have to tell ya, for the little i know about England’s Art Brut, i’m hooked. they’re like that cute boy you see in the cafeteria who reminds you of your heart-breaking ex love. Art Brut is the cute caf boy to my punk rock. i wouldn’t go as far as to say that they’re the nirvana of punk rock, but definitely an adequate reincarnation. anyway, i happened upon them last year while listening to yahoo!’s indie radio station- fuckin’ Emily Kane. there it was, that sort of first-love jerkin’-it guitar riff that i got listening to The Damned and Screeching Weasel in high school. so i got my hands on “Bang Bang Rock And Roll” and was mildly obsessed with the song “Bad Weekend” and put it on every mix cd i made for like a month.
THEN i started taking this asian culture class and had to define culture in some way and share my definition with the class- preliminary stuff- and i stumbled upon this sweet article in JSTOR about, you guessed it, art brut. apparently the band gets its namesake from this art created by the fringes of society- jailbirds and hobos and the psychotic. as an art student, i think this is all kind of redundant. i’m a creative person and thus, i am a tiny bit psychotic. but i guess what differentiates art brut artists, or who i will from here on out refer to as art brutists, is their bizarre array of subject matter and materials (media). these artistic heroes threw popular artistic conventions out the window and sought out their own rhythms and styles. i think this is what most artists should be doing, but of course the ones who actually create different and cutting-edge art pieces are disregarded because they don’t have NYC studios or degrees or their work is not blood-splattered with the artistic paradigm created by whatever art critic is fucking everything up with their inane ideals and shitty taste at the time.
i’m sorry. obviously there is need for artistic paradigms and rhyme and reason in art. the subjectivity of the art world tends to drive me a little bit psychotic (see earlier). in one way, a person can create conceptual art with fucking 3 fluorescent lights on the floor of a museum (the FUCKING guggenheim) and be considered genius. in another, a misfit is invalidated because their art is part of an anti-cannon. i dunno. seems to me that a miscreant, psychotic hobo would have a lot more pain and truth to reveal in his art than the hobo-chic art student (let’s pay $60 for a tattered, Free People vest that LOOKS like it’s from goodwill) who comes from money piled into a house with greek columns. to be honest, i think my art is more validated when i practice my drawing and painting. but i’ve come to value art that feels real and is based in truth. i guess for me, it’s a constant struggle between skill and untrained talent. if something is poignant and beautiful but the artist is untrained, can we overlook training and revel in something new or refreshing?
i’m going to swing this on back to the band Art Brut. their hearts probably broke just as mine did when everyone started to utter “punk rock is dead.” but they refused to let it die, and they picked up punk’s sun-bleached skeleton so that they could make bouncy music. hey, i’m listening. you should too. be a nut job, a punk rocker, and fuck the ebb and flow of the paradigms.
blue moon & burritos,
sara
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constantonslaught
