Art for Art's Sake
"Fashion", they say, is what other people wear. "Style" is what one wears oneself. But never a nose-stud or tattoo.
Art- With grateful thanks to our friend Abu Saleh Titu
AMERICAN PIES
“The Father, Son and Holy ghost… They took the last train for the coast”.
Not sure what the future will look like, but it won’t be pretty. Art will be long dead.
As AI spawns itself, rewriting the past, PREDICTING the Past will become ever more difficult, and less accurate, than calling the Future.
Edward Bellamy, author of the 1888 futurist Utopian bestseller “Looking Backwards”, being the protege of my great-grandfather (along with Mr. Samuel Langhorne Clemens, alias Mark Twain).
Bellamy coined the term “Credit Card”. You used it to buy your bean soup from the State canteen. (Now called Welfare)
Don’t hold your breath for Bellamy’s “Socialist Utopia in the year 2000AD”.
Came and went. Like a greyhound bus you never wanted to be on.
We got 9/11 instead. Someone else’s future.
Bellamy, once America’s most famous author and visionary, is all but forgotten.
A lesson to us all. Fame fades, but alas, not our tattoos.
Grandma show us your Tatoos…
Picture the thousands of Gen Z, Teen Swiftie fans, now aged 80, showing off their once taut “Tats” (tattoos) above their left buttock, to startled grandchildren trying not to be repulsed.
“Love- Yourself- Taylor- Swift” in metallic blue ink plus constricting wrinkles of the intervening decades, may end up spelling many unintended things. “Lo…Elf…Ta..Wift”.
And no darlings, you won’t be able to “Shake It Off”. Nor the skin cancer you can never be quite sure wasn’t induced by the carcinogenic inks. At least with 1970’s flares you could consign them to the back of the wardrobe until they became fashionable again. And your granddaughter wants them, like super-much.
Ick. Tattoos and melanomas never are “fashionable”. They are the very opposite of “Fashion”. Indelible bad taste.
Only a decadent society, going ever so insane as it implodes, red dwarf-like, would prize disfigurement over natural beauty. It is “Female Mutilation” paid for, and then paid to be removed, by taxpayers funding welfare designed for life’s support “essentials”. Not a tatty cartoon of David Beckham carried aloft by a dove to a rainbow. Naff and Kitsch at the same time.
Art-less Art
I have an aversion to tattoos. A shivery, hairs on the back-of-the-neck phobia, when an otherwise shapely-turned ankle reveals a self-inflicted, unsightly birth-mark blotch, declaring “One Life, Live It Lesbian” …
Especially those green lizardry sleeves down one arm. Yuk. The attractive young ladies disfigured at graduations, more Venice Beach than Venice, by this visual, cultural self-mutilation.
We all have to have a slogan in this day. Hold up our piece of torn cardboard. Confront strangers with our statement T-shirt. Though I did see an amusing one recently- when you got close enough for myopics like me, it read- “Stop Staring at My T*ts”.
Granny was Meme
Tattooing used to be confined to bearded ladies performing at circuses. Merchant seaman. Criminals and Chinese gangsters lolling in opium dens. Now everyone has become, a little of all three.
Won’t employ, or unless choiceless, go to the waitress or teller with visible tattoos or piercings. The nose-stud really is the end of age of Chanel. Tell me true, would you employ someone, especially front-of-house, with an arrow-shaped “LGBPG-Tips”, “ear-bar”- with tasteful silver chain. Or make a polite excuse about the other CVs being “particularly strong” this year…
Thought so.
“Body Art” isn’t Art. It’s going to be so last year. But your pigmented anagrammed buttock will still be thinking it’s partying like it’s 1999. It is narcissism inked. We keep our vanity hidden yet somehow on display.
Like metallic blue-pink hair, execrable “Graffiti” and “Community Murals”. Imposed like “Public Art” which the public invariably hates yet has to pay for. One is painfully reminded of the peculiarly noisome Mr. Zukerberg’s recent statue of his beloved Chinese wife- 7ft high with a blue face. Perfect anniversary present, darling. Just what I always wanted.
Too much money in pursuit of too little taste.
When archaeologists- if there are any- brush away the dust and plastic wrappers from our societal ruins, it will reveal this as the epitaph of our age.
The “tattoo” is the epidermal equivalent of post-modernist art (whatever that is), and akin to brutalist architecture. An aesthetic dead-end that will scar for decades. The multi-storey car park of body design.
It is contrived ugliness, the worst kind, masquerading as Art. As with “modernist” sculpture, abstracted, distracted. Always in the wrong place at the wrong time.
from “Tell Me True”- Art in a Post-Art Age- James Chanel AMAZON/KDP