I don’t really think of myself as being particularly poor. I get by. It wasn’t until I went to Amazon to buy Hitch 22 and realized that I didn’t have enough money to get the book that it dawned on me, maybe I wasn’t as well off as I thought. How ridiculous. “It’s is not the man who has too little, but but the man who craves more that is poor”. I know I don’t have to go without. I can buy the book second hand or go to the library but I have a prejudice again this.
It’s also why I had a reluctance to get a kindle (when I had a bit of money to throw around). There’s a certain aesthetic lacking in it. All the technology wank that it carries that makes a certain part of my brain ooze with excitement can’t match the feeling of a book. If technology makes my brain ooze, the feel and smell of a new book makes it orgasm. Notice how I say new book. How perverted I feel confessing my love of virgin books and getting off on the fact that no one has touched them before. No one has thumbed through the pages before me. They haven’t dog eared the pages. The book hasn’t been carried around in the bottom of a bag to make the page edges blunt. I always feel guilty looking through books in shops. Letting the entirety of the book fan past my thumb as the words inside are just a blur past my eyes.
The smell of a second hand book doesn’t appeal to me. Even less so when it’s not something I am completely enamoured with like Christopher Hitchens. My admiration for him has been growing quite steadily until recently where it is fast becoming a full blown passion. I think this is why I feel this bourgeois need to buy his books new.
I find it strange how I can be so particular about aesthetics and smell when it comes to books but with art I am quite different. I welcome and embrace technology. Almost everything I do is done on the computer and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I adore my Cintiq. I’m glad I chose to have it instead of a car. (People everywhere should be rejoyceing that I don’t drive. There is no doubt in my mind that I would be some kind of road hazard). My acceptance of the computer in art might be related to my hatred of these elitist’s I met while at university. These painters (you say ‘painters’ like you just swallowed a spoonful of turpentine) that would only use oil paints and believed that if you didn’t make your own canvas you weren’t a true artist. The theorist’s (you say ‘theorist’s like you just drank a cold cup of tea) that vomited words without saying anything. The same people that told me my essays were insightful and gave me firsts when all I had done was cut and pasted words together in a Dada style rage.
I don’t understand these people. I understand how art works. How the sickly child heir of fine art, postmodernism, works. I wouldn’t have gotten nearly all firsts if I didn’t. It is all too easy to do. The state of art is heading further and further into entropy where upon we can only work backwards. It can only implode in on itself.
I watched an interview with Doug TenNapel, who we have to thank for Earthworm Jim so you know he’s something of a legend. He was talking about doing one of his graphic novel’s on the cintiq. He said how it was better, more efficiant and faster. He praised it up but then he said how he didn’t like the aesthetic of it. How it didn’t give him the rush of excitement. How the marks he made weren’t absolute. How after he was done for the day he didn’t have to wash the ink out from under his fingernails. “You don’t get pixels under your fingernails”. I wanted to be outraged at this. I wanted to call him an elitist wanker but I couldn’t. There was something pure about the way he spoke. Something so real it took me by suprise. It made me remember that people I hate in art sometimes over shadow people with real talent and a real passion.
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