At some point in your art education.
Art (n) an act or object conspiring against usefulness.
This is my new theory for what art is, and I can assure you I didn't just come up with it while I was sitting around trying to think of something useful to do. Art began this way though, a man who killed a 500 lb. Bison and was able to drag it to his cave had enough meat to take a week off from hunting and gathering. This man, like most others of his time and place, had never had such luck and such an easy time surviving, so he got bored. Trying to figure out a way to idle the time away, not being burdened by the usual struggle to feed himself, he decided to scrawl a crude depiction of the hunt on the side of his cave and art was born.
As the painting evolved and techniques were refined, the form lost much of it's "artiness." People mostly just used their painting to depict religious scenes and to serve the vanity of noblemen in europe. Painting was to useful to be art at this time, because the Church needed painters, and those Jesus comic pamphlets that people give you on the subway hadn't been invented yet. Realistic painting is far to useful to be considered art by my definition, unless of course you paint something particularly unremarkable.
The greatest work of art from the Renaissance was the Mona Lisa, which was realistic, but marvelous in the strangeness of it's subject. Why anyone would forgo the tradition of getting the most attractive girl in your village to strip nude for your paintbrush, and instead to paint a portrait of a woman with a giant forehead smiling like she had just farted, is a questionable choice. That exercise of poor taste is what makes the Mona Lisa art. People probably saw that and wondered why DaVinci would have wasted his time and technique on such a bland woman, but enlightened people recognized that it was true art, and now it's probably the most famous painting in the world.
Most paintings were too useful to historians or religious scholars to be considered true art for many years to follow. With the birth of photography, painters, like that well-fed caveman, had of a need to work, and could focus on something useless. Modern art was born. It started with Impressionists painting blurry paintings that were to recognize their subject, a great use of "uselessness." Artists then rushed to depict something in ineffectively as possible and abstract art was born.
Picasso's Geurnica was perhaps the first work of Modern art that was on the same level of uselessness as the Mona Lisa. Picasso could have easily gone to Geurnica and painted a picture of a Republican solider bleeding to death in the sun and he would have paid tribute to the fallen of the Spanish civil war, but that would have been far to useful. It might have even brought in International intervention. Instead the genius Picasso painted a bunch of weird ghosty head thingies and I think that one thing is a bull. Picasso's profoundly useless expression of grief and anguish made the world stop and say "what the hell is that?" Now it is common to question acts of war.
Then Marcel Duchamp took the art world by storm by taking a urinal, which is a very useful item, and placing it on the wall far too high for anyone to realistically piss in. This was considered to be a truly great work of art. Art had now reached absurd levels of uselessness, and for the first time in history people who had no useful skills at as, as painters or otherwise, now had cause to call themselves artists. Artistic liberation had finally arrived.
Throughout the 20th century art reached in many directions of uselessness, from Jackson Pollack dribbling paint over a canvas between games of ping pong to Andy Warhol photo copying supermarket coupons between watching soap operas. The pinnacle of modern art was probably the "color field" paintings of Mark Rothko (among others). Some might argue that painting a canvas one color is useful, as it is is similar to the extremely useful act of painting a house. I find that these paintings, lacking primer, are still useless, and still while managing to be as visually uninspiring as a cloudless sky, they are useless even as what we thought art was. Magnificent.
I've tried to take this artistic principle and apply it to my comedy. You see the lowest form of comedy, artistically speaking, would be something useful. Since comedy is basically a useless act, only good for distracting people from doing useful things (I don't believe in that Patch Adams "comedy can heal people" B.S.), the only way to make it useful is to get paid for it. The best way to get paid for it is to help someone sell something using your comedy stylings.
The most useful form of comedy would be to be a guy in a Taco Bell commercial who says something like "You da man." By helping them sell tacos you would be providing a service using your funny face and voice. Even comedians that go on late night shows are providing some kind of commercial service. They are helping to fill five minutes of necessary "entertainment" time between valuable ad space to keep the audience watching and buying. Comedian's on late-night shows help a greatly overworked writing staff by adding five minutes to the show and making their tired "ripped from the headlines" zingers seem funny by comparison to their acts.
I hope to stay useless and make true art. I do this by not performing much, cursing so much that my act couldn't be broadcast and generally looking unpresentable.
Art (n) an act or object conspiring against usefulness.
This is my new theory for what art is, and I can assure you I didn't just come up with it while I was sitting around trying to think of something useful to do. Art began this way though, a man who killed a 500 lb. Bison and was able to drag it to his cave had enough meat to take a week off from hunting and gathering. This man, like most others of his time and place, had never had such luck and such an easy time surviving, so he got bored. Trying to figure out a way to idle the time away, not being burdened by the usual struggle to feed himself, he decided to scrawl a crude depiction of the hunt on the side of his cave and art was born.
As the painting evolved and techniques were refined, the form lost much of it's "artiness." People mostly just used their painting to depict religious scenes and to serve the vanity of noblemen in europe. Painting was to useful to be art at this time, because the Church needed painters, and those Jesus comic pamphlets that people give you on the subway hadn't been invented yet. Realistic painting is far to useful to be considered art by my definition, unless of course you paint something particularly unremarkable.
The greatest work of art from the Renaissance was the Mona Lisa, which was realistic, but marvelous in the strangeness of it's subject. Why anyone would forgo the tradition of getting the most attractive girl in your village to strip nude for your paintbrush, and instead to paint a portrait of a woman with a giant forehead smiling like she had just farted, is a questionable choice. That exercise of poor taste is what makes the Mona Lisa art. People probably saw that and wondered why DaVinci would have wasted his time and technique on such a bland woman, but enlightened people recognized that it was true art, and now it's probably the most famous painting in the world.
Most paintings were too useful to historians or religious scholars to be considered true art for many years to follow. With the birth of photography, painters, like that well-fed caveman, had of a need to work, and could focus on something useless. Modern art was born. It started with Impressionists painting blurry paintings that were to recognize their subject, a great use of "uselessness." Artists then rushed to depict something in ineffectively as possible and abstract art was born.
Picasso's Geurnica was perhaps the first work of Modern art that was on the same level of uselessness as the Mona Lisa. Picasso could have easily gone to Geurnica and painted a picture of a Republican solider bleeding to death in the sun and he would have paid tribute to the fallen of the Spanish civil war, but that would have been far to useful. It might have even brought in International intervention. Instead the genius Picasso painted a bunch of weird ghosty head thingies and I think that one thing is a bull. Picasso's profoundly useless expression of grief and anguish made the world stop and say "what the hell is that?" Now it is common to question acts of war.
Then Marcel Duchamp took the art world by storm by taking a urinal, which is a very useful item, and placing it on the wall far too high for anyone to realistically piss in. This was considered to be a truly great work of art. Art had now reached absurd levels of uselessness, and for the first time in history people who had no useful skills at as, as painters or otherwise, now had cause to call themselves artists. Artistic liberation had finally arrived.
Throughout the 20th century art reached in many directions of uselessness, from Jackson Pollack dribbling paint over a canvas between games of ping pong to Andy Warhol photo copying supermarket coupons between watching soap operas. The pinnacle of modern art was probably the "color field" paintings of Mark Rothko (among others). Some might argue that painting a canvas one color is useful, as it is is similar to the extremely useful act of painting a house. I find that these paintings, lacking primer, are still useless, and still while managing to be as visually uninspiring as a cloudless sky, they are useless even as what we thought art was. Magnificent.
I've tried to take this artistic principle and apply it to my comedy. You see the lowest form of comedy, artistically speaking, would be something useful. Since comedy is basically a useless act, only good for distracting people from doing useful things (I don't believe in that Patch Adams "comedy can heal people" B.S.), the only way to make it useful is to get paid for it. The best way to get paid for it is to help someone sell something using your comedy stylings.
The most useful form of comedy would be to be a guy in a Taco Bell commercial who says something like "You da man." By helping them sell tacos you would be providing a service using your funny face and voice. Even comedians that go on late night shows are providing some kind of commercial service. They are helping to fill five minutes of necessary "entertainment" time between valuable ad space to keep the audience watching and buying. Comedian's on late-night shows help a greatly overworked writing staff by adding five minutes to the show and making their tired "ripped from the headlines" zingers seem funny by comparison to their acts.
I hope to stay useless and make true art. I do this by not performing much, cursing so much that my act couldn't be broadcast and generally looking unpresentable.
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