Essay

The air surrounding Maccarone Gallery booth at Art Basel Miami Beach is heavy with the smell of chocolate. Look! Chocolate holiday Santas…clasping…butt plugs? Paul McCarthy’s Santa with Butt Plug by…

How shocking! I once made a piece of art that was so bad that when it was first exhibited, all the cows mooed, all the children ran wild in the…

The worst piece of art I’ve ever made is also one of the most important pieces of art I’ve ever made. It sits at the very top of an eight-foot…

LONDON, England — Super-ultra-mega-collector-and-a-half Charles Ponzi has launched a porn site for art students to display not only their tentative and unresolved juvenile work, but also their tender, naked, more…

Context matters. Given the art world, the non-art world looks rather inviting.

We relax together, holding hands, telling stories and singing songs, dancing and passing around bottles of the special Basel Brew, made from the fermented blood of poor people.

She looked at my proffered slide-sheet as if it was an illustrated menu of birth defects and snorted scornfully. We don't do slides, she sneered.

The profusion of talent in the proposals we received, comparable to the massive cloud of pollen generated by a field of ragweed, made the task of our selection committee as difficult as actually defecating a gold brick.

Nowadays, everyone intuitively understands that it's unfair to show artwork that's not mediocre, because it might bother somebody or cause a ruckus.

It's common to cling to a desperate, irrational hope that somehow the art is not really bad at all. Often this pathology is expressed in improbable lies like "It's interesting," or "I like it."

Although I already considered myself the greatest painter of the age, I never really felt confident in my ability to assemble a Whopper.

My art is just sharing the beauty I see while I frolic through my life. I hope it makes you happy because my art is about feeling, not just seeing.

I'm sorry you were born without a sense of humor.

Last night, I had fun vandalizing the Museum of Certified Art's mission statement.

Every bored divorcee or dreamy retiree who opens an art gallery to satisfy a vague spiritual longing is automatically, magically in league with the ruthless power brokers of Manhattan's art world.

"The sooner every spark of human vitality is snuffed out, the easier our job will be."

For the record, I was 12 years old and I had no respect for life.

One look into his black, dead-fish eyes and I knew that I was far more likely to be found rotting in the trunk of my car than to ever get paid for any art of mine he sold.

If I don't have to worry about oversensitive nuts seeking vengeance, criticizing art will be fun, like torturing anything that can't fight back.

Unfortunately, the Art Death system has no use for artists who say things like Satan has personally authorized me to bleach society down to the roots.