Review Fix How To Series: Pretending to Know About Art

In an age where any person with a garage can lay claim to running a gallery, where a cardboard box or a Polaroid of someone’s feet can be accredited as visionary, the field of visual art is vast and infinitely mind-boggling. While school is an option, most art students will tell you that more than learning about art, you learn how to pass stuff off as art; and with the proper training, you can learn to pass that pizza box you found in the dumpster on the way to class off as art – or at least be able to persuade others that it’s intended to be bad. However, instead of shelling out the hundred or so grand seemingly necessary for such invaluable skills, follow these simple steps and you too will be a connoisseur of crock.

-Perfect your furrowed brow look.

-Once you’ve mastered that, you are ready to move on to the head tilt: cock your head to either the left or right at a 45 degree angle and hold there for 4-5 seconds, then slowly return head to upright position.

-Next try both together figuring out the amount of furrow and tilt that best suits you.

-Habitually check museum websites to read about the various exhibitions they are holding and any description they give regarding such. Look up any words you are not familiar with and then plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize.

-Andy Warhol = BAD.

-Dash Snow = GOOD.

-Your vocabulary should consist of no fewer than 10 of these terms: post-modern, convey, minimalist, linear, collective subconscious, juxtaposition, medium, contexts, elements, portray, cerebral, motifs, abstract, underscore, capture, conceptual, iconoclasm, iconography, embodiment, subdominant, contemporary, composition, organic, perspective.

-Now employ your newly discovered vernacular in rambling, ambiguous sentences – the longer the better so as people will be more likely to forget the beginning of what you said by the time you get to the end, thus reducing any chances of being discovered for a fraud.

Example: The artist is clearly trying to convey a sense of security through the use of various mediums and familiar motifs while at the same time challenging the viewer to explore their ideas of comfort by depicting the motifs in contradictory contexts, thus underscoring the viewer’s subconscious realization that familiarity is relative while at the same time commenting on the post-modern state of being and its inherent embodiment of the dichotomy of minimalism versus contemporary consumerism.

-Air Geometry. When a piece of art moves you to the point of “speechlessness,” hand gestures are the perfect fallback. Just take one step back, place one hand over your mouth, stick out the pinky on the other and slowly outline various geometrical shapes.

-Since you cannot afford that $18,000 cracked toilet seat cover you have your heart set on, simply go to Ikea, buy a bunch of prints and then hang them around your apartment “ironically.”

-Before you leave the house, be sure to dip your hands in paint.