Sunday, March 27, 2011

David Sedaris on Conceptual Art

If you haven't read this yet, you should:

Or listen to it. That's what I did while painting recently and when he got to Chapter 4 : 12 Moments in the Life of an Artist, I couldn't help but laugh hysterically. Not only at his jokes about artists and their deadly seriousness but also the irony that I was at that second probably at about Moment 5, in my studio, paintbrush in hand. Which I actually had to put down to jot down some of the things he said to laugh at later. Here they are, not exactly quotes but pretty close:

"I took an apartment near the state university where I discovered two things: methamphetamines and conceptual art, neither one of these things is dangerous but in combination they have potential to destroy entire civilizations.

[Former art friends] were still talking about pen and ink portraits and couldn’t seem to understand my desire to drag a heavy cash register through the forest…I hadn’t actually done it but it sounded like a good idea to me.

His living room contained nothing but a giant nest of hair…Their artworks were known as pieces…Nice piece I’d say. In my eagerness to please I accidentally complimented chipped base boards and sacks of laundry waiting to be taken to the cleaners. Anything could be art if you looked hard enough. The world was our conceptual oyster and we ate it raw."

0 comments:

Post a Comment