For God’s Sake - and For the Sake of Western Civilization - Buy, Buy, Buy, For All You’re Worth, When the New Art Season Opens.
Why? Hey, I’ll tell you why. Because Failed Artists are an Historically Established Menace of Major Proportions.
Seems this week’s big, too-good-to-be-true, international story - The Jock-Strap Bomber – involved, as usual, the visual arts. When are we going learn people? Support the arts, or suffer the historically established consequences.
Case in point:
al Qaeda Yemen’s claim for the Christmas ‘undie’ attack on Northwest flight 253, was followed by well documented reports that the (now scorch-balled) bomber’s handlers included two ex Guantanamo Bay prisoners - freed in 2007 and sent back to Saudi Arabia. Muhamad Attik al-Harbi (known now by his nom de guerre Muhamad al-Awfi) and Said Ali Shari appear later (2009) in Yemen-based Qaeda propaganda videos.
Now here’s the meat…..after their release, the two former Gitmo prisoners entered an Art Therapy Program underwritten by the Saudi Arabian government. A program wherein jihadists are supposedly weaned away from violence by red yellow and blue.
The two men, having decided to become fulltime artists and unable thereafter to secure dealer representation, exhibitions in alternative mosques, or sales of any significance - reportedly grew despondent at the failure of their newly chosen lifestyle/careers and are believed to have backslid into renewed jihadism. The two failed artists then migrated to Yemen where they joined a growing network of al Qaeda affiliated terrorist organizations. One insensitive U.S. diplomat said Saudi Arabia's "so-called art-rehabilitation programs are a joke." Considering that sort of critical reception is it any wonder our two nascent artists became disillusioned and returned to their old jobs of fashioning IED’s (improvised explosive devices) instead of artworks?
Here’s the proof-of-life YouTube Video for the Doubters Among You
The two failed al Qaeda lads are just small potatoes, in the bigger scheme of things, when it comes to failed artists wreaking havoc when careers go Phhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhht*
Take for example famously failed artist Mr. Adolf Hitler. According to a former friend of mine - failed Austrian conceptualist Ludwig Redl - as soon as Adolf (who’d often idle by the Danube indulging reveries of becoming a famous artist) seized real power he had the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts Professors – academics who’d rejected his application portfolio – summarily shot. Fuggedaboutit!
Here’s a YouTube portfolio of der Fuehrer’s artwork. Now, just think what might NOT have happened if dewy young Adolf had had a sold-out show of his landscapes.
O.K., O.K., I can’t blame you for being skeptical ‘bout my thesis, but wait, there’s more. Now, as everyone knows, our boy Hitler is firmly ensconced in history’s Big Three of mass murderers. But he’s only #3. Stalin – bringing it home (30 million victims) at #2 was also an artist. Of sorts.
See image heading this post for an example of Stalin-Readymade
He liked to get his dictatorial mitts on (ready-made) nude prints & drawings, and, get this, add his own sardonic textual marginalia. Talk about ahead of its time! Image and Text works from the 1940’s. And ironic to boot.
Here’s a sample of some of textual addendums that Stalin used to fortify his nudes.
“Ginger bastard Radek, if he hadn’t pissed against the wind, if he hadn’t been angry, he would be alive,” Papa scrawled across the leg of a rotund male nude.
"Don't sit with a bare arse on stones," Stalin pens on a drawing of a man on a pedestal. "Give the boy some pants."
"Stalin and naked guys: what’s Going on Here?" headlined a story in a recent issue of the daily Komsomolskaya Pravda.
Consider if, famously vain, Uncle Joe, had gotten the sort of critical success afforded prominent image-ironists such as Sherrie if-I-had-a-nickle-for-every-word Levine. Would the "Father of Nations," have spent more time reading his reviews than force-collectivizing Georgian and Ukranian farms.
A show of Stalin’s handiwork was recently mounted at the leading Marat Guelman gallery in central Moscow.
The moral sub-text of these stories?
Fuggedaboutit!
