[The Seven by Nine Squares home page] [YAWN 14] [Art Strike 1990-1993]

Confession in Support of the 1990-1993 Art Strike


I may as well admit it from the start. They've been right all along. I'm useless. Totally worthless.

But then, chances are, so are you or you probably wouldn't be wasting your time reading this publication. Not really wasting your time. Wasting the precious air that your excuse for a body is breathing. When you should be rotting in a rapidly disappearing Amazonian jungle, or a woods somewhere,-performing the only function that you're probably good for. As compost. After all, isn't it about time that you did something for the trees after having deforested them for so long for the sake of making paper to put your silly, egotistical drawings on?

No, not really wasting your time. This publication might even be damn "good" for your lowly, conniving, pseudo-sensitive pollutions you so ludicrously glorify as art. Face it. You're a careerist of the most parasitic sort. At least admit that this slop in printed form is no more than a sort of "True Crimes" manual with pretensions of superiority. I have. When I realized that useful people like car mechanics, wet nurses, and mad bombers have good reason to scorn my "flights of the imagination" and "abstract" thinking I was brave enough to blurt out to the world to see that I'm just another con artist. Just out for an unfairly easy living and a free meal. Just like you! (dirty scribbler) Do you have the guts to spill it out as honestly as I have? Or are you just going to snivel and complain in that cushy Bolton Hill (or wherever) apartment that your parents pay for because you're incapable of facing harsh reality long enough to support yourself? -Or maybe you're too busy being duped into gentrifying someplace like Hollins Market so that the rich can get richer and the you-know-what can get you-know-whater. Ever notice how many of your non-artist neighbors are going to prison? Avant-garde = gentrification. Be it of the soul or of the city. When the artists come, there goes the neighborhood.

Not that I'm any better than you are. That's why this is a confession. As my parent set is infamous for having written, "Artists are only good for three things: making glasses, basket-weaving, and counterfeiting money." Well put-but, with all due respect, not going far enough.

Have you ever asked yourself why you're reading this publication? Probably not. So let me rub it in your mug. Oh, I'd say half of your motivation lies with your scummy need to pick up those little tricks of the trade like how to pretend to convince the government and corporations that you just might be smart enough [more confession, from other side] to be able to bad-mouth them if they don't give you the payola to support your addle-brained pot habit-all so that they can pretend to be doing something socially useful by keeping you alive. And as for the other half? Your pathetic need to qualm your microscopic conscience with that big fat mutual pat on the back.

"Gee, you're sooooo talented! I just love the way you take that palette knife and squiggle it around like that! Oooohh! That really is great! That prick and pussy horse tongue collage would really shock your mom and dad! Better not let them see it! (giggle)"

So what's the ball point of all this? The Art Strike. The only answer to a problem we should've gotten rid of with the bubonic plague. In fact, why stop for just three years? Take a good look at yourself, stop exercising solely to get your mouth between your legs, and give up art altogether. Do you want to be so ashamed of yourself that when you're fifty-five and your grandchildren come to visit you in the nursing home you can't even look them in the eye? Don't forget, if even they hate you, you won't even be able to bum your fucking cigarette money off of them.

Don't be more of a scab than you already are. Support the Art Strike.

[Baltimore, Maryland


Read: On the Use of "paradox" as a Philosophical "Electric Prod" & EmBEDed Ulterior Motives as Trickster of the SubConscious in the Writings of Tim Ore, a comment on Tim Ore's Confession in Support of the Art Strike
Reprinted in SMILE 11, Glasgow 1989

Further bibliographical information in tENTATIVELY a cONVENIENCE Bibliography