Darling Charlie! Pretty Lady is so grateful! Here she had been meaning and meaning to write a pretty little screed one day, all about thrilling, difficult topics like Spite and Ego, and just never getting around to it. And Charlie-poo goes and provides the perfect Timely Example! Oh, Pretty Lady could just kiss him.
What’s "fun" about the art blogs is how conformist, reactionary, redundant and self-referential they are, the Sam Brownbacks of the art world. Tyler Green sucks up to every curator on the planet, and I wish him well on his world tour of speaking engagements at obscure museums, cashing his money orders at the bus station.
Have you ever been to blogger Ed Winkleman’s gallery on 27th Street? I hear there is a valuable prize awaiting the first recorded visitor: you get to meet Dinky Winky in the flesh or at least register for a random drawing to win email privileges. Militant Art Bitch is the Elizabeth Dole of the fogosphere, a kind of bastard outta Carolina, and ArtFagCity trolls YouTube a little slower than your random teen at the mall. Art critic Regina Hackett has a cute self-portrait on her site, "Sleepless in Seattle." They all refer and link to each other, in a heated circle-jerk, since their primary audience is themselves.
Oh, Charlie-poo, you cutie-pie. You just couldn't have done any better! Ten points!
egregious
--adjective
1) extraordinary in some bad way; glaring; flagrant: an egregious mistake; an egregious liar.
—Synonyms: gross, outrageous, notorious.
spite
--noun
1) a malicious, usually petty, desire to harm, annoy, frustrate, or humiliate another person; bitter ill will; malice.
2) a particular instance of such an attitude or action; grudge.
3) Obsolete something that causes vexation; annoyance.
Poor little Charlie-poo. Pretty Lady's heart just bleeds for him.
For could it not be more obvious, darlings, that Charlie is throwing a tantrum at having been left out of the sandbox? The little tyke is so jealous! So jealous that he has thrown prudence to the winds, and has allowed the essential petty egotism of his character to flail flagrantly in the wind. In his haste and his fury, frothing at the mouth, Charlie-poo has not even bothered to put together a set of cohesive, factual paragraphs, but has lost control of the English language in an orgy of inept name-calling.
Note, darlings, the absence of convincing rhetoric within the Chas-man's periods; the manner in which he utterly fails to provide supporting evidence for his assertions. Verily, it is evident that Finchy-pie is upset about something. Privately, Pretty Lady suspects that Charlie got his knickers in a twist by a comment or fifty made by Edna, once upon a time. This is perfectly understandable. But why is the poor ranting fellow going after everybody else as well?
Well, it seems to Pretty Lady that Charlie feels his territory is threatened. And rightly so. Many of us, including, sadly, Pretty Lady, don't bother to read what Charlie has to say anymore, when we have the perceptive, eclectic, ruminative, insightful words of dear Edward, and Tyler, and Deborah, and Chris and all to peruse.
The fact is, darlings, that Charlie himself has made it perfectly obvious why Art Readers everywhere have decamped and gone on to more erudite climes. Nobody wants to play with a spoiled four-year old, and that is what Charlie's own words have forcefully proclaimed him to be.
And this sordid little incident fully illustrates the truth Pretty Lady has been biting her lips upon, lo these many months; that persons who continuously make unprovoked pejorative comments about others are revealing far more about their own characters, than the characters of the persons they profess to critique. In laymen's terms, this is called 'projection.' Pretty Lady is astonished at the manner that certain persons seem unable to grasp the lack of wisdom in their actions; at times, she is even tempted to consider that the perpetrators of such behavior are Not Very Bright. If they were, surely they would learn to shut the hell up.
4 comments:
My mailbox filled up -- okay, I got four or five messages -- about Mr. Finch and his rant. And, honestly, I think he has a point when he writes "They all refer and link to each other, in a heated circle-jerk, since their primary audience is themselves." He's right. And we all gather at Ed's and play Gookie Cookie.
It seems like other art movements were similar -- think of everyone gathered around Greenberg -- but that doesn't mean this blog thing is a movement, much less a worthwhile one.
I think Finch has a point -- certainly my blog is reactionary, redundant and self-referential. I wouldn't call it conformist, though.
So here's how I read his article: via a blog link.
PL: You hit it.
CR: I can't speak to circle jerks (though there was a hilarious scene in Fellini's Amarcord, remember that?--where all the boys pile into a car and get down to business, but I can be self referential. I posted a comment of my own: "The Italian Lesson" (http://joannemattera.blogspot.com/2007/10/disgustoso.html
An example is Sharon Butler of the "Two Coats of Paint" blog in Connecticut, who is so exhaustive in her summaries of current art writing that someone could start a (short) blog on how Sharon Butler spends her nonexistent spare time.
Ms. Butler's spare time is nonexistent, so obviously (to anyone with grey cells) she has none to spend, but we have it on good authority that if she had any, she would spend it dissing Charlie Finch.
Tyler Green sucks up to every curator on the planet, and I wish him well on his world tour of speaking engagements at obscure museums, cashing his money orders at the bus station.
Hey, it beats trying to find an unoccupied warm grate near the bus station. (Or so it has always seemed to be the case to me.)
Pretty Lady is astonished at the manner that certain persons seem unable to grasp the lack of wisdom in their actions; at times, she is even tempted to consider that the perpetrators of such behavior are Not Very Bright.
There's those grey cells (or the lack thereof) again.
Hey, it beats trying to find an unoccupied warm grate near the bus station.
Indeed, DM, it has always seemed thusly to me as well. I have always found it quite astonishing, the way in which persons who purport to support the creative arts have a knee-jerk negative response when presented with an example of actual creativity.
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