The Matrix of Leadership

Now I have the pleasure and displeasure of knowing some people in what is often self-referred to in a hilarious overestimation of scale and import "the art world," and I can tell you that there is no realm of human endeavor more committed to inanity.  I do not say irrelevance, because I don't believe art should be relevant; a painting isn't an op-ed; a sculpture is not a power-point presentation.  But when your work can be confused with trash, not metaphorically, as in a moral judgement, but actually, as in scrubbed off and thrown away, then perhaps you will consider that your subversion of traditional aesthetics or whathaveyou has gone slightly awry.  I mean, you might consider abstract expressionism monstrous, but you would not confuse a Rothko with a spaghetti-sauce stain; you might think that Matthew Barney is hysterically grandiose and immensely tedious, but you wouldn't confuse The Cremaster Cycle with the faded snapshots you never bothered to un-magnet from the fridge.  Does your art "offer a steadfast commentary"--um, well, then it isn't art, but commentary, and boring commentary at that.  You see one of the problems of the visual arts is that it has sought to become simultaneously performative and philosophical and fall short as both performance and philosophy.  A Chorus Line is more interesting than commentary or performance than a freezer-full of film and video art; any half-assed blog is more philosophically interesting than a pile of junk that's supposed to lecture to you about the mundanity of daily existence.  Transformers 3 is better than the whole of your latest biennale; more skillfully crafted; more artfully accomplished; more rigorously drawn and truly done.