Opting for Art - Second Draft

.
I cannot shake an image of the Artful Dodger trying to coax Eeyore through MOMA's revolving doors:

"Oh, Dodger, I don't want to go - nobody wants to look at old me.  I'm just here today and gone tomorrow .  .  .  . and this clown suit.

"Don't be silly Big-E!  They are going to love you here - they positively dwell on the gloomy.  They're thinking of renaming the place "O, Me, O, Ma."

The tableau springs to mind whenever I stumble across a particularly flagrant example of an artist inflating the CON in contemporary art. I wrote before [http://mayispeakfrankly.blogspot.com/2009/06/about-con-temporary-art.html] about wandered into an exhibit called Emerging Talents: New Italian Artists in Florence a couple of years ago to find a half-full bottle of bitten finger-nails defined thus:

Simone lalongo's work consists of a small pillbox.  The seemingly naive simplicity of the work is given the lie by its content: the artist's fingernails, the product of his anxiety and neuroses.

Well, move over Simone you ain't heard nothing yet!  I learned this from a recent edition of Wired: [http://www.wired.com/underwire/2011/08/horse-blood-art/]

It seems that The Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica for hybrid art was recently awarded to Laval-Jeantet for the provocatively titled May the Horse Live in Me, in which she effected what she calls a "hybrid man/animal existence" by injecting herself with horse blood.

One motivation behind the project was to find out how the animal immunoglobulins would affect her mind and body.  A motivation I would question as it presumes the presence of a mind.  Nonetheless, after showering much of Eastern Europe in bureaucratic paperwork – the “artists” were given permission to perform the piece at a gallery in Ljubljana, Slovenia. In post-performance interviews Laval-Jeantet reports that she is now oversensitive to stimuli, and can't tolerate as much alcohol as previously.  Poor baby.

I find it hard to empathize with her malaise.  Remember she did shoot up with horse blood, for crying out loud.  The child needs therapy.

And that, perhaps, is what is so discouraging.  So many young artists take up the mantle of nihilism, claiming Equus asinus Eeyore as their patron Saint.  One cannot blame them too much.   It is de rigueur for my generation to assert that it is the role of the artist to reveal aspects of the human experience that others ignore.  But I'm not quite sure when that path got turned so firmly to the dark side.  Maybe we are attempting to atone for Timothy Leary and all those years of vaguely remembered, sensuous, gaudy, hedonism. But do we really want to encourage our creative kids to do horse blood?  I'm thinking it may be time to move beyond Op-Art and Pop-Art and take a stand for Opt-Art: art rooted in optimism, in happiness.

After all, who are the adults here?  Perhaps it does require a certain fullness of years to realize the precious depth of joy.
.