Wine and Cheese

So I saw the Gates in Central Park on Saturday, because I was in New York to visit some friends. I have to tell you, I really don’t get the hype. People came from all over the country to see a bunch of orange Gates. They are just Gates people. That’s it! There really isn’t anything special about them other than where they are, and where they are does not need anything added to it. Central Park is one of the best pieces of art in the world. Why mess with perfection?

I am really tired of these self-important debutant wine and cheese fuckers. They pass as loving art and knowing about it, but all they know about is themselves. Art is beautiful because the best thing that we all have to offer someone else is a bit of ourselves, and art, at its best, is a gift of ourselves. There isn’t anything wrong with not sending a message and just making something that is beautiful, mind you, but I looked at the Gates and felt, I don’t know, blah.

I chalk the Gates up to yet another artist saying, “Hey, look at me and look at what I can do.” I hate that. The whole look at me patting myself on the back self-aggrandizing bullshit just irks me. It isn’t what art should be about. And then there are the critics and the people who know what’s “in” who sit around and do a circle jerk over this stuff, salivating over how smart they think they are and how big they think that their collective artistic penis is. Then, the SCLM, being lazy, does a whole bunch of stories about the wonders of art, and they have no idea what the hell they are talking about. Then they poison our society with the idea that art is shallow and pretentious. They make people think that art is only for the elite, the people who don’t need to work and can spend millions expressing themselves.

Art can change the world. It can bring people together, in a profound way, not just in a capitalist, bring Lemming-esque tourists shoulder to shoulder to Central Park kind of way. It can break through the walls that we all set for ourselves, the walls of country, economics, knowledge, social status, race, sex, religion, whatever. We can see the beauty in it all and be captured by it and then be intrigued to ask questions that we would never ask before. We can go to a world that we would never visit, because it is so “different”, and we can let the art take us there, both figuratively and literally. It will not take us there if it isn’t taken seriously, and I think that this whole Gates hoopla is a roadblock in our travels.