the start of summer
I met my friend Mika this afternoon (for the second time this year) and was really looking forward to checking out a current Araki exhibition. Everything was going well until an American Art Guy walked in the gallery.
Loudly and agressively ask what I think of the exhibition surrounding us BUT before you wait for my answer crudely state your own feelings by shaking your right hand in a loose and suggestive manner to further express your opinion that you are verbally expressing.
Now say that the work “is a total rip off of ____________”(obscure/unknown/close friend photographer) and then ask if I have heard of this person. Then after I say no, quickly and audibly SIGH and be an jerk. Keep being an jerk by making huge sweeping genrealizations about an artist (in this case, Araki), going so far as to tell me what Araki thinks about-
no, wait.
This is lame. Let me start over.
This guy came up to me and interrupted my conversation with a good friend today in a gallery. He was crude, though he seemed to have thought he was just the smartest guy ever. The demonstration of his wildy overpowering artistic sense relied heavily on name dropping and slaming everything about the photos on the walls (except one, because the girl was not in the center of the photo).
He also slammed everything about Araki, Nebraska (!), or any photographer that Mika or I liked. He mentioned several times, over and over about how he went to Yale and how tough their photo program is at Yale and how Yale produces the best photographers in the world and how so and so the famous photographer/teacher made other famous photographers cry at Yale and on and on.
In between the Yale mentioning and Araki disses and statements of near hate (or arrogant dismissal!) for just about any other photographer, he was sure to keep doing this thing where if I made any sort of counterpoint or civil agreement to something he said he would drop about 3 or 4 names of photographers (obscure/unknown/close friend ones) that were just AMAZING and make better work than anything I have ever seen. But for some reason neither I nor Mika (a photo grad student in Tokyo) had ever heard of any of them. To which he would then scoff at the fact that we had never heard of them. But then add that “only half their work is good” or, “Their old stuff was so much better than the shit they do now”.
He called a lot of other famous photographers sell-outs, brought in the ol’ McDonald’s hamburgers analogy in two versions- the one that says they dictate popular understanding of hamburgers even with a crappy product, and also the one that says some people eat these hamburgers and secretly enjoy them like smart folk (like him?) who should know better still can like bad art but not anything by Araki.
He tossed in another few “zingers” that seemed to have been recalled from rote memory. It was embarrassing, like when the topic of our (?) discussion just barely fit the smug art critic one-liner he so badly wanted to use. (”Well… Ninagawa Mika- you know, she’s got the best career money can buy! hunh? right? Money can buy”. An actual quote.)
Congratulations guy with stringy long hair! You totally pissed me off.
I AM SO GLAD WE DID NOT TALK ABOUT MUSIC as I have heard of Music Guys like him.
I could have gone toe to toe with the Art Talk, but there was not enough room for two loud idiots in that, or any gallery. Actually, my whole life I have gone along with being “nice”. And I was today. “Curt” is probably the better word though. Was it worth the effort it would take to try and argue with someone who is that much of a cliche themselves? Even at the very moment he is haranguing the art surrounding us on the walls as just being a cliche?
If I am upset or mad or in complete disagreement with everything that comes out of your mouth, I won’t say so. I will let you keep talking. I am not going to “fight” out competing artistic theories and try to win. Don’t get me wrong, I am all for thoughful discussion on art and photography, and I do enjoy learning about artists that I’ve yet to hear of. But do it with some class, G.
The moral is:
Art Guys and their fast talking name-dropping vitriolic sermons of condescension are the worst.
And then to top off 30 solid minutes of bullshit with “so what are you guys doing tonight?”….
