There ARE different kinds. ARTHEADS. Factions. Lone Wolves. Outliers. Sheep. We are not a monolith. Some are innit for the green, for the ‘preening or to be seen as an artist.

Others are artists so as not to kill a whole bunch of yall who deserve to fookin’ Die.

& there is nothing wrong with all that unless they’re positioning themselves as gatekeepers to overall cultural conversations regarding the official parameters and guidelines of all geists without the bandwidth to get the multiple tribes of us who can’t be bothered with the pony show.

Those fuckers should be assaulted every chance you get , to help snap them out of their dullardesque, not discerning the body betrayals before they end up assassinated by their own Hubris.

We see them coming a mile away, the do-anything for outside attention for all the wrong reasons, besotted scramblers.

We even see the artistry in all that.

Kinda like…scrimmaging, all their running around.

And that activity is integral to the whole thing too. That nonsensical going about kicks up cloaking dust for those deep in the geterdone to work peacefully amidst.We need them crowing lookatme so we can get up to what we get down to sans interrogation or interruption, no matter how it is we do.

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But~

The demand that an artist engage in traditional ways or be shamed by the machine that runs on milking the viewer and those whose impulses captured the views when it’s showtime… flies in the face of what producing actual visual art is.

…A painting on display ain’t a TV show. There are no laugh tracks or canned applause to rely on.

It’s a wound, ripped back opened. Gutted. Cleaned. Then…Exposed to the air. To heal and be healed.

It is the war and the aftermath splayed across walls , strung up in a mausoleum dedicated to spiritual battle, where weary folks wash up on the shores in front of it just to see if the medicine suits what ails them or not.

A gallery show is a funeral repast, often for the arthead. It’s a piece hung in a place of the dead -IN PEACE, mind you- that someone might turn a corner inside of themselves and explode back to life due to.

& you have no say in what in your work will trigger (for real, not performatively) whom unless you and the actual spirit you’re creating in cahoots with is openly strategic, from the piece’s inception. That’s the wild part.

People you despise may adore your work. Your loathing of them embedded may be the key that sets them free down the road. It’s a crap shoot, really. Keeps it fun.

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A real painting… drawn from the realms musicians draw cosmic bells from as tells of there being more to life than this…is something wholly different.

It’s the opposite of Plato’s cave, even though the particulars seem akin to it, with all the folks standing there sucked into what they see on the walls, trying to interpret the shadows they’ve had pointed out to give meaning to the unlocked chains keeping them there.

A real painting by a real artist will at least be a window to the outer realms everyone around you is terrified to talk about, not a sedating Trompe-l’œil vista on a cave wall to keep you in your alotted place, having seizures in pseudo stasis to convince yourselves that the vista moves.

…when the arthead has Hemingway’d the fuck out and fucking bled what is in his or her head all over that canvas that has been pulled, pricked, spread… that painting becomes the cloaked Crack in the cave wall, letting in outside air to lure anyone still able to recall the smell of grass, out.

Beckoning the viewer out into the light, out from under whatever had been churning on the inside of them and demanding they stay darkened even when not in darkness, doing it’s best to obstruct them from seeing a vibrationally new dawning day…

Is not the gig everyone agrees to when they sign up to BE artists.

Thank God they don’t have to.

The road of the artist sorts it all out as you go, though.

-AB