- noun
an “artistic” movement reflective of post-WWII America’s industrial dominance. Just as GM was able to slap together shitty cars & dump them on the “free” world, American "artists" figured they could slap any shit they wanted onto a canvas & declare it artistically "relevant". As the
philosopher P.T. Barnum observed, a sucker’s born every minute, & so the shit sold.
A major reason these artists sucked was they couldn’t stay inside the lines. They side-stepped this seeming career-killer by ignoring the lines & marketing themselves as rebellious, anarchic,
idiosyncratic & nihilistic which explains A LOT about why the “art” looks the way it does… when you set out to paint shit, you end up with art that looks like shit.
Eventually the art world caught on to the scam, forcing the “artistes” to rebrand themselves as trailblazers in other bogus schools like “Post-painterly Abstraction”, “Color Field Painting”, “Lyrical Abstraction”, “Action Painting”, “Minimal Art”, “Post-minimalism”, & eventually some crap labeled "Neo-expressionism", a style so
insignificant it barely escaped the late-70s. Given the paucity of talent in the artists who inspired them (e.g., Amedeo Modigliani, Max Jacob) it’s no wonder their works have the aesthetic appeal of a dog’s breakfast.
Truth be told, most were frustrated poseurs who couldn't handle composition &
perspective, & burned out on cocaine in the 70s to escape their anger at just missing the free-love movement of the 60s.
Chip: Hey, Dale. I didn’t know Hunter S. Thompson did Abstract
Expressionism painting… hope you didn’t spend much on that
piece of crap you hung in the foyer.
Dale: I’ll have you know that’s a Michael Petroni… one of Neo-expressionism’s finest artistes!
Chip: If that’s
the good stuff, save me from the rest of it. And hang that monstrosity somewhere else, like the attic.
