There will always be Art

Last night I remembered what it is like to damage my hearing. I went to see Barbarion. A reminder of why I still like words like 'rad' and 'bodacious'.

Yes there music gripped my scrotum. Apart from the self consciousness of standing in the front row of a well lit audience, I thoroughly enjoyed the performance.

Namely, long winded guitar solo's in every single song. Riff driven pieces with profound lyrics such as 'Infamy has it in-for-me' (note that infamy can easily be pronounced 'informe') and the powerful ballad of 'Matilda, my favorite wife'.

I saw new and exciting guitar toting techniques, like the 'rifle' and also a bass solo that involved playing the bass in the violin position. I couldn't actually hear said solo perhaps because the two largest speakers in the building were pounding it directly into my testicles, but it looked impressive.

Furthermore, I've always hated bands that are 'gimmicky' like KISS, KISS and Slipknot. But the costumes really added something to Barbarion. They were dressed like varieties of Barbarian ethnicities. And rather than being a confusing homage to demonic powers, like Slipknot and Kiss, and lets face it I think nobody really knows what satanism and witchcraft are really about, other than trying to pretend you are shocking and wish it was halloween every day of the year.

But this was a harking back to simpler times, where instead of Wall Street 'Masters of the Universe' people dressed more like He-man from 'Masters of the Universe' and instead of cashing in on short term asset bubble leveraging schemes. People cashed in on short term raping and pillaging of neighboring agrarian societies.

And so one could simply enjoy Barbarion. Something else I've simply been enjoying is Ren & Stimpy.

John K, creator of Ren & Stimpy may take the title of first ever genius I don't want to meet. But that said, his work speaks for itself. The nonsensical interludes, superfluous scenes and everything else breaking from the convention of just about everything a cartoon is supposed to be about.

Wanting to settle an argument I had with my brother as to whether the voice of Stimpy was clearly the voice of 'Fry' from Futurama, I stumbled across the quote on Wikipedia of early meetings with John K...

Bill Wray said that he and Kricfalusi met to "sit around and discuss how really good cartoons died in 1961." Kricfalusi and Wray attributed the decline to the rise of parent groups asking for cartoons to take "educational" approaches. He added that the creators of Ren and Stimpy did not want to create an "educational" series and that the stance bothered Nickelodeon.

In other words, Ren & Stimpy avoided the basic assumption that a story has to be about anything.

I have to say, the episodes I like most now that I'm all grown up are one's like 'visiting Anthony' where half the episode is about the tension of Anthony's aggressive father intimidating Ren & Stimpy, shouting a hail of spit at them.

Or the old favorite, 'Stimpy's fan Club' most of which consists of Ren reading Stimpy's fan mail, and then his corresponding decent into madness.

I enjoy Ren & Stimpy as pure art, probably why I'm in the minority that still prefer the 1989 Batman by Tim Burton to The Dark Knight. Furthermore, its probably why I'm in the minority that still prefer the Adam West Batman Movie to all other incarnations of Batman.

Pure artistic genius.

Then I have to say having seen the works of Botticelli, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Dali, Magritte, Van Gough and so fourth, their works really don't look like any other paintings.

And they are all to varying degrees about something or about nothing.

In all, I don't believe that Art critiques will ever be considered experts in the sense that scientists are considered experts.

Art is undefinable. Absolutely anything could be art, pointless or not. Created or not. In away everything is a subset of art. Critiquing any form of art is in itself an art form.

Hence it is my position, that Art in all its forms will always have a place, at any time. Even if the world was cracking in two, its molten core ruptured and expanding into noxious radioctive flecks, contaminating our lungs as the atmosphere splits into two amorphous bubbles. Somebody will probably want to use their last breath to express something.

And that something needn't really be about anything.

But in a way we shall all be gripped by it, in the scrotums of our souls.