Amazing Artwork...wait...I mean 'Shit'

This morning I was doing some random websurfing when:

“Jesus Christ! You have got to be shitting me.” The words left my mouth before I could stop them.

“What?” Said Sunny from the couch.

“Come take a look at this shit.” I said.

When I’m clicking that oh-so-addictive ‘Stumble’ button, I tend to land on a lot of online artist’s portfolios. Normally, I don’t judge. I have quite a few of my drawings up online, and I’m not a great artist, so who am I to call someone else’s artwork bad?

This one, however, took the cake.

Ok, I know that art is subjective and open to interpretation. You can go to any number of real-life art galleries and see paintings that make you think “I could do that in ten minutes myself!” But this actually, genuinely pissed me off.

This so called ‘artist’ had a website that was filled with what can only be called ‘doodles’. Know when you’re on the phone and just happen to have a pen in your hand, and by the time the conversation is finished you’ve drawn a cube, that star thingy and a smiley face? That’s what this gallery was filled with.

…and she was selling them…and people were buying them.

They weren’t exactly expensive (around fifty-bucks each), but a handful of them were stamped ‘sold’.

I mean, I can understand someone buying a ten second sketch on the back of a napkin if it was by someone like Picasso because there’s history there. It might be a crappy sketch that anyone can do, but in that case, you’re buying it more as memorabilia than as ‘art’. It’s worth a decent amount of cash in the same way a three dollar baseball is worth a lot more with Babe Ruth’s autograph on it.

My question is who spends fifty dollars on a ‘ballpoint pen on copier paper’ sketch by an absolute nobody with zero artistic talent?

When it comes to art, I’m my own biggest critic. That’s why I have sketchbooks and folders full of drawings that I have no intention of ever sharing. As I’ve said before, if zero is someone who’s never picked up a pencil and ten is DaVinci-level artwork…I’m at about 1.2…but I can say in all honesty that I am about a hundred thousand times better than this ‘artist’.

I can’t stress this enough, and I wish I’d saved the URL instead of just closing my browser in disgust so I could show you…but this shit was terrible. Give a ten year old a piece of paper and a marker and in five minutes you’d have something better.

Ok, I know a lot of people reading this will be thinking about paintings by artists like Picasso that were incredibly simplistic and childlike (Just do a google image search for ‘Cubism’ to see what I mean)…but there’s a huge difference.

Picasso started off painting ‘realistic’ paintings and was creating beautiful, realistic artwork when he was still in his teens. He made a conscious decision to leave that behind and break all the established ‘rules’ of composition. That’s what made his work interesting.

My point is that some idiot doodling on copier paper does not an artist make.

Just to illustrate my point (pardon the pun), I decided to emulate this ‘artist’s’ style. You’ll just have to take my word for it that this piece is every bit as good as the shit he has on his site for sale.

So here it is:

Fifty bucks, anyone? Any takers? Technically, this is better than that other artist’s work, because this was drawn with an Pitt brush-pen with archival quality ink! That’s gotta make it at least worth $75, right?

If you want to buy it, there’s a paypal button on the top right of this page. Just donate $75…and don’t forget to include your name, shipping address and explanation of why you’re retarded enough to buy a doodle off a complete nobody over the internet.