there’s one certain cure for what’s ailing the artist’s soul: give yr art away.
you are not a producer of consumer goods. nor consumed goods. you are a creature of good consumption. you produce to reduce. you will be dead soon. your art and culture and capital will be unremembered. an electromagnetic pulse will blenderize every last digit.
your arm swinging the ax is your art. swiftly. then it is gone. the ax evaporates. the desk chair split is pure energy now. your shoes have melted into snow.
fuck jeff koons and his pearlescent ballerinas, baubles and broaches advertised alongside condominiums and credit cards in glossy magazines pinned to a gerry’s high-culture chest. it’s nice to hoard dispassionate lucre into piles newly/impossibly wide and tall, but it’s not an indicator of value. neither yrs nor yr art’s value, frankly.
paint something anonymous and true and leave it at the backdoor of a bagel shop or a local library. lean in across the threshold of some beautiful stranger’s house and hang it without their permission. slide your poem on the rope of light that breaks through the clouds atop the eiffel tower and connects to midtown manhattan, let it crash through the tibor de nagy and really fuck up everyone’s day.
write a sestina and tape it under the seat on a public bus. nail a haiku to a telephone pole or your mayor’s frontdoor. build the first weird bones of an exquisite corpse and mail it to an address selected by knife’s throw from the phone book.
you are not the asking price of yr handiwork, hardwork, nor convictions. conviction bends at the feet of capital.
capital has a funny way of helping one to forget who she is.
if you love what you do, they’ll buy you lunch and pay your phone bill. go busk in the park, clark.
you must go on long walks with yr dog and read poetry aloud. gesticulate wildly. madly, stop worrying about what you look like to the drive-by commuter.
you ever wonder why you feel terrible every day?
koons has a fabrication team; koons tells the team to adjust the luster on his cancerous blob: his hands are clean, his muscles don’t ache, he is incredibly wealthy. to maximize profit, he has minimized his effort.
what he has going for him, however, is that he is an artist arting. that is undeniable. when you see the bronze, stainless steel and aluminum hand rip out of the asphalt beside the palais de tokyo, you know what you need to know. he is working in his $5,000 suit—kissing kings.
lust after lust after lust, do what you want precisely. make up words. invent colors. read backwards. you mustn’t do what they tell you to.
is your art honest?