more proof modern art sucks…

… I was recently at an art event with a nice enough fellow. He suggested a gallery crawl in the local art district because he knew me well enough to know I love art, but not well enough to know I detest modern art. It’s the thought that counts I suppose.

We came across this particular painting of really bad modern abstract art. Think Jackson Pollock having a seizure after ingesting LSD. A lot of LSD. Violent scribblings and stick figures. Of course I hated it, but when he asked me what I thought I had to squelch the urge to spit out my first response… you know those drawings done by mental patients when asked to draw “home”. Yeah it looked like that, only worse. So I just said it was interesting.

He persisted. I felt cornered. Oh c’mon, years of studying art history and that’s all you got, “interesting”! I felt challenged. So I rattled off some pseudo intellectual art babble about composition. Blah Blah Blah. The damn piece of ugliness wasn’t even titled, it was pretentiously numbered [God, there were MORE than one of these!?], so I couldn’t gather what the artist was trying to portray.

This guy would seriously not let it go. I felt like he was using it as some sort of date Rorschach art test, asking me repeatedly what I see.

Fine! You want to know what I “see”? It looks like dark twisted demons surrounding mutilated corpses or art therapy used on the psychotically disturbed. I told him it reminded me of my work in forensics and compared certain elements of the painting to an actual crime scene I witnessed. I got as graphic I could. On purpose.

He just looked at me with shock, frowned deeply and said “My God, you are dark.”

The evening was down hill from there. This is precisely why you shouldn’t encourage me to be myself, people. At least not right away.