I love art, and I like people who make it. But I hate artists. Now now, I hear you saying, Victor, you mustn't generalize, that's prejudice. Fine, I'll be more specific. I hate those pretentious, asinine, bourgeois individuals who have nothing to convey, mistake obscurity for depth, and assume I want to spend my time and money trying to find some content in their empty, shallow forms.


"Tell me again how my rhizomatic indeterminancy encloses my subjective perception within post-Lacanian microtropes."

I saw a short film program at the ReelAsian film festival yesterday. I was expecting documentaries about the Asian experience. Instead I got an incoherent mishmash.

At its best, this included a series of snapshots featuring a Hawaiian model posing with tourists - the tourists change, she stays in the same place. That was OK; nothing profound, but it made you think about how the exotic East is marketed to westerners.

Note the key words in that last sentence: "made you think". The rest of the series tried very hard to kill that process. An artist cutting off her 'breast' in a corset, to reveal a papaya, which she eats, while balancing a plate on her head, telling a story about getting a cheap plate for her grandmother's funeral. The same artist falling on a turf-covered waterbed. 10 minutes of three people badly translating Walter Benjamin, who's writing about a Chinese film star. The artist eating an onion with her parents, ending with kissing them - except she played it backwards, so it began with a kiss. 40 minutes of the artist travelling to a Chinese village trying to market itself as the new Shangri-La, with workers making models of a mountain in wood and a cake.


I like working class musicians

The artist answered questions afterwards. I was shocked by the audience's fawning attempts to ingratiate themselves: it felt like an extended version of The Emperor Has No Clothes. But I noticed all the pretentious hipsters asked the same question: what do the films mean? In other words, the artist had failed to convey anything.

Was this because she was a bad artist? Possibly, but I think it goes deeper. It wasn't that the artist had a considered, complex premise that simply got the better of her skills. Rather, she had no premise to begin with.

When people asked what the waterbed film was about, she said, "It's about how my actions affect the portrayal of the environment I'm in." The translators showed that signs and signifiers are impossible to share (not that you should get better translators.) The onion-kissing was a reference to Cocteau. The Shangri-La story was a meditation on 'heaven on earth', because the fake mountain range was made out of mirrors which reflected the sky.

Let's summarize. We impact our environment, and that affects us, geddit? There are people who don't read German very well. Cocteau's gorgeous, surreal imagery - and tight plots, I might add - is like making out with your parents. You can see the political economy of a Chinese village, by paying the villagers to make a wooden mountain and a cake.


I thought I was in a fantasy movie about the ability of love to ease our fear of death. But I should've just kissed my father!

These are not premises. Premises are systematic investigations of interlinked concepts around a central theme. These are simply rehashed moments of high schoolish, 'things are not what they seem', pop philosophy. I learned more about the Asian experience reading my Little Red Book, and it took less time.

I find it insulting that artists can get money for half-baked ideas that communicate nothing about the world around them. That they feel they can dispense with narrative structure altogether and that equals a different take on the world, rather than incoherency. I find it particularly disrespectful that an artist can use the lives of poor Chinese working people to illustrate their own non-points, without investigating the political, economic, cultural and social history of their subjects. For christ's sake, she used her own artist grant to pay them to make the mountain models, so she could film it! Privilege? Imperialism? That's what other people do - we're artists.


"I'm gonna be in pictures? Gee, thanks!"

I want to sit these artists down and make them work at Burger King for a year; then I want them to take an Intro to Political Economy course; and finally, convince a room full of Bolivian peasants that they don't understand what material reality is.

I put this all at the mushy, clay feet of postmodernism. Once you feel it's impossible to discern the world according to reliable criteria, you can use any criteria you want. Which quickly becomes no criteria at all. Ironically enough, you end up using the same criteria that has distinguished bourgeois art since the dawn of capitalism: your ability to step outside the labour process and be an 'individual'.

That's what I hate most about these artists: they fail to reflect anyone's social reality but their own. Their quest for 'uniqueness' makes them all the same. Thousands of bourgeois using public money to replicate the alienation that makes most people workers and a few of them, artists. They reinforce capitalist social relations just as surely as Donald Trump - except he's honest about it. Artists, on the other hand, make the system seem less odious, because it lets a few privileged wankers ignore it.


"Capitalist exploitation? I've tried to observe it, but I keep passing out from all the absinthe."

To show my heart's in the right place, here's a link to my favourite art blog, Tea Time With Big Nurse. The Asian-American artist works in different media, creates crafts, grounds her themes in everyday life and, best of all, doesn't take herself very seriously. Engaging, intelligent, fun art, worth a dozen film festivals.