‘FINGER NAIL SALOONS AND STARVING ARTISTS’

[Davo]

‘FINGER NAIL SALOONS AND STARVING ARTISTS’

Is the ear half on or half off?

(Read using your most credible ‘Al Pacino voice’)

What would it be like if Vincent van Gogh were alive today? I would be willing to say that everything would be exactly the same EXCEPT – that he would have better medication. If he could afford it. Everything else would be the same. The painting would be the same. The obscurity would be the same. The unappreciated genius would be the same. Perhaps he would be institutionalized, since he had a mildly self-destructive personality, but perhaps not. Chances are he might even be homeless. Imagine that, one of the most important artists of all time - homeless! Of course this is all pure speculation on my part. Or is it? How many of us today would recognize his troubled genius without some art historian peering over our shoulder and whispering in our ears? Would you be able to look at his paintings and say, ‘This man is a genius, ahead of his time’? Would you be able point him in the right direction so that he would receive the recognition he deserved? The big-shot art dealers in Paris weren’t impressed with him at the time so why should the average work-a-daddy citizen know better? Considering his supposed lack of social skills, would you even want him around? Better to rub elbows with him at the local arts fundraiser down at the country club. Although I doubt you’d ever find him there.
Yet everyone knows van Gogh! Everyone loves van Gogh. His work is reproduced on everything from calendars and fine art prints to T-shirts to mouse pads to key chains to fake rubber ears for Halloween. Whenever his name is mentioned the whole room swoons and waxes nostalgic. But why? Why does everyone LOVE van Gogh? Is it because they are such astute art lovers? Do they identify with his life of self-sacrifice and deprivation? His frustration? His suffering? His loneliness? I don’t think so. I think someone TOLD them that he is IMPORTANT and made a big deal out of it. He’s gotten good press. Sure, we can all feel sorry for him cause he’s dead and ‘never sold one painting in his whole life, after a lifetime of dedication’; which is untrue, he did sell one. Or so someone says. A worse tragedy is now that he’s been dead so long, his paintings are the most expensive in the world and he never saw a dime of it. That’s about the only part you can be sure of.
But then a great many artists throughout history worked just as hard and lived lives of quiet desperation, whose work could easily stand along side anything van Gogh ever painted and yet they are even more obscure today than Steven Hawking is to a New Guinea pigmy.
Yes, we know that he suffered. Is that the key to his immense popularity, his suffering? Are we sympathetic to his art because we empathize with his cruel fate? Do we feel too that our own creative efforts have largely gone un-noticed by a cold, unfeeling world that is too busy struggling to survive? And what a cruel fate that was; to be nameless in life, and have world renown after death.
Today van Gogh would have to continue suffering in some form in order to insure his future in the annals of art history. Let’s face it, suffering is B.B.O. Big box office. Jesus, Gandhi, Kennedy, Elvis, Joan of Arc; they all suffered and we love them all the more for it.
So where would you likely find van Gogh today? I believe you might find him in one of two places; either walking the streets, wild-eyed, with paints and easel in hand OR sitting behind the manicurist’s table over at the neighborhood fingernail saloon where he could not only put his artistic skills to practical use, but, contrary to his earlier incarnation, earn a respectable living. Maybe he eventually saves enough to one day open his own fingernail saloon. Maybe call it something like, ‘Vinnie’s Expressionist Fingernail Saloon’. I’m sure that with a little practice, his artistic talents could be tailored to the fine art of fingernail painting and design.
But what would happen to his ART? Would selling out compromise the very qualities that enamor him to so many? What about his emotional use of color, the erratic, frenzied brushstrokes, the hallucinogenic imagery? Happy now as a respectable manicurist, and no longer the social miscreant, but an accepted member of society, might he not succumb to the distractions that plague our world today? Television alone, our modern version of a ‘living painting’ could take its’ toll on his art, as could shopping, video games, the wife and kids and Internet porn. Or…
Or, empowered with today’s resources, might he raise up the painted fingernail into the fashionable bastions of High Art? Stranger things have happened. And since there are more fingernail nail saloons in existence than art museums, why fine art might at last become accessible to the masses, assuring the further appreciation of all art - and artists in general. The manicurist would no longer be merely ‘a lowly employee’, but would get the long-overdue respect they deserve as a ‘fingernail sculptor’, mais non-, ‘Un sculptoir du doit’. Celebrity fingernail sculptors would have their own television shows featuring celebrity manicures, celebrity interviews, manicure news and manicure tips. They would be spokespeople for high recognition name brand products, receiving millions in royalties, their faces on every magazine cover and tabloid on supermarket shelves around the world. They would be asked to host Saturday Night Live. In the history books of the future they will mention the era when fingernail art set the tone for a nations taste in the arts…. and van Gogh no longer suffered.




Naaaaaah!

[karen rand anderson]

well. Hmm. Instead of fingernail masterpieces, I'm thinking he would be a tattoo artist; slightly more permanent. (along the lines of what Dave mentioned. Just imagine seeing "Starry Night" as a tattoo on the skin of someone's back, preserved and stretched under glass for eternity... creepy) IN any case, good one, Davo. Keep writing. ONe of these days I may get passionate enough about something to write a blog too....

[Davo]

Not to worry Dave, we would only be pulling the fingernails from the fingers of banksters and mortgage loan brokers, then paint them and mount them.
The fingernails that is...

[Dave Mathieson]

A curator came to me one day mentioning that he had been confronted by a donor that offered his “hide” to the museum upon his demise. I looked at him curiously and said, “What the f**k”, not really but it did pop into my mind. This potential donor had a full body suite done by a renown Yokahama artist back in the 1940’s and wanted to have it preserved after his passing. He had arranged for a mortician and taxidermist to perform the removal of his “hide” and properly preserve it for posterity after his passing. The curator was perplexed as to how to address this request. After all this gets kind of personal. This may not only be a rejection of the donor, if this is the direction the curator was going to go, but also a rejection of the original artist who performed the work.

I have to assume that the manicurist in the art of nailism is more conceptual than perpetual otherwise we would have to be going through the painful process of fingernail pulling and preservation baring that the nails art was done on press on nails. Would museums now be forced to have departments of digital artistry and curators of nailism or digiart. This is all confusing as I can see this whole art form slowly progressing in the direction of body piercing and the like which all brings us back to the beginning when a piercing artist confronts Van Gogh with only one ear which could upset the symmetry. Oh well, I must get back to my latte and check my backlog of text messages.

[Rhonda Ward]

Tragedy is attractive. It adds a sense of mystery. The tragic artists have all the fun. The hook is that they have to suffer to do it, at which point it's too late for them to join in. They never get to hear the songs, read the books, or view the films produced about them. Even having cut off his own ear, van Gogh remained obscure. But dead and having cut off his own ear, he became much more interesting. I LOVE van Gogh, and Plath, and Wolfe, Basquiat, and all the other tragedies.

As for fingernail painting, one would have to sever the digits to truly enjoy that artwork on a personal, daily basis. Otherwise, chipping and the gradual degradation due to nail growth would ruin the masterpiece. van Gogh would definitely be found "walking the streets, wild-eyed, with paints and easel in hand"!

[Daphne Lee Martin]

funny, just what i needed after a long day at the shop.

[Cindy Samul]

I appreciate your humorous approach to some serious questions. I think the most important question you ask is, "Why does everyone LOVE van Gogh?" Many now well-known artists have suffered, in fact all people suffer to some degree so why van Gogh? Perhaps the answer is in the question... "LOVE." Van Gogh's work comes from a place of love. He loved, life and beauty and color and painting and...God in spite of his suffering. I always felt that was the miracle of van Gogh and why he endures.