Demon Dingler
Written by John Paul Marat
Wednesday, 17 June 2009 13:34
Your typical downtown New Orleans street is marred by a noxious mischief monotonous in its ubiquity: A sloppy scribble in a 10-year-old's handwriting, an oeuvre nonetheless certainly scrawled by a miscreant old enough to be the child's father. His development is unmistakably arrested and languishing, judging by the dubious tableau and its juvenile content.
In righteous anger we recognize an obvious misuse and misinterpretation of freedom of expression and the downgrading of art by its total democratization to a lowest common denominator, a physical manifestation of the relentless dumbing down of our national psyche. We denounce graffiti committed by simpletons like our ubiquitous urban defacement czar, NOLA Rising's Michael Dingler. We summon our sweltering citizens to penitence and reflection on an epidemic symptomatic of grave afflictions in our anything goes society.
This pseudo street-art is the material expression of a collective downward spiral into total equality in art, an endeavor to lower us all into common artistic playing field by demeaning us through an unwillingness to criticize and differentiate cultural norms of quality. Taste is decried as the untouchable domain of an ivory tower elite. To level us all into equals, into uniformed artistic comrades, that is our mantra. The end-result: we all suck at art.
Graffiti reflects our most absurd democratic predilections and inexorable capitalist pressures, where faux urban wranglers driving costly and soon to be obsolete pick-up trucks listen to codified, unimaginative pop music with a Tennessee accent and barroom-brawl lyrics and don designer cowboy hats, all in an affected effort to stake a claim on the inheritance of an idyllic and abandoned rural America. Ours is a nation where loveless, cheaply constructed strip-malls are denizened by corporate eateries providing "creatively" processed meals that beckon us onto a slippery slope of ill health and cancer. Our coeval cultural inbreeding, instilled by subversive advertising and a perverse ethics indoctrinated via ghastly cinematic abominations, leads our stunted populace to identify the capitalist squeeze on our brains and resources as an unquestionable progressive step towards mankind's apotheosis.
Long ago, when street gangs worldwide proclaimed their territory, grafiftti was a symbol of youthful defiance and urban territorial ambition. Today, New Orleans' expatriate bourgeoisie, comprised of white Yankees and even whiter outcasts from Jefferson Parish and Uptown, doodles Graffiti in an exercise of pretentious and vacuous narcissism. Ben Johnson correctly perceived that "art hath an enemy. It is called ignorance." Indeed. Graffiti comes scrawled in various poses to give it the appearance of something it is not: authentic political messages and artwork by a rebellious working class, rough-handed sons of labor raised in the buzz of industrial machinery. Like hipster outfits and junk fashions, poor artwork is often created to express indifference to judgment - whereas it is an obvious display of the contrary.
It is idiotic for Americans, whose closest approximation to revolution consists of dressing up in spikes and leather at punk rock shows after serving tourists tacky, over-priced drinks in an even tackier Bourbon Street hovel, to invite further criticism by going around painting vapid, baffling expressions of freedom on a public wall. Neither clever nor art, poorly executed graffiti is the callow display of a civilization that encourages public idiocy, a la reality TV, and is led by clownish political leaders like George W. Bush and C. Ray Nagin. Our national fabric is dominated by ugly and unapologetically infantile entertainment figures from Eminem to Bill O'Reilly.
Edmund Burke stated that "To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely." Little wonder that with our nihilistic, reckless drive into cultural penury, sponsored by a terminal capitalist desire for profit at all costs, the value given to art and even life by a large portion of our citizenry is nil.
"To send light into the darkness of men's hearts - such is the duty of the artist." Contrary to composer Robert Schumann's aesthetic, these most pretentious members of the culturally bereft send aggravation and discontent into our citizenry's collective soul. When Wordsworth proclaimed that "Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them", little would he have known the portentios truth of his proclamation. "Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable." Thus spoke George Bernard Shaw. That is, unless the art itself is so crude that it further reduces the appeal of reality.
A confession: About 10 years ago the author defaced a Saturn parked in his driveway during Mardi Gras. His girlfriend looked on with "who the fuck are you" look, leading to a total renouncement of such sad attempts at rebellion.
Another confession: There is some good graffiti art in the world. This isn't aimed at you.
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