a few days ago i finished reading the portrait of mrs. charbuque by jeffery ford. a good little book. the main character is a painter in 1800’s new york who’s slipped into the easy life of doing portraiture for the moneyed class all the while regretting having abandoned his real dream of painting something “great”. i enjoyed it. anyhow, reading the acknowledgments page i noticed the book, what painting is by james elkins listed as inspiration. i read that book a few years ago and found it incredibly inspiring. it’s draws a parallel between oil painting and alchemy. gets real down and dirty into pigments, materials and process.  i remember rushing into the kitchen after finishing it to do a little home alchemy myself, grabbing the few jars, bottles, cans, and condiments we actually had to mix in with my paints. i seem to remember spices and under the sink chemicals featuring prominently… of course that’s back when we’d drink a bottle of wine every night topped with a splash of bushmills and most likely a few bong hits. needless to say the painting which resulted from that alchemical inspiration was shit, or atleast i assume it must have been, since i can’t remember what it was, where i put it, or if i finished it.

so… this memory then lead me to hop online to search out some more interesting art books. i thought, “hey, books on art can be fun!” i know i was deluding myself, art books are as a general rule depressingly bloodless, but i do come across the occasional gem worth more than the paper it’s printed on. sure enough in my resulting digital travels i came across a book which seemed to fall in line with some of my own suspicions and biases. i figured such a book, written by someone with some actual knowledge of art history, might help clarify my own cloudy puddle of artistic bile. well, hey-presto, i was out of the house and on my way to barnes and noble. i can hear some of you scoffing now, “barnes and noble? don’t you know that store is a shit hole? don’t you know that place is to the written word what television is to the moving picture? 358 channels and nothing on!” well, yes. i do know that. they never have the book i’m looking for. never. but in my excitement it completely slipped my mind. sure enough, they had nothing. (sorry sir we don’t stock that book, but we can order it for you… uh, i came here for instant gratification thank you very much, if i wanted to order it and wait around i’d do it myself and have it sent to my house, so if you can not provide the instant, and i mean instant

, gratification i require then, well, go fuck yourself.) on my slouching walk home i was reminded of that article from wired a couple months back called the long taile, these stores just can’t please us modern consumers, but that’s another story i guess.

well needless to say i ordered the fucking thing and it is, as i write, being sent to my house. the book in question is called the end of art. i know, i know! such a very grand title, just begging to be mocked and stomped back into the fertilizer-heavy soil of the art world. but take a breath and read this review / interview. much of the opinion expressed within rings woefully true to me. like this snippet for instance- “typical ‘postart’ values include: a tendency to mock posterity, a tendency to elevate the banal to the status of the enigmatic and the scatological to the status of the sacred, and a preference for concept-driven art. ‘postart’ is art at the service of the mind and the product of joyless, “clever, clever” theorizing. entertainment value and commercial panache are valued more highly than artistic ability or aesthetic worth and painting is perilously close to becoming a sub-genre of performance art.” that’s a sentiment i often want to express, only in my mouth those sensible words become “oh fuck this man, what a bunch of horseshit, this sucks.”

i realize that grand sweeping pronouncements, especially those of the doomsaying variety are utter folly, pointless in terms of art, which has no firm ground to stand on, no matter how many bones of dead artists are ground to dust below us. subjectivity is king. that’s how i feel about it. but at the same time, much of what the author donal kuspit has to say on the subject, in this interview, i can’t help but feel sympathetic to. it may simply be the old troublesome romanticism biting at my heels again, but so much of what is out there, being celebrated, looks like diseased baboon excrement to me, and sub-par baboon excrement to boot. as stated subjectivity is king, so in my kingdom at least, a crier like kuspit is welcomed. the final judgment though will have to come after amazon directs an offshoot of it’s fleet to my door, bearing kuspit, more victorian era “magical realism”, some sci-fi, and, from the horse’s mouth, the artist’s reality. yippee!