Ah, so you finally gathered your courage to comment. Good, good. I'll reply with what I think about it.

Being able to draw is only a fraction of good art, otherwise Boris Vallejo would rank as one of the premier artists of the twentieth century
He does rank, as a master in his genre. He had inspired a whole industry - that being cinema and put a standard in fantasy illustration. For some highbrow critics who can endlessly praise the "metaphorical depth" and "ingenius, paradoxical concept" of a 10-cent blot of paint on a huge blank canvas, that, of course, is garbage. I'm well aware of that. We're talking about result though - his art was widely commercialized, in the end, which underlined his cultural success. But I'll talk about the whole "content" thing a bit later.

The impact of "Oklahoma Bombing" rests on an unsteady foundation: disdain for the subject. Let's face it, if this wasn't a picture of the Oklahoma City Bomber but of some random guy named Dave Johnson who worked as a plumber in Spokane it would lack all the attention it currently has. It would just be a picture of some dude placed smack dab in the middle of the frame, a regular boring portrait.
The perception of an art piece cannot be torn away from the SUBJECT of that art piece, whether you want it, or not. When a person sees a flower, he is supposed to feel a positive emotion, when a cut off hand - a negative one. Same is true for the people subjects. In all times portrait artists would paint the faces of aristocracy, military leaders, celebrities and generally all those people who evoke emotional reactions from the viewers. In the XIX and XX centuries many artists tried to break that mold, of course, by choosing their subjects amongst the unknown, the dregs of the society, their friends and such. We know these famous portraits, such as the "Lover of Absynth" - but we don't know the subjects. And our emotional reaction is halved down only to the preception of the form, the technique, maybe some other emotional reaction that, however, isn't connected to the real subject of the portrait.
What I'm saying here is that yes, the impact lies in what we know who that person is. Undoubtedly. But it's an invalid argument for debunking the piece, because then you'd have to point at every artist who painted a king, a famous scientist or a general.
No one ever cares about plumber Joe even if he's painted by the hand of a master.


Shocking content has been used purposefully by many an artist to convey their vision. Countless others employ shock tactics for self-promotion. You don't win anything if you guess that I plant you firmly in the latter camp. Any sensible person glancing through his gallery can only conclude that art isn't your secondary concern, it's not even your tertiary one. You, you, and you take precedence. Your singular goal is to piss off your audience.
Well yes, and? To be honest it's not my singular goal - my other goal is to pay homage to the man. But anyway... That, my dear friend, is art. Art evolves as does humanity. At one point, before the Renaissance, I manage, some maitre scolded his art apprentice for daring to paint a nipple as it was deemed un-godly, and claimed that he just wants to shock the audience.
There is two paths we can go down here:
- "sometimes, a banana is just a banana" principle. Sometimes a person paints a nipple on a naked Saint Mary because that's what his self-expression calls for.
- There's nothing wrong in desiring to reach out and piss/shock the audience. That, my overly humble friend, is how names are made in the art industry. Pissing one's audience in our times of total desensitization is a hard task. But not toally impossible.

Think of this. Were it my only and sole goal, I would've painted lynched black people and piles of emaciated corpses down in Treblinka. In happy rainbow colors, with swastikas scriblled all over. That would be much more effective. But I'm not doing it yet. Why? Because pissing off the audience pays off only when this pissing brings you satisfaction, when it's an organic part of yourself. And my respect for McVeigh is indeed, an organic part of me. So once again, you derive wrong conclusions from your observation.

Everyone who picks up a pen and then shows the result to another person is already screaming: "HEY LOOK AT ME". Those who don't go into accounting or try farming. The subject doesn't matter. Pollock screamed, Worholl screamed, Crumb, Van Gogh and every other artist who didn't put his painting in the cellar.

No room is left for interpretation, the viewer need not bring any past experiences or thoughts with them. Right away it's obvious that we're being given the finger. Just as obvious is that the artist never matured beyond the age of thirteen.
I would like the proof of this. About the room for interpretation. You certainly can't speak for every viewer out there, only for yourself. However, if you feel that you're given the finger, you are given it. Someone else might get something else reflected in this piece.


What else could explain a series of userpages that are virtually unidentifiable from each other besides slight variations of a few motif...The fact that this trendiness is based upon racism and ignorance compounds the annoyance factor twentyfold
This whole paragraph was a rather poorly constructed, scholar-level attempt at some scathing social commentary, pretty surprising in a critique of a concrete work of art and just further obliterating the flair of "competence" and professionalism you tried to give off with this critique.

Firstly, any ideology is a fandom. Every social process where individual human beings team up for a sake of some concept or object, can be described as a fandom. A dome of fans, ie - devotees, followers, etc. Politics is a fandom. Religion is. Science. Literature. Is it bad? Well not really, it's just human nature. Even when you snobbily look down on these fans, you're joining a growing fandom of smug individualist yappers who share the same outlook on things, same hairstyle, dresscode and even their favorite books. I've met these types of people - you met the types of people like me.

Secondly, our outspokedness. That's just following the zeitgeist. You surely don't think that we national-socialists are stuck in the 1940s and the methods of those times? No. If the world dictates that every special snowflake is out there and should scream to the world about their sexuality, their love for America, their apathy, their atheism, their religion - we shouldn't drown in this cacaphony. We'll adapt and tailor ourselves a new public suit, and this is one of them. I see your bitterness in the fact that it actually works - well, hard fucking candy.

Today a trend, tomorrow a force. Any channel must be utilized to reach the goal. If someone is attracted to the flashing, if someone says "hey, you know, these Nazi guys are actually sort of cool" - that's another small victory. If someone says: "oh pshaw, these are just edgy kids and their weird fetish, it'll pass" - that's another small victory too. It's easier to defeat an opponent who underestimates you, who thinks that his status quo will hold forever on the basis that it's "rational" and "good".

Yep, he was a loser and it shows in this picture. He killed a few people, but the tyrannical American government kept on chugging along just as strong as ever! It isn't too presumptuous to think that the person who drew this finds the idea of heroism through failure an appealing one.
I wouldn't call a person that accomplished his goal a looser. Plus it's quite silly to judge heroism based on immediate success. By this logic any soldier who lost his life in an ungoing war is looser, just because his individual action hadn't slipped the scales. That's pretty faulty, if not outright moronic.

I'll skip the whole shit-analogy due to it's trivial nature and yet another display of "proof-based" opinion. In the end, who am I to tell a viewer how to view my work?

In conclusion, let me in return critique your critique and share some of my own thoughts on the presented argument.

In short, your tirade can be boiled down to "shock art is shit because it's done for attention and holds no real substance". It's a debatable topic for whatever, but I just want to know - but what holds real substance? What is real art? Does the critic know what it is? And I take a look at the critic. And what do I see?

I see a severe case of "artschoolstudentitis", a horrible illness that parasitises on young painters, when they suddenly the discover the world of High Art and get this weird, psychotic idea that content reigns over form just because the modern art staples had ruled it out so.

You see, there's a catch. I may look like a total redneck wacko that draws killers, warhammer, neon swastikas and etc. However, I'm fully aware of what I'm doing. I'm a journalist. I'm no stranger to art galleries, trendy exhibitions, I'm thoroughly educated in the history of fine arts, theater and cinema. And I'm very, very well aware of what kind of views and paradigms rule there. The snobism and all. I've witnessed the blooming of the whole "performance and installation" genre, of this modern quest for the meaning in art and how it got diluted to the point where everyone just took after the toilet formula, trying to squeeze the meaning and content out of every pore of oneself.

I call it trying too hard. You can call me a stuckist. For me, the form IS the content, as long as it is figurative art, but you, yet, seem not to grasp the concept. Your own paintings represent this frantic, desperate attempt to trick and play with the viewer, to create a meaningful layer and sense of mystery, while the harsh truth lies in the fact that the mystery resides in the mind of the viewer and cannot be artificially created through vieled hints and games.

Do abstract art for the aesthetics, do surrealism not to amuse the viewer, but as a tool to express the desired form.

Why do I say this? Because your writing is the same, a typical example of a person that has a very vague idea of what he wants to say, so he tries to veil it with intricacy and an air of supposed superiority. It lacked a rigid structure. Arguments weren't backed up, you jumped from the question of substance to the discussion about the "current generation omg kids get off my lawn" and ended it in insults. You've used inappropriate quotations by unauthorative and obscure figures to mask the lack of your own words and thought on the matter, and it all just reeks of artschoolstudentitis, a hempy bohemian condescendance based on well, nothing.

I like it when people disagree with me, but I like it when they speak their own mind, instead of blurting out some regurgitated barf of postmodern outlooks on art and shit.

But it's still entertaining.

And one last thing - I recommend watching how your visitor count and statistics surge up after this. Because you really need to learn that popularity isn't that bad. Faked obscurity, indecipherableness and underground are art crimes no lesser than mine )

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ONE PART THE FUHRER
ONE PART THE POPE