Obscure Artist Will Kill for Fame
I hate to give this any more press than it's already gotten, but as it's part of a trend, I think it's worth a mention. Brazilian artist Gil Vicente has manufactured some controversy over charcoal drawings that show him assassinating such horrors of humanity as George W. Bush, Pope Benedict XVI, Israeli PM Ariel Sharon, Queen Elizabeth and... you get, as it were, the picture. In doing this, Vicente joins the ranks of such other sad hate mongers as Nicholson Baker, who imagined killing W in his novel Checkpoint (I'm not linking. Find it yourself.), and the clowns who made the film showing Bush's murder, whatever it was called.
The only point I want to make about this, is that these artists and the people who cover them and even the people who are outraged by them all fail, it seems to me, to ask the pertinent questions the work actually raises. To wit: If your philosophy fills you with murderous rage, shouldn't you change your philosophy? If murder is the necessary outcome of your politics, shouldn't you change your politics? If your worldview has no room for art that transcends death shouldn't you change your worldview?
Or to put it another way, if this is all you have to contribute, shouldn't you just shut up and go soak your head?
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Re: Obscure Artist Will Kill for Fame
"If your philosophy fills you with murderous rage, shouldn't you change your philosophy? If murder is the necessary outcome of your politics, shouldn't you change your politics?"
Beautiful.
Jun '10
Re: Obscure Artist Will Kill for Fame
Am I the only one who notices the irony that when these nuts engage in hypothetical assassinations, it's aimed at people like GWB, the Queen, Pope Benedict, and an Israeli PM, and not men like Castro, Ahmadinejad, or Chavez?
I'm not a proponent of an alternative list, but there's something sick when two of the targets are elected leaders, one the head of the world's largest Christian Church, and the other last in a long line of royalty of a country that exported institutions to a large part of the world (that continue to benefit those countries today).
And, incidentally, I think he's a crappy artist. I can draw better than he can.
Edited on Sep 27, 2010 at 12:07pmJul '10
Re: Obscure Artist Will Kill for Fame
What, no Mohammed?
I was going to type Jesus, but then...
Aug '10
Re: Obscure Artist Will Kill for Fame
I hate to say this.....but there ought to be a law against freaks like this ! Has the public's concept of art fallen so law that this is considered as such ? His narrative is absolutely necessary to justify such puerile scrawls and his choices of victims just "edgy" enough to disgust the right people. Makes you yearn to see Chris Ofili ,as Karen Finley perhaps, smearing himself with elephant dung. A neat package that !
Edited on Sep 27, 2010 at 12:39pmMay '10
Re: Obscure Artist Will Kill for Fame
Andrew, I have an antidote for your cultural blues.
Or, as I refer to it, aging monarch wings obscure artist.
Edited on Sep 27, 2010 at 2:33pmMay '10
Re: Obscure Artist Will Kill for Fame
As Peter said, beautiful. And a powerful reply to the multi-cultural belief in the equal validity of all viewpoints. It may be beyond human minds to fully grasp the absolute truth, but we can confidently identify ideas that are certainly false. As Andrew says, if your ideas lead to these sorts of fantasies, they are certainly false and valueless.
The same can be said of philosophies that lead one to wear a bomb into a public market, or fly a jet into an office building. Only madness can reach such conclusions.
Jun '10
Re: Obscure Artist Will Kill for Fame
The difference is, Conservatives don't want a collectivist Utopia on Earth, where everyone agrees. That's not the ideal system, or even achievable. It's only "achievable" if you kill off all the dissidents, and only fascists and communists are willing to do that. Conservatives aren't looking for Utopia on Earth. We just want the voters in charge.
Sep '10
Re: Obscure Artist Will Kill for Fame
What a chicken. The guy picks a bunch of people he hasn't met - people whose daily lives are a total mystery to him. He doesn't really know whether he wants to shoot them or not because he doesn't know what it is they do all day. If he had any courage as an artist at all, he would have drawn himself shooting a handful of close acquaintances, neighbors or coworkers. At least then he could offer some concrete reasons why he wanted to kill them. Instead, he's suggesting the most juvenile of actions - if I kill the Pope, I can make the Catholic Church go away.
Grow a pair, Gilster. Draw yourself shooting the teenager who lives next door to you or maybe grumpy old Tia Consuela. Think globally, act locally, dude.
May '10
Re: Obscure Artist Will Kill for Fame
His "art" can best be described as shallow provocation.
Aug '10
Re: Obscure Artist Will Kill for Fame
Michael it's as shallow as any production he could mount or possibly issue what a loser let's see who flies this flag as "art".
Sep '10
Re: Obscure Artist Will Kill for Fame
A commenter on my own blog made the excellent point that such "art" almost never brings support for your position. Instead, it elicits sympathy for the person being killed in the image. If he wanted to make a propaganda point, he'd have been better off showing Ariel Sharon driving a bulldozer over a Palestinian orphanage.
My point, crudely made above, was that it's so very safe to draw yourself shooting a distant figure such as Queen Elizabeth, but so very dangerous to draw yourself shooting even your neighbor's dog. As provocative, political art, this is neither effective nor courageous.