Is this thing Art? (or Stop Destroying Western Civilization in the Name of Duchamp)

This week I went to Gagosian Madison Avenue to see one of the most disgusting shows of the decade. Not that I purposely went to waste my time there, but since I was walking to the Metropolitan Museum I decided to head upstairs.

Three floors of dots paintings -- if you can call a stretched canvas full of dots a painting. And I heard that the eggs are spread around in the world's Gagosian hen houses. In the canvas defense: In some of them the dots break the edge line, making them wavy, in others the color vibrate against the white background. I remember talking to a security guard about one particular painting and saying to him that despite that the majority of the dots were vibrating one of them didn't because it was grey and thus the painting was a failure.

I'm an artist and I applaud when and artist's cunning and marketing skills make his career take off. But what can I say when a con-artist's* skill makes him a millionaire? There was a time when true artists have to prove themselves to the world and to their collectors, either by God given talent such as Picasso, by perseverance and consistence such as Cezanne, or by unfettered passion and hard work such as Van Gogh. But how can one react if after going to the gallery or the museum is faced with an exhibition by Ripley's Believe or Not of cow heads and stuffed sharks? And the people who spend million buying those things, omg.

I've been holding my ire for years waiting for the best to happen, that the fashion finally was going to go away. But it hasn't and its been a long time. Does anyone realize the amount of damage is exerted into society by imposing this stupid, mediocre "art" in the name of Duchamp? How perception, taste, ideas of beauty, sophistication and refinement got so twisted in the social consciousness that mediocrity has become the model and the descriptive character of an epoch? Is it not that what you see today as contemporary art is not merely a symptom but the great detonator of the collapse of the Western mind?

*The term con or conning implies substitution, something in place of the true thing. The con-artist job is to replace perception. In the case of those people who use other artists to draw, paint and sculpt for them they are replacing the perception of the creative individual as someone who doesn't need to do anything with his hands.

In classical art schooling the hand needs to be trained in order to catch up with the ability of the mind. This presupposes that the mind is faster and swifter and that the hand has to be able to reach the mind, just as the athlete train his muscles to be the first in the race.

Those artists who make people draw, paint, sculpt and even generate ideas for them are like untrained athletes.

Now imagine for one moment something impossible: an untrained athlete winning the gold medal in a race.

Or imagine something possible: A trained athlete using a banned performance enhancing substance to win a race. It is illegal and its is unethical and if discovered he/she is stripped of his/her medal.

A so called artist who employs an army of artists to do the art for him/her is like an athlete using performance enhancing drugs. Why is he/she celebrated instead and given an honorary place in culture and society?

How can both untrained artists and performance enhancing user artists, unlike athletes, are allowed to win gold medals and trophies?

This is different than the genius in his workshop. Peter Paul Rubens studio gyrates around the figure of the talented drafter and painter, the superb anatomist and perspectivist, the master crafter and artist. It is the same with all the great figures in the history of art up to the moment in which the able and trained body became separated from the mind. The mind went on a trip of its own, alienating the body. To the point that the body was considered an unnecesary and superfluous attachment and deemed replaceable by another body or another instrument.

Perhaps this emphasis on the replaceability of the body started with the Industrial revolution, when it was discovered that the machine could do faster, better and more work than what the body could do.

So called artists who employ other artists to do their work are an expression of that moment in which the insufficiency of the body for the task at hand was replaced by the over sufficiency of the machine. It is the moment in which the inhumanity of modernism was transported into and became the inhumanity of modern art.

I don't have anything against artists having the freedom to do whatever from chicken eggs to cow heads. But what we are witnessing here is the imposition of an idea about art to the rest of culture and society by a group of individuals who have the power to do so. If you have lived in a totalitarian regime you know that one of the means of control by the government is the limitation of information and communication. The individual, bombarded by a one sided and biased flow of information has a limited perception of the world and a limited capacity to understand it.

Those who have the power to regulate information have the power to control the minds of the population. There is no difference regarding art. When certain individuals and institutions have the power to decide what is to be shown and communicated to the people they provide a one sided, biased perception of art and culture that becomes hegemonic, thus providing the means for the people to construct a limited idea and understanding of what art and culture is. A culturally engineered half human being is created. A cultural dummy. It is true, Wall Street is not the only institution that needs to be occupied this days.