Like When Your Mother Is Teleported to Afghanistan

            Like everyone else, I have a limited and self-selected circle of friends.  They fit broadly into a few categories: musicians, people in porn or otherwise in the sex industry, other artists, a handful of jack-of-several-trades writer/comedian/filmmaker types trying to get books published or screenplays sold or shows pitched, and a few other otherwise creative-type people.  No surprises there.

            Also like everyone else, it often seems to me like my friends have nothing in common with each other.  I can't imagine inviting the stripper who drives the car with Tank Girl drawn on it to the same party with the postmodern literature expert from New Zealand.  Fact is, though, they all actually have a lot in common.

            Here are some things they all assume:

1-It is ordinary for adults to like punk rock, heavy metal and/or hip-hop.  Anyone who is alive in 2009, interesting, and between the ages of 15 and 40 who doesn't like at least one of those three kinds of music must have lead a strangely sheltered life.

2-Some people have tattoos or piercings or possibly hair dyed an unnatural color.  Some people have beards and some people have glasses.  None of this means anything much or tells you anything much about the person by itself.

3-Sexualized pictures of women aren't necessarily sexist or misogynistic, they're just evidence that whoever made them has an ordinary sex drive.  Furthermore, a decent chunk of the female population likes these kinds of pictures and gets turned on by them.

4-Sexual promiscuity is neither good nor bad in and of itself.

5-Conceptual art and any other art that is justified only by its concept or subject, is the product of a plutocratic conspiracy and is deeply conservative.  (This one only applies to my friends who are aware of conceptual art.  There are those who are unaware of it and don't ever go into museums, mostly because they assume museums are full of boring art which the other friends would identify as: Conceptual.)

6-Art should look good.  If it doesn't, it's bad art. 

7-It is natural to look at street art, illustration, and commercial photography the same way you'd look at art in a gallery and a great deal of innovation can be found in these media if you look carefully.

            A thing I'd like to say immediately here is: I don't regard any of these assumptions as particularly original or eccentric or hip and groovy.  I'm not particularly proud (or ashamed) of any of these assumptions.  This is not an essay where I mean to drop radical new beliefs on a stunned and appreciative reader.  These assumptions aren't, for the most part, things I talk about with friends at all.  These are just a few of the ordinary background assumptions of daily life, right up there with "water is wet" and "it hurts to fall on concrete".

            Now, all these people have a lot of other things in common like, say they think George W. Bush was the worst president since at least Nixon and possibly the worst ever, but I'm not including these in the list.  I'm not including them since these assumptions are ones which are shared with the vast majority of the art-viewing public.  People who might have read the "Arts" section in a newspaper at least once, basically.  Assumptions 1-7 are not necessarily shared by this entire demographic, though I often--often--VERY often--forget that.

            So what is my point?  Getting to it.  Hold on.

            So: I've been looking over old reviews of artists I know and artists I like, and some old reviews of my stuff, too.  What I noticed is that 70-80 percent of the reviews and comments about the art aren't arguing with the quality of the art itself, but with one of the above assumptions.  Like a reviewer will spend half a review talking about how an artist's work is "like graffiti" and whether or not that's ok and what that could possibly mean, or people will write an entire article about whether or not a painter is misogynistic without addressing the issue of whether they're any good at making paintings you'd want to look at or not, or a reviewer will seem to think announcing that an artist's work "lacks a conceptual foundation" is a way to finish a review rather than a way to start a review.

            Worse--and funnier--than this, is when the critic thinks that, just because an artist's work implies a belief in one of the above assumptions, it's a calculated attempt to provoke the critic or the public.

            Imagine for a minute that your mother is teleported to a Taliban-controlled village in Afghanistan.  She's probably not wearing a veil.  She might even be wearing shorts.  The Taliban, naturally, will probably be upset.  Or maybe not, they might laugh--"Hah, woman!  Your attempt to seduce us is laughable!".  Either way, though, they'll be mistaken if they think this is a deliberate attempt on your mother's part to provoke or tempt or doing anything to them.  This is just what happens when someone is transferred immediately from the orbit of one culture into the orbit of another.

            The Taliban won't understand that your mother's shorts, rather than representing an attempt to communicate with them, are just what you wear when you're gardening. 

Likewise, a great number of people who talk about art don't realize that an artist having a tattoo on his neck is not a statement meant to elicit any kind of reaction from them, it's just something that happens to be there for reasons that are local and private and have to do with a separate social world and which don't evaporate when the artist momentarily appears in public.

            Which is all to say that I still get more surprised then I want to when I read stuff about me where people seem bent on finding meaning--good or bad--in the fact that I look like a punk or that I paint women in--occasionally--provocative poses rather than in whether those pictures by that punk are well-executed or not.  I know I shouldn't be surprised--that's not very "media savvy" is it, Zak?  But, really, it never ceases to surprise me that people who write about culture professionally care about things I--and everyone I deal with all day--think of as normal and utterly unremarkable and uncontroversial.

            The fact that I like Leftover Crack is no more a statement than the fact that a Swiss person being born in Switzerland is a statement.  I don't have a choice about it.

            Of course, you could argue that I have a choice about letting people know what I like and don't like, which is true.  But I feel like me changing the way I act just in case a magazine photographer shows up would be kinda like your mom changing the way she dresses just in case a Muslim extremist shows up.  This is America and they're going to have to get used to your mom wearing shorts.  Interpreting the shorts as being meaningful says more about the interpreter than it does about your mom.

            All of this comes up now because I just wrote a book and the reviews will be rolling in any time soon.  It's a nonfiction book about what it's like to work in porn, (with lots of drawings).  Maybe the book is well-written, maybe it is poorly-written, I have edited and re-edited it so many times that I've lost the ability to tell.  I just hope that when the reviews come in they represent attempts to decide which of those two things it is, rather than attempts to teleport me to Afghanistan.