A Haters’ Elegy, Of Sorts-Swerving A Big Detour From Simple “Traipsing Through The Arts”

By Laura Perkins   

Maybe it is because I am in chloric mood having just gone through a bunch of medical procedures, been poked and prodded to perdition but today I am nothing but an old-time flame-thrower, not those tunnel rat throwers that my friend Sam Lowell keeps telling me about from his time in Vietnam but the ancient stoic Greek warriors who batted burns with the best of them and maybe that will help me feel better.

I hate in no particular order: two million-word writers (excluding revered Jack Kerouac who at least wrote a few great novels and some passable ones too and who at least did his work the hard way via some nubbed pencils and a ten-cent notepad purchased at some off-hand Woolworth’s when that was a go-to place for such things among the young and then to secret cave libraries and mind adventures); terminal word junkies (not serious writers, see above,  although if my medical condition gets worse maybe them too but guys and gals who prattle on endlessly assuming just because they don’t consider their time valuable they assume everybody else is in step and that getting the last word is the idea of great literary/debate style); Jimmy Swag “hit men” (the last one, let’s call him X in case shows up in this country again and maybe take umbrage that I didn’t show him quite enough respect either calling him a lowlife hitman or that he left Jimmy cold and dry not doing his contract leaving the Swag to do a nickel in State Pen and who has rumored of late to have been seen in Argentina working as a gunsel for a high-end Madame at a Buenos Aires bordello; “fixer man” (no, not the beautiful backroom cigar-smoke, whiskey drinking guy of politics like sainted Mayor Daley of Chic town when he had that place wired, was so wired he was so wired that he was electric and who could “deliver” those last three crucial votes to your guy from his opponent to put him over the top by threatening to expose them as respectively having had carnal knowledge of animals, being a sodomite, and having sent fifteen years in a mental hospital but the guy down your street wearing high-belted yellow pants, floral jacket and a soft fedora with a feather in the band flailing little white packets yelling out “let me make your nightmares into dreams, ” let sister turn cousin in tricks in the night);Primitive Baptists( a primer, not the grand army of the post-flood who need to have their sins washed away in some rushing river or non-fetid swamp but the ones who insist that those adults, no children under twelve need apply thankfully resolved that issue without too deep a cut in the congregation, to be baptized in a muddy creek or swamp to signify they have been dirty little harlots who left alone for a minute covet every wife’s man or in a pinch every man’s wife, the whores, and con artists shaking some innocent girl out of her maidenhead by claiming ye are the Jesus and she the bride, bullshit with gravy,  so not the more well-known General Baptists who do their nasty rituals in fast-moving rivers without life-preservers daring the penitents to survive the torrents those few not drowned, the Remnant, are “saved” or the Particular Baptists who don’t care where it is done except everybody has to get naked as jaybirds for the cameras even the kids);Mountain Methodists (here I know from whence I speak unlike that flock Baptists, since my father, born and bred as I was, in Upstate New York, land “burned over” during the Second Great Awakening in the early 19^th century had been raised in that faith whose central tenet was that all would be saved come End-Times, come Judgement Day some might have to wait at the gate a little longer  that was all but would alms, welfare checks to day I guess, and who differed from the merciless Wesley boys and their factory pallor who would make the “saved” jump through hoops to get in the pearly gates and bums, tramps, winos, lay-abouts, junkies and usurers had best look elsewhere because the joint would be sealed with seven seals against them);Brethren of the Common Life (another place which I know from whence I speak, my mother was purebred Brethren, and I pretty much followed the religion as a girl, which was a breakaway operation from the more famous Monrovian Tabernacle the split issue there which I never really understood and then would care about less when I was old enough to have investigated had to do with doctrinal differences over how long and at what rest points did God create Earth the Brethren arguing five days on, two days off against the more traditional view); Clarence Dewar, a professional art critic for Art Today who I am calling out today by name for his boorish and deluded view that I have nothing important to say about art because I am not a professional art critic, which I have never claimed to be, that has stirred up the fire-eaters, dingbats, hopelessly deranged, a few irate art patrons, some museum volunteer guides, the Grey Ladies, here’s the dagger- back in the day to feed his horrible opium addiction he would take old copies of say Art Wave , maybe cut and paste, literally in those days before word processors saved our butts,                    

an article by Clement Greenberg and sent it along under his own name.); People who blather on about art being the search for the sublime (when we have the names Clarence Dewar and Clement Greenberg on the grille we might as well tackle this sawdust bit that has saved more bogus careers in the art world than you can shake a stick at when these dingbats go off on their tangents and proclaim, yes, that is just the right word, that the best artists rather than trying to sell a few items to keep the wolves from the door are really pushing the human experience forward a thimbleful thus saving themselves from having to work up a sweat over what the artists really had to say in their productions); Edgar Degas the pervert(there is no room even in hell for this degenerate who spent his life bothering, girls, children really, and young women around ballet schools and riding stables clutching his wretched cigars in his moth-eaten hands and taking a million hits of his bong pipe no among of reparations can repair that savagery but would help and while we all know that this stuff went on, goes on, witness the #MeToo movement the coppers knew wat he was doing, had the complaints in their archives gathering dust but sat on their hands when the art mavens and their bosses pulled down the hammer);Whistler’s “theory of art for art’s sake” (following ever so closely behind that sublime business that has saved more wretches clueless about art is the idea that nobody but the artist should give a fuck about their artistic production and not be floored by conventions and again every bum of the month has held on to this beauty for dear life when trying to get those last thousand words on some freshman term paper or glossy art journal entry although strangely Whistler himself, the old dog, used that idea to hustle his mistresses when the rent was due and when he couldn’t figure out what the hell he was doing with all those fireball, color ball, bombast ball paintings that did make sense otherwise including hanging his poor dear mother out to dry as some color study, not nice);Claude Monet’s Camille (Jesus why would anybody in their right minds pick on his poor first wife especially if one, I, am setting aside the whole idea of cultural appropriation associated with the painting La Japonaise but this allows me to get at the bastard through the back door since what I really want to get at is artistic whoring after having argued how fetching and sexy Madame posed and then found a photograph of her from an earlier time and she looked like like a lunger, had consumption or something);and, art gallery owners (I had intended to finish up with whorish press agents and flak-catchers but they are down in the cesspool of the food chain which runs the Cabal but I saw a better moving target and a grouping more central to the so-called trends which only means that they are always hustling to avoid being stuck with some goods that even flea marketeers would have a hard time getting the fuck rid of I know because some of it is in my living room).

Why all this, why all this venom. Why this surly mob of disparaged elements. One way or another these loss-leaders have been the bane of my existence of late as I have tried to blast some small hole in the entombed Art Cabal for the benefit of the art devotee public. Strangely the strands they represent could give one a very good look at the yahoos and b.s. artists who have attempted to defend the “academy” against the onslaught. You know already I feel better maybe I will take on the literary lightweights as an encore.