Lets Taco Bout It

There was a trend a while back to interject profanity or ironic humor into art. It’s been called twee nihilism. I saw a lot of art school graduates in local galleries using balloon letters to spell out swear words, engaging in “craft activism”, using textiles ironically, and so forth. It’s still popular with many people. I see it as a lingering vestige of early 2000s hipster culture, and ultimately deriving from the 90s attitude of social derision. It’s a paradoxical rejection of the very culture one engages with.

It’s an example of what Pierre Bourdieu called the “taste for freedom”. The working class have always turned to ribald humor as an escape from the vicissitudes of life, and now the upper class are adapting that as a show of sprezzatura (studied carelessness). I saw an artist recently who specializes in defacing images of Jesus with nose rings, mild profanity, and so forth. It’s cute, but I can only imagine that being in the center of the Bible Belt, the artist likely has elderly relatives who belong to affluent church congregations. It reminds me of the way I felt radical for supporting Obama in 2008, or watching Stephen Colbert, as if more than half of the US population my age weren’t doing the same.

I first saw the phrase, “Great art is bullshit, eat tacos” in a mural by a local artist whom I could defend as being middle class; neither rich nor poor. I think they adapted the phrase from elsewhere and genuinely thought it cute. Years later I saw the phrase being sold on T-shirts at an art show in Columbia, SC. In some ways I agree with the sentiment. I never went to art school and I see a lot of pretension and elitism from art connoisseurs. I don’t like Robert Motherwell and I hate Hunt Slonem. But, I’m not sure that’s the viewpoint that the slogan is coming from. Rather, the concept of there being “great art” to criticize suggests that the slogan originated from among the art scene itself.

For twee nihilism to be relevant, one has to be intimately acquainted with the source concept. To find Live, Laugh, Lobotomize amusing, one must be familiar with the decorative typography of the early aughts. To say great art is bullshit, one must start from the premise of there being great art. Many of us among the unwashed masses of the working class aren’t really aware of high art. Before I began painting, I knew the names Monet, Van Gogh, and Picasso from a few paragraphs of a high school textbook. I’d watched Bob Ross on TV, and I knew about Andy Warhol’s soup cans. But I didn’t think there were any “great artists” in modern times.

My conception of contemporary art was that it ended after the second world war with Pollock and Rothko. One could certainly be forgiven for maintaining that impression today. With the exception of Banksy, most publicly lauded artists are sculptors, fashion designers, illustrators, video game designers, and so forth. There aren’t many “great artists” left. So I wonder why would we need a slogan like “great art is bullshit” when there’s no one to persuade. It’s like saying disco is dead. I suppose it’s just meant to be cute, a sort of post-anti-intellectual twee nihilism.

But, for me, I am an artist, if not yet a great one. I’ve been an artist for nearly twenty years. Not all of my work is serious art, and a lot is purely decorative. But I take art very seriously. I don’t think very many people do these days. I’ve never felt accepted, much less endorsed, by my community or society. Very few people understand me as an artist. When I’m appreciated, it’s as a craftsperson. I’m accepted in the way a sofa upholsterer is accepted. A skilled or “talented” laborer, but not someone to be taken seriously. My opinions are of little consequence as long as the colors match the wallpaper.

Twee nihilism throws shade on intellectual candor. It points the finger at sincerity and says, great art is bullshit [insert pop culture reference, tacos, vinyl records, kombucha, or whatever]. Unfortunately, much of traditional academic painting is rooted in patriarchy, racism, colonialism, and capitalism. That’s why Rothko did what he did. But, instead of building back a more egalitarian aesthetic, we’ve remained in a sort of creative anarchy. A quagmire of absurdism and irreverence. Vulgarity for the sake of vulgarity, when it’s long since failed to elicit anything like surprise. Online meme culture elevated to a sort of new Fauvism. We’ve made bullshit great art.

I used to write a lot of poetry when I was younger, I wrote music, I drew and painted my dreams. For the past seven years, I’ve mostly just painted for public consumption. And I think that’s partly because we’ve decided, as a culture, to hide from emotion and sincerity. I’m expected to paint simple empty landscapes, conventional still lifes. Colors that pop like a megapixel display on an iphone. If one wants to paint “contemporary art”, it’s supposed to match the sofa colors. Pastel images of abstract cowboys, pointillist Dolly Parton, neo-western revival of 50s aesthetics as a meta critique of consumerism, Jesus in a Ford Pinto. Frankly, I’m not sure any of the experts know what they’re doing, and we’re not all like a pack of dogs sniffing one another’s tails to see who’s had tacos.

One could argue that the purpose of “great art” was always the betterment of society. When art no longer serves as serious expression or critical social commentary, then maybe it’s better to “eat tacos”. There’s a lot of emphasis on community building among artists, but that’s something I’ve never experienced. Artists have a well earned reputation for revelry and excess. Artists are expected to smoke cigarettes, eat tacos, turn on, tune in, and drop out. That behavior often serves as a stand-in (or an anesthetic) for intellectual depth. To quote Don Henley, “Some dance to remember, some dance to forget”.

It’s important that artists maintain a sense of self awareness, recognizing the impractical nature of the trade itself, but not surrender to post-modern apathy. Great art is the most important legacy of humanity. All art is sort of religious, being devoted to an unreachable superlative. Art represents our ongoing effort, as a species, to communicate the ineffable mystery of the individual perception of our collective human experience. It’s both very solitary, very subjective, and at the same time requires the participation of the viewer. We should eat one taco at a time, and try to appreciate the flavor.