Your Daily Awesome

On Boosterism
Promoting all things arty swamps reality with phony art-crap. Right in the place where a real art scene would be.

On Vibrancy in the Art World
It used to be that every time I heard ‘vibrant community,’ I thought of vibrators. I like to read the literature that art organizations publish about themselves, so I used to think about vibrators a lot. Sadly, I recently learned that when the mission statement, or the proposal, or the crop dusting report says ‘vibrant,’ it actually means ‘vigorous, full of life.’ Huh? ‘Vibrant community.’ Buzzwords exist to obliterate reality, so what’s getting obliterated here? Could it be that the art community is not ‘vigorous, full of life?’

It’s the same with prostitutes. That’s what somebody told me. You ask a prostitute if he or she ‘has anything’ and they’ll always say ‘No.’ They’ll yank the bent, borrowed U-100 needle out of the webbing between their first and second toes, spit a little blood, cough a few times, blink their crusty eyes, and say ‘No. No way. I’m clean. I’m clean, baby.’

‘Whores lie!’ my friend Reed used to exclaim. ‘Whores lie!’ They say whatever they need to say to get what they want. Can you imagine a prostitute, or even just an out-of-control sex addict, answering that question ‘Gee, who knows? I’m such a slut and I never use protection. Is that a problem?’ Its no easier to imagine a funding proposal that says ‘We’re part of an alienated, mediocre art scene, crawling with scabby posers and itchy wanna-bes. We tested positive for Acquired Academic Schlock Syndrome and it’s likely we have grant-fever. We probably got it from using a toilet seat right after some curatorial peckerwood!’

On Art Fairs:
For those who don’t know, art fairs are the way of the art world these days. They are as inevitable as kissing the anuses of those more powerful than you, and just as enjoyable. Like the whole world, they make a lot of sense when looked at from the point of view of the very wealthy, because art fairs, like the whole world, are entirely set-up to service the very wealthy.

Then you can enjoy watching a bunch of clueless tourists, blind art professionals, manipulative collectors and gutless dealers walk around feeling important, dissing each other, and equating the state of their personal financial health with the state of Art Today. In the best case scenario, they haggle over your work the way old peasant women at a street market in Caracas might haggle over a particularly attractive gourd. That’s called being a big hit at the art fair.

On Press Releases
‘We will enforce a Zero Tolerance policy for art that is not politically correct, for art that does not need a label or an art professional droning on and on about what it means… and especially for any art that is sensually pleasant without a tedious, rational excuse.”

On Grants
I tried getting money from the Non-creative Arts Council of Houston. Applying for a NACHO grant is as degrading as pathological fraternity hazing. They ordered me to supply the names of all my representatives in the U.S. Congress. Wow. That’s just the kind of information that free-wheeling creative spirits, barely surviving on the margins of society, have at their fingertips. Right next to my perpetually updated resumes, my digital photo studio and my state-of-the-art computer system.

On Systems
This was on Richmond Avenue and, as we all know, Richmond is one of the special ‘boondoggle streets’ created by Houston’s charter. That means that every 3-5 years, however functional or necessary the road may be, it gets scraped away, right down to the earth’s core, and is then slowly, but carelessly, brought back into being by a tremendous expenditure of labor, resources and taxpayers’ dollars. Sometimes they widen it a little, take out a kink there, add one here, but it’s really what I would call ‘process art.’ It’s about the process of making sure the right people and the right companies make lots of money.

Flood’s column, Objects in the Mirror, appears every week on Glasstire.