Its very noble, you know, to be an artist. To walk out of your mother's womb, knowing that you want to be an artist as soon as your hands can grasp a brush. Or as soon as you stop fucking falling asleep. Infants sleep a lot, you know.
Anyways, you pursuit that dream of being an artist from day one, knowing damn well that that decision could throw you right into the hands of poverty. But you keep trying. Shit happens to you, but that's okay. Artists face tragedy. Artists get depressed. The product is fine art.
Lets say that one day, that one person comes to you and recognizes you as an artist. That's all you needed really; someone outside of your household willing to tell you that you're something great. You might make a career out of this.
So you spend the rest of your life pulling meaningful, intricate works of art out of your ass and people give you money for it. Soon your name becomes known. Picasso. He pulled himself out of poverty with his art. He fucking loved that sort of thing.
But then there comes a day when this artist sees that they're something really fucking special. Then they get this dumb ass idea to get a large canvas and bullshit it.
Let me start that idea over. Imagine Degas. He's sitting by his candlelight, painting another fucking ballerina, when he stops what he's doing, looks at the canvas in front of him and is completely disgusted. The ballerina's arm is too long. Fucking ballerinas.
He gets so frustrated that he grabs his little bucket of paint and splatters it over the canvas. "Damn," he thinks after awhile, "I could sell this."
But see, Degas never did that. He just kept painting his ballerinas. The whole splattering-paint-on-canvas wasn't created by a mistake. It started with some famous artist, who decided that they could sell anything they made for thousands of dollars just because it had their name on it. Why had they been trying so hard? Any human being can splatter paint on a big canvas. Being famous is no excuse to get lazy. I mean, unless there's some hidden image or some goddam imagery, I really don't care. Because there is no imagery, friend. No two people can make the same splatter, but no splatter will stick out in my mind.
Then the idea becomes popular. That's the sad part. Just splatter and save time. Or they find other mediums of laziness. An artist could make a simple line drawing of a woman's ass, name it "Le Femme" and sell it for thousands. Why? Because his fucking name is Picasso.
I hear that the Detroit museum paid $10,000 to an artist who went to Meijer, bought a snow shovel (keeping the tag on), and simply put it in a glass case so that some goddam loser would come by and maybe contemplate it. Find some fucking meaning in it. It's simple really. I owe that last example to Beth, btw.
I saw a movie in my drawing class where some dude chose a building in Venice (I don't remember the name), picked a room and took a picture of it. Then, he went to a man, knowledgeable in computers, who could take a picture of that room and change the angle of vision to produce a blueprint. The dude chose an angle. Then, he had that blueprint printed out and traced it onto a canvas. After that, he placed masking tape on the edges of all the lines, and painted in between them (with shades and colors chosen by a nice old lady for accuracy). He used airbrush.
After he pulled away all that masking tape, he had a (sort of) painting of that room in a building in Venice. Basically, he did jack in terms of creativity, and needed zero skills as an artist to do so. It made me angry. Not only that some dumb fuck calls himself an artist (claiming that he just "used tools... like any other artist"), but that I wasted an hour of living to see him getting praised for it.
I guess what I really want to say is that it's 2 o'clock in the fucking morning and that I have a lot to accomplish tomorrow before I can rest. Thank you, come again.