The dilemma of artist’s dress
Painters, like Antonio Tapies, appear to be bank clerks, but as I observe other painters,
they wear the same clothes.
All in jackets and ties, with the same boring haircut.
Doubt crept into my mind. So I began searching for photos of writers, composers, and various artists.
Externally, they are ordinary people.
They don’t need to transform their bodies into conceptual art because they have the artwork within themselves!
So what is the difference between you and them? Shame and instinct.
You have the former, they the latter.
We, however, are out of the ordinary games.
Our gazes are like tears in canvases.
They serve to look through reality, not to surrender to it?
Perhaps, the artist dresses like this for the following reasons:
- They don’t need to be original because their works are
- They fear being judged as time-wasters too
- They don’t have much money or simply don’t value it
- They don’t give a damn.
So fashion isn’t art, but expensive charlatanism.
I’d like to see an elementary school teacher with purple hair, at least two earrings on their face, maybe a tattoo on their neck.
Instead, they’re often boring, frustrated women dressed like elderly ladies.
Or they dress too much like women, attracting the attention of young students’ penises.
But society is fine with this.
Everyone locked in their own compartment: artists, teachers, poets, railway workers.
Each with their own outfit, pressed and tidy, sometimes different, but so similar that it’s hard to distinguish who the poet is, who the whore is.
Often they’re the same person.
When you go beyond a tomato for dinner, everything is transition, prostitution.
Clothing isn’t a commodity but a business card for conformity, for approval.
So you know what I’m going to do? I’ll take the hammer and smash all the paintings, statues, cinema screens, concert stages, including amplifiers, and with this attack,
I’ll reclaim the anarchy of clothing. The greatest moral, non-visual performance that life can offer.
I have to hide my notes, if Abramovich finds them she’ll steal my idea.
I have a painter friend who won’t sell his paintings for less than 5000 euros (do the math in dollars or pounds, the world isn’t Anglo-centric).
“I worked on it for 15 hours, then the canvas, the colors…”
My father worked in a factory, at least 40 hours a week, earning less than 2000 euros a month, driving four to five hours a day to get to work.
Much more dignified than any artist who, in some countries, lives on unemployment benefits or by giving metaphorical and real blowjobs to whoever’s the patron.
My conclusion is this: to declare yourself an artist, you must do another job, dress differently: not too eccentric or ridiculous. and have the courage not to listen to the judgments of those dressed like you.