Modern Art II

If there's anything the contemporary art world needs more of, it's Eurotrash. That's why my visit to P.S.1 in Queens was so disappointing: on a typical day, New York's Eurotrash community is too busy primping each other in dim Spring Street bars to head out to Long Island City, and I can sit peacefully in James Turrell's Meeting room or wander the museum's labyrinthine stairwells without running into a single lanky Cooper Union-grad with girly hair and girly glasses yammering about his opening in Barcelona next week. But no such luck yesterday; it was the International Visiting Artists Open Studio Day, and the place was a beehive swarming with Eurotrash and their unfiltered cigarette smoke.

You know, I was just thinking maybe I'm miffed that these pompous, driveling, wispy artist-types seem to have the social skills that I lack, and yet they remain bereft of the shame and puerile haplessness that oozes out of me. Or maybe the art community is just a clique of self-important bastards who wouldn't know bad art if it sat on them. Either way.

So, in this spirit of contempt, I'd like to propose my new rules for art galleries:

1. Kids under eight pay triple. Just because the damn thing came out of your body doesn't mean it's cute, and it certainly doesn't mean I want to hear the damn thing screaming. Besides which, what the hell is a little kid going to get out of an art museum anyway, besides possible post-expressionism trauma. If you wanna fuck your kid up for life, read the little pain in the neck Naked Lunch as a bedtime story.


2. No making out inside the installations. This one ought to be obvious, but alas, there were a few young members of the Eurotrash community who figured that just because Justin Lowe's otherwise evocative installation had plush cushions and a thick rug lining the floor, it was an ideal spot for a heavy-petting session. As a corollary to this rule, if you're not allowed to take photographs there, you're not allowed to make out there, either. In fact, how about we make this one really simple: until I'm getting some, no making out, anywhere, anytime, with anyone. Period.


3. No more twenty-minute video pieces where every one of the last 1,196 seconds is exactly the same as the first four. We can find better uses for celluloid than this, can't we?


4. If I can make it, and I can't understand why it's hanging in a museum, then it doesn't belong in a museum. This includes lame conceptual art, like Jin-Hua Shi's going around Manhattan measuring the lengths of things with a pair of dirty underwear, as well as color fields, proto-expressionism, and random scribble on canvas. And don't try telling me that you're "trying to break the rules of light and shadow, tenebrity and chiaroscuro" or you're "exploring the disconnect between 'reality' versus reality-no-quotes." Honestly, you're just embarrassing yourself, and you're not fooling anyone. Except already brain-damaged art critics.
   
5. Just because it's a drawing of people doing it, doesn't make it art. At least Playboy pretends to have content.