Is My Art Shoe? 2024. Art slumpu about a concept, (100) 7 x 5"
I hear Sun’s super rich and as boring as these inordinately teen-brained, sociopathic billionaires can be. Needs so desperately to feel something, anything, that will pull him out of the loser funk, so the worldwide attention grabbing begins. Money got him a banana, and it could have bought him love, but he went for the banana instead. What a loser! And even with all the kow-towing a desperate media (corporate and social) doles out to a yachtin’ billionaire, his 6 million dollar art lesson bombed completely among the human population. Any person not psychotic and/or getting paid by Justin, just hates the guts out of him for it. More art establishment idiocy retold by a conceptual billionaire. Even I, the empty-handed painter, am ready to pee on the first van Gogh I see. Why not? You know van Gogh would. And all he’d ask for in return was some decent cheese and the next month’s rent paid.
Here is a concept for Justin, the child-man of code fingers and cracker brain. He will purchase for 6 million dollars the large paintings Rose and I are working on (what he paid for the banana performance). They will hang in his mansion visible to every freakish sycophant who attends his boring parties, just like the Tracey Emin dirty bed that sat in Charles Saatchi’s parlor for several years, to showcase the lie that billionaires must pretend every minute of their desperate lives in order to ensure their survival, which is built around the greatest farcical concept ever (the one about billionaires actually existing). My concept is clear. Six oil paintings on canvas, to be hung, viewed and resold by Justin or his heir’s greed. May the delusional tool get whatever concept (money) he hopes to get for them. Myself and Rose? We get 6 million dollars in exchange for paintings that are very slow to rot indoors and cannot be eaten. Then we exchange that concept (U.S. dollars) into some tangible art—an earthship studio/house on a desert farmette in New Mexico, donating the rest to friends and family who desire more art showing, and less billionaires breathing.
Martian Garden 2025. Oil on canvas, 64 x 64" By Ron and Rose
Is the concept ever art? Even if the digested fruit stand banana came with a certificate of authenticity as Justin Sun claims the art actually is? “I once bought a banana and ate it.” Signed Fool and His Money. Is that art? Or, should more words be added like, “I once bought a banana from a man who said the banana was a piece of art, and then I ate the banana and made more art.”? Is it more like art now? Here is a concept that I say is art. I just put my hand up a dirty sock and made it introduce itself to me. I call it “Justin Sun has a Hole in His Head”. It’s a smelly, hole-in-the-heel sock, unwashed and undarned. With my free hand I wrote down the title on a piece of paper and signed it. Then I made a video of dirty sock Justin talking with me. Voila! Now to get a rent-fearing gallery in Soho to show the sock at Art Basel Miami. Maybe Jeff Bezos will buy it to use as a cosy for his model penis rocket. Maybe that can be his art, and his retinue of never-sexed Reddit boys can snicker and coo about it all day long until the next propaganda cycle about more concepts, concepts, concepts!
I know we get it. These days, the overwhelming human concept is the tenuousness of our collective sanity. We see the farce of modernity play out in our daily lives, and those of us who can still feel (more likely any person wrapped up in less than a million dollars) are deeply cynical about it. Justin Sun and The New York Times are conceptual art projects. They create concepts out of thin air, and we suck them in with our attention, doing great damage to our selves and souls. Day after day, more vaporous concepts like Donald Trump and the Democratic Party appear to wreck havoc on our art, which has never stopped being about the real stuff we make in our lives—great dinners, landscape paintings and warm-hearted kids. The planetary conceptual-art-is-life project, allowing political gangsters and billionaire buffoons to exist with their heads attached, has got our century off to a very bad start. We did it to ourselves, as was foretold by the writer John Steinbeck, one of many canaries from the coal mines of the 20th century. He died an art-making millionaire in 1968:
“I have named the destroyers of nations: comfort, plenty, and security — out of which grow a bored and slothful cynicism, in which rebellion against the world as it is, and myself as I am, are submerged in listless self-satisfaction.”
Ireland’s Basic Income for Artists (BIA) could mean a brighter financial future for artists on the dole, along with the permanent banishment of fatheads like Justin Sun from society. I mean we have government pave our roads; a just election might vote to scalp a Justin Sun and also pay the painter a pittance for bread and beer. What do we allow government to do to our murderers? Conversely, how do we as a society, treat our life-givers? Sadly, we don’t even offer them prison. Edgeworth Johnstone and I were discussing the banana-universal income schtick this morning on our podcast. Edgeworth believes great art was/is made in adversity, and I agree with him in the context of some modern art. That is, art made during the post-photography phase of the industrial revolution. Before that time, the majority of art we see today in museums (beyond the folk-art of itinerant painters) was made and passed down by aristocratic artists or artists funded by aristocrats. Before socialism, the landed gentry were the government, and therefore the grantors of artist support. There wasn’t a free market then either. The expressive artist of 1788 would have had a pile of shit poured over his head and sent to the lunatic asylum. There were the lessor known and unsupported William Blakes of Europe, but most had a side gig to keep them afloat (See the future of Free Art Frees Art). Of course we also know that Michelangelo was a ward of the state because the Vatican subsidized his studio with Papal grants. Adversity has not passed down a single work of art from the year 1538. Any expressive painter without means was no such thing. Modern Pablo Picasso was very poor until the post WWI French government granted him 1.5 million less contemporary boys to play art with. Kinda leveled the playing field, like literally in the fields of the Somme. Paris was less of a free market and more like, “Jesus Pablo, get the hell outta Spain. The French girls lost all their mates and their art is sooo dead. Even trash writers like Hemingway are getting a say”! Then Peggy Guggenheim stepped in to teach the media (and a future Justin Sun) about artist dependency and leaving an establishment legacy for future generations. Justin Sun with the help of the Guardian and New York Times, has opened up a slew of future coffee table books to instruct my grandchildren on what is art. His banana will have a say. Unfortunately, I don’t think Picasso (or any person ever) has experienced a free market. A free market is free. And that’s just what Edgeworth is doing in Camden—giving away his art on the street. There will have to be other ways to make money. Black Ivory is still working on it. Stay tuned.
Perhaps billionaires and governments distributing grants are in their own competition to define what art is and which art stays. The rest of us stand around like yokels with mouths agape and thumbs in our pits waiting to be told what’s what. I say both the billionaire and the government are very weak and needy. Sun or the State of New York can never truly support the artist because any artist worth his or her salt would reject the concept wholeheartedly. What self-respecting maker of anything wants a billionaire or government handout for their art? They are both representational gifts from watered-down, unremarkable personalities that, in return, expect an unsaid and sometimes contractual promise not to lose our minds, which is the exact opposite of what needs to happen for great art to flow out. If my fame and fortune (or lack thereof) relies on a single weasel or a collectivity of them, then point me to my hole and call me a mustelid. Still, while standing apart from the status quo, I shouldn’t be expected to sell my soul in order to eat or be proud. Nor must I implement a scam or schtick to trick the world into wanting my art, in order to eat or be proud. What a lie! What a concept! There’s not enough time to convince anyone or Justin Sun that I am a worthy investment. Henry Thoreau:
Not long since, a strolling Indian went to sell baskets at the house of a well-known lawyer in my neighborhood. “Do you wish to buy any baskets?” he asked. “No, we do not want any,” was the reply. “What!” exclaimed the Indian as he went out the gate, “do you mean to starve us?” Having seen his industrious white neighbors so well off—that the lawyer had only to weave arguments, and, by some magic, wealth and standing followed—he had said to himself: I will go into business; I will weave baskets; it is a thing which I can do. Thinking that when he had made the baskets he would have done his part, and then it would be the white man’s to buy them. He had not discovered that it was necessary for him to make it worth the other’s while to buy them, or at least make him think that it was so, or to make something else which it would be worth his while to buy.
I too had woven a kind of basket of a delicate texture, but I had not made it worth any one’s while to buy them. Yet not the less, in my case, did I think it worth my while to weave them, and instead of studying how to make it worth men’s while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them. The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?
Personally, I’ll take the government handout any day—it makes no difference whether it comes from Congress or the sardonic game-drained brain of a spoiled rotten billionaire. However, I’ll only accept it for the cause of me to be, and hands off my art! Basically, put me on the dole, but not because I am an artist. Feed me bananas. House me like a hermit crab, I don’t care. And I want the same for you, so that you can become the you that you feel the need to be. Why waste my time being a cashier for the Food Mart to make money so I can come home to make art? That’s Justin Sun’s concept, and it’s an old one called The Protestant Work Ethic. Boring! So obsolete and old-fashioned. A waste of precious time.
How then are we going to safety net everyone with basic income so they can realize their dreams freely instead of working bullshit jobs just to survive? Tax the conceptual billionaires! Does Musk want a Tesla? Conceive of it you old toad, cash your basic income check, convince others to make it for you because you think it’s an even better concept than Justin’s banana, and then get as rich as you can selling to all the un-artists everywhere who have extra free market money to burn. That’s practically a world of people, for I don’t know a single soul besides yours truly who dreams to make art on the dole, on purpose, eating rice and beans, and washing his bowl.
I’ll end with these two Henry Miller quotes that make me feel good:
“To live beyond the pale, to work for the pleasure of working, to grow old gracefully while retaining one’s faculties, one’s enthusiasms, one’s self respect, one has to establish other values than those endorsed by the mob. It takes an artist to make this breach in the wall. An artist is primarily one who has faith in himself. He does not respond to the normal stimuli: he is neither a drudge nor a parasite. He lives to express himself and in so doing enriches the world.”
“The role which the artist plays in society is to revive the primitive, anarchic instincts which have been sacrificed for the illusion of living in comfort. It is not the most comfortable life in the world but I know that it is life, and I am not going to trade it for an anonymous life in the brotherhood of man—which is either sure death, or quasi-death, or at the very best cruel deception.”