File spoon-archives/avant-garde.archive/avant-garde_2002/avant-garde.0209, message 24


Date: Wed, 04 Sep 2002 13:05:16 -0700
From: John Young <jya-AT-pipeline.com>
Subject: Re: RHIZOME_RAW: "the art advances and the artisan recedes"


My take on Brad's dictum is "command" in which the artist obeys
an order to create beauty. Those who can do that are world class
artists. If you can't produce art on command you are a nobody,
a failed artist who showed youthful promise, a wannabe cynic
who just couldn't handle commercial success, a misfit with only
one boring note to play, a dead spark who got about 15 secnds and
blew it, an inarticulate rude dinner companion with bad breath,
never to be a member of the Century Club or the Academy of
Artists and Belle Lettrists, not even worthy of a five-and-dime
Guggenhein, grown dismissably old before aging gracefully
on a MacArthur or as a near-miss Poet Laureate, shit not even
worth bailing out of misery with a raggedy ass retrospective at
a downtown roach motel where candy-haired youngsters puke
into the hard-wrought sculpture not recognized as once cutting
edge sublime by two people, the artist's fucked over bedmate
and the one family member who paid the artist to not come
home reeking of hatful condescencion -- by this is meant an
artist sans adjective, nor slathered head to toe in derivative 
promotional goo, especially not the self-splattered acoutured,
scowlingly withered to thricely undeserved low esteem.

I also took Brad to mean that the capability of producing beauty 
on command is no excuse for being a world class shit, though
those attributes certainly appear inseparable as if one and
one is zero.




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