keeping it.

art is no longer in the hands of artists– artists are a commodity manipulated by their brokers in chelsea, soho, basel, armory, wherever…  insider trading, stock manipulation, short-sells, fraudulent investment instruments and other assorted deceit is more rampant in the art market than any other stock market.  the art world needs its own rule 10b-5.

the dealers, gallery owners and the critics are the gordon gekko’s of the art world.  and the artists, especially contemporary artists are its bluestar airlines…

bear in mind, i am making the analogy between the artist and the bluestar airlines– not the actual pieces of art and bluestar.   art is not the commodity anymore– even that was somewhat noble.  artists are the commodity in 21st century art.

and it is a major industry.  when we talk about the “art market”, we are really talking about a high dollars and high stakes industry.

nowhere the deceit is more obvious than conceptual and performance art…

take this week’s times for instance– there is a puff piece, i am sure considered to be serious art criticism to be taken to the bank by most times readers, on the MOMA retrospective of sanja ivekovic.  a conceptual and performance artist.  samples of her work “sweet violence” makes me wanna puke in anger…

art is not art, or should not be art, when you need to read three paragraphs of very smal print to “get it”.  i sincerely believe this.

unfortunately conceptual and performance art comes with a verbal explanation thicker and more dense than most cellphone user’s manuals.  that’s the only way it makes sense.  that ain’t right…

and art doesn’t have to make sense.  it needs to move.  it may please you, it may piss you off.  but it moves you.  conceptual art will not move you without reading the user’s manual…

art doesn’t have to be a statement, but sometimes it is.  it can be for its sake or the greater good.  i don’t give a flying fuck either way.  but i shouldn’t need to read a treatise to “get it”…  if i can’t get it by seeing or experiencing it, it ain’t art…

“those who can’t do teach” goes the old cliche.  they teach and preach about the very thing they can’t do…  same with conceptual and performance artists: those who can’t do become conceptual and performance artists…

conceptual and performance artists are no different than professor and lecturers: they preach and tirade about what they simply can’t do.  narrate the thing they don’t have the tools, skills or creativity to express as art…

akin to a bad literature teacher, they ruin art for us…  i had my share of bad literature teachers (though i had a few who were amazing)…  couple of them managed to ruin poetry for me, by dissecting beautiful poems they really did not get according to the textbook dissection charts…  monotonously chanting essays about each and every word of the poem instead of letting each one of us feel its music, its movement…

that’s precisely what conceptual and performance artists are doing right now and thanks to the stockbrokers of the art world, its late night tv sellers, we eat it all up…

a hit is a hit and a piece of shit is a piece of shit.  no longer true.  if a piece of shit has a good power dealer behind it, it becomes the next big thing, selling for millions.  as if warhol wasn’t bad enough..  enough already.

yeah, hate me if you must, but my summons are addressed to the grave of warhol– pollock and rothko contributed but warhol was the one who pulled the trigger and should be tried for crimes against humanity posthumously…  he rolled downhill the snowball which became this tragic avalanche, transforming the dipshit artist wannabe with charisma to the commodity it is today– a sick cult of personality…

that’s why i only respect so few modern day artists and that is why conceptual and performance art chokes me.  that’s why i like outsider and street art.  simply because they’re outsiders, not in the machine yet.  that’s why i like banksy, even though the stockbrokers of the art market are trying to transform his ass to a commodity as well– and they’re about to succeed.

that’s why “exit through the giftshop” and “f is for fake” makes so much sense to me, summarizing what i just ranted about clearly and concisely, outing the artist as a commodity and the cults of personality…

time to say a big fuck you to all those conceptual and performance artists with their teary, soulful eyes, their exemplary and trying life stories, their fake political correctness, or, worse, if that is the trend that rocks their boat, their pseudo political un-correctness…  and their bullshit statements and tirades about the things they can’t express without subtitles and treatises…

they sense and know what is sellable and they package and offer it without any substance or any shame…  then an art stockbroker takes them under her wings and tells them what else is sellable…  or whether they should continue recycling the same bullshit…  with critics and monographs and A-4 sized descriptive labels tagged to their works, telling us what we should feel, sense or understand in the presence of this particular piece of shit…

time to jailbreak art from its confines.  time to take it out of basel, armory and the late, late nights of cocaine and piss-weak-vodka laced modern day studio 54s, and unleash it on humanity once again…