Gracjan Kraszewski
Footprints is a work of genius!
I nod, nod, nod, nod. My interior self, ‘Bob’, is just about off the knob relative to the plod and trod concerning all things metaphysics, mimesis, and sub-atomic machinations of the most muscular, deft diplomatic stripe.
The doctor keeps scribbling. He does not look up once, not even when taking a break for a breath between the furious pen pressing.
Footprints is a work of genius! I think, and hear myself internally say, in preamble to an immediately forthcoming discourse, if he allows it, concerning this very same topic. The guy put women’s shoes and boots on his hands and feet, dipped them into many buckets of various colors, and just plodded (ah, right, that’s why that word) around his studio until he was done and was ready to display it and ready to have someone bid six, maybe seven, figures plus sincere praise and pedantic sycophantism gratis.
‘Okay, but, doc, but, bro, dude but listen, okay? Okay if I speak on one more thing before we finish out here? Right. Good. Post modern art, bruh. I’m talking at the time like called mid-century, you see from all the French students in the streets ’68 plus Dubcek east of us plus MLK far to the west, that time, like ’68, like late ’60s where we just flushed about like a waterfall swirled in the historiographical revolutions toppling top-down analytics into bottom-up, bottoms up celebratory drinking parties for the common man, soon the common ‘person’ because this and that always eats its own, like look what then happened about all types of identities and identifiers decades later, right?, this time, ’68, where we say mid-century and we know 20th, where we say fin de siècle and we know 19th, so this time to my timeframe being framed as we speak, here, frames like those things that maybe even they can’t make all this shit look even passably painting-like, a frame of mind, nothing, it’s nothing because nothing itself means jack shit, we’re past the void here, post-nihilist, because when you can’t explain if the painting is upside down, or right-side up, or left, or right, or what color is that color there on the canvas, or that it is, what is, and really is that anything?; or, okay, but that’s not part ‘of it,’ okay…so this time, doc, feel me when I try and keep it on point and just to the facts. Modern art, five things of import: One, the first thing, is that you have be good at playing the ape game, the imitation game, and, because it’s fundamentally about subversion and inversion, literally in the latter inverting like 180 degrees ideas of good, beauty, form, transcendence, truth, meaning, logos, unto, like, bad, ugliness, scattershot shitstormtroopering, imminence, falsehood, absurdity, and, bro doc bro doc doc, cod, cape cod, doc, cape cod league bro, bruh-doc, dawg, and especially, most especially chaos. So that’s number one: Art used to mean something and that thing, those things, were both objective and objectively good so if we want to be effectively subversive—and that’s the whole fucking fuckcluck pointed point; to fight against, and ultimately destroy, try to destroy at least, die trying, die hard, die hard 2, die…you, you get it, to try and destroy all that is solid, sensible, sane and sacred—we need to effectively develop new ‘schools of art’ that say things we all know are shit are actually good and they’re the ‘new thing’, the new avant-garde whateverthefuckever who cares so long as people are effectively fooled by this ape-imitation to say, in effect, the old ways are out, the new way is here. Okay, so then #2 is to start backing up the trucks full of cashlootdimenickelstacksstcakedcoinage and just straight filthy, dirty, expletive-ridden suscio as fuck facil dinero and start dumping it all over this ‘new art’. It’s just insider trading in Oligarch finishing school. If all these art collectors get together and agree to buy endless piles of this shit pseudo-art then—because people worship money, am I telling you something new?—the prices go up, the buzz goes up, general interest climbs and peaks and keeps buzzing all the way unto what they’re really after: legitimacy. If all these rich people are paying like $20m a painting it must be good, right? I mean, to me it looks like shit but, but that guy just paid $20m so, well it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been wrong; silly me. Legitimacy. Legitimacy. Bruh-doc, Doctor Brother, legitimacy is what we absolutely need, so these they do say, kay? But to really seal the deal the money just won’t do. We need three and four. #3: get these pieces into the museums. How silly does silly me commoner feel when, already rebuked form his absolutely correct first impression that the urine-stained (by the artists’ own sample! The visionary character is found in an impregnable dedication to authenticity) detached toilet seat was, indeed, as valueless as it appeared/appears/will continue to appear to be, he sees said seat hanging in prime real estate within MOMA? And then, #4, something for the true holdouts, the hardest to get common sense critics for whom money and (all) integrity-(and honesty)-for-sale museums won’t bring across the divide, the chasm, that separates art from not-art. #4: Get some academic(s)—if you have to ask does this academic, forcement, forcement as in see: by necessity, have to have a PhD from Harvard or Yale and an undergrad degree from Brown or Berkeley and a current endowed chair at Dartmouth or Princeton? you’re really f***** beyond hopeless, brother; here, for this type of work, even Northwestern need not apply—to write impossibly dense, wordy, inscrutable articles, really as impossible to comprehend as the artwork they’re writing about in the first place, the subject matter (now that, finally, is art), and have it published in the most reputable, most scientifically screened and hyperbonk peer reviewed journals with one message: THIS IS ART AND IT IS GOOD AND YOU MUST LIKE IT AND APPROVE OR ELSE YOU’RE WRONG OR, WORSE OF ALL, A COUNTRY BUMPKIN-LIKE FOURTH RATE FAUX-INTELLECTUAL LIGHTWEIGHT MUCH TOO LIGHT IN THE HEAD TO UNDERSTAND, TO ‘GET’, REAL ART. And there you have it, my doc. I cannot, will not, but, again can not, I do not posses the requisite hairsplitting skills to stop the disco-dancing of all those angels on the pinhead to better, I mean more precisely, cannot any better explain this whole con game to you than that, than I just did, kid; ah, okay, but chu-wanna rid, me, wanna put a lid, on my arguments? Not so fast. A review? One: Perfect imitation game making what was once good bad, and what was once bad, ugly, abhorrent the new ‘good’; two: money to prove legitimacy; three: museums to prove legitimacy; four: a treasure trove of the best and brightest academics and critics proving legitimacy in legitimacy is thy name legitimate journals that only a fool would doubt are in fact legitimate. Five is just one: Step five is the con completed successfully; confirmed; the Z back to A completed loop, 5, Z, that’s all of us, the sheep publicly fleeced for their pleasure certainly not ours, we wearing the itchy wool sweaters of shit ass fake art without the slightest complaint, no, not even a peep, not even a murmur of discontent, rather, an approving and docile smile of passive submission.’ AQ