YES, damnit, it IS SO art!

The other night I struggled with a moral dilemma. An ad for legaleriste.com came through my Facebook feed - this is a company that turns art into fabric design. I instantly wanted to do lots of designs quickly so I could make money. But then it occurred to me that I was trying to do a cheap and dirty thing, just extruding trash to make cash. There's a word for artists who do that - "hack."

I don't want to be a hack. But it takes so long to produce something decent - and in the meantime other artists are selling their work. Competition. I thought about how I was struggling with the texture of the ground in "Blue and Gold Road" (not finished yet) and that I was using the Photoshop brushes to "cheat." Rather than creating my own design elements, I was using the brushes to stroke a premade texture onto the background.

I was feeling very conflicted and stressed while thinking these thoughts. But my Good Parent intervened and asked me to determine how I could utilize the readymades in an authentically artistic way to create good product. What I concluded was that I can play with stuff like the brushes but in a goal-directed way: think about what attracts me to the object, and build on that. Be "spontaneous" - let the readymades help me create a design but look at what their major "thrusts" are - for example, the brush I was using last has striations - parallel curves arranged around a more-or-less horizontal curved axis which is a double stroke with space between the two lines. The flattened curve and the "spines" are the thrust.

Having identified the main visual components I can develop them further into a finished visual object. So my aim should be to articulate what components matter, evaluate what their visual impact is, and add altered versions of said components in a harmonious arrangement. This is making use of readymades in a legitimately artistic method.

Relecting now on my internal stuggle, the Bullshit Detector part of me says: Are you effing crazy? You never heard of Duchamp, Warhol, or Banksy? You're worried about "cheating" by using Photoshop brushes to create an image, while the abovementioned artists (1) sent a urinal to the Armory Show, (2) painted an exact, albeit enlarged, replica of a soup can label, (3) used what must have been a clip art image to be present on paper just long enough to get shredded. I think I'm entitled to use whatever the hell I want short of parts of specimens of endangered species and do whatever the hell I want short of robbery, assault, homicide, or terrorism. So there, goddamnit!