(sometimes)

One evening a few months ago I was talking to a fairly young artist with a degenerative disease that is increasingly forcing her to rely on assistance with the tasks of daily living. As if this weren’t indignity enough, she’s also made the decision to change her focus from painting and drawing (media she’s been working in for over a decade) to photography, as she finds it increasingly difficult to control a pencil or brush. The photographs she showed me were gorgeous. I wish she’d shown work at Artomatic. I don’t like to reveal personal details without permission, so we’ll call her The Photographer for the sake of this little story.

Another artist, a vague acquaintance both of us, ambled up and joined our conversation. We’ll call him The Asshole.

This guy is one of those folks who don’t show work at Artomatic because he considers himself above it. Knowing full well his fellow painter was now engaged in a lot of photography, he still proceeded to hold forth about how photography wasn’t art, photographers weren’t artists, and how anyone who collected photography lacked taste. The typical bluster and art school pretension I’m sure we’ve all heard more times than we can count. I was itching to make the equally banal pronouncement, “Painting is dead” because that’s another one I’m tired of hearing, but I really didn’t want to stoop to his level. Maybe I should have introduced him to this guy.

If he’d picked a fair fight with, say, Dr. Birdcage, I probably wouldn’t even be recalling it (unless she’d wrestled him to the ground and forced him to eat tarantulas). But it struck me as the height of cruelty to knowingly belittle someone else’s work, after they’d worked so very hard to carve out a new path for themselves.

I know I’ll get at least a dozen emails asking this guy’s name. I really don’t know it. He paints somewhere in Maryland. He’s a jackass. That’s really all that matters. I think you have to have a rather insecure view of your own work to be so mercilessly judgmental, particularly about things you don’t even understand. Made me glad not to own any of this guy’s work, can you imagine the bad energy that stuff must give off? Ick.