Exploitation in the Suburbs

So most of you who know me, know that I have this job...

I manage a "Painting Party Studio", which means that I teach bored housewives how to paint K-Mart dorm room paintings for $40 an hour. I get to drink at work, I get to practice painting every day, I get to make a living off of being a commodified creative. 

There are two main employees, I being the senior of the two. Both of us are blonde, tattoed, artist typecasts. Although I live in Kansas City, a city that embraces artists and the artistic lifestyle, I work in the suburbs outside of my city, where the people only venture downtown every other weekend, to hang out in outdoor malls and go to concerts at the Sprint Center and eat food that the actual locals can never afford. Because the suburbs wont fund bus routes to the well paying jobs, to keep the riff raff where they belong. 

But I digress....

The thing about my job is that most of the time I feel like everything about me is being whittled down to its most basic aspects, to sell me as a product, while simultaneously using me to make these suburbanites feel like they are living on an edge that doesn't exist. So they can drink wine and get immediate satisfaction, by copying off of someone else's artwork that has been guided by a market of cheap, replaceable junk that means nothing. So they can take pictures for Facebook next to a girl with tattoos, holding a paintbrush, which they will later throw down in frustration because they aren't getting the perfect painting, right away, in twenty minutes after spending thirty years bragging to their friends about how they don't have a creative bone in their body, and "can't even draw a stick figure". How dare things not turn out right for them right away? Were they not promised that life would give them what they wanted? They've never had to work for anything else, why is art different? If they could just sign their name to the bottom of someone elses painting and have their photo taken next to it for Facebook, they would walk away with a better experience. When did it become cool to be ignorant? Walking around and bragging about who is more terrible at art, is a very thinly veiled way of bragging about being above the artist. "Oh, I can't even draw a stick figure! I'm just so right brained." This usually precludes the line of questioning about what my "real job" is. Why is it so uncool to try? Why is it so fashionable to be a dumb woman? Why is it so acceptable to brag about being inadequate? What is so cute about selling yourself short? "Oh, I have never picked up a paintbrush." Well, why not? I don't like playing sports, but that doesn't mean that I just never tried. Why is it okay to just write off the arts?

Lately, I have put on my normal ten pounds of winter weight, which I am struggling to drop. And suddenly, I feel as if I have gotten fewer shifts, as if I am not quite the perfect visual representation of Suburban edginess, because tattoos and piercings are edgy, but being overweight is just lazy. I am accepted for who I am when I fit comfortably into the predetermined mold of how suburbanites view "people like me", but not truly accepted for any physical or mental flaw. 

We start shooting for Painting Parties.com this week, and I couldn't be less excited. All of a sudden, I am the "alternative" Bob Ross of Internet commodification of the arts. Pay $20 online and you can learn how to paint cute little owls! I imagine giant banners on the websites, western fonts, and pictures of me in too much black eyeliner, being toted about like the Kat Von Dee of fake bullshit Pier One Imports artwork. 

Making a living as an artist, but at what cost?

Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots

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Whatever I Want

I'm starting to realize that my first real show is in the middle of January. I'm starting to realize that attendance might be low, which relieves some of the pressure to be a perfectionist, and opens me up to the possibility that the show could be exactly what I wanted to be without making any compromises. Instead of worrying over $700 frame jobs and making sure that I get my press release to the right critic that may or may not show up, I plan on making the entire show an installation that looks as if it were dipped in glitter glue and run through a thrift store. At least this way I can gauge whether my taste transcends my own head space. So fuck it, might as well just go all out. I don't mean to sound pessimistic about how the show is going to go over . I'm sort of proud of myself being able to just kind of let go. It helps not being in the collective environment anymore, but at the same time I don't really have a critical eye looking over me at any point. I should probably look for a balance between being 100% self indulgent and having someone reign me in a little. But in the meantime I should start shopping for tacky gold frames.


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Location:Hyde Park

Fucking Photography.

Untitled

Oh my...

Sometimes, I look at you and my breath just catches in my chest.
No piece of art has ever meant anything, because no object can suck the air out of my mouth,
can overtake me like being drenched in perfectly warm water.
Crushes me in the most delicious way.

Boys vs Girls, Lovely Skateboard Art Exibition

I was nervous going into the show last night. Just like everything lately, I had rushed my design and was not completely confident going in. Regardless, my design is the one featured on the far right, and in the end I didn't feel too terrible about the project.

Taking a Good Idea and Letting it Dissolve.

"Kickstarter allows filmmakers who otherwise would have NO access to Hollywood and NO access to serious investors to scrounge up enough money to make their movies....Recently, Kickstarter was used to fund a new VERONICA MARS movie. This is obscene to me. It’s a known television series distributed by a major studio...This is what Hollywood does...it sees an opportunity for exploitation and it takes it." Read the full Blog here.

This hits close to home for me.

When I envision people logging into Kickstarter to throw money and support to the arts, I visualize people tossing a few bucks to some struggling artists, filmmakers, product designers, or whatever. Now on the eve of our biggest struggle yet, The Roost has begun to toss around the idea of using a Kickstarter as our last ditch effort to save our space. But now I suddenly find our pet project in competition with Veronica Mars and Zack Fucking Braff, and I am disgusted. This was an idea that was meant to help people, and is now being turned around to harm the people is was designed for. These "artists" are taking money from the pockets of people who truely need it, artists like myself and my partners, artists who are trying to fund a show from their tip money, using that last little bit of their shitty ass tax refund to repaint a gallery wall, artists who are always late on the rent, who come home afraid that, any day now, they will lose everything that they have worked for.

Artists like us.

The Roost can't compete toe to toe with Zach Braff trying to make some shitty indie-comedy (that will be lost to obscurity 6 months after its release), or Veronica Mars shaking her pre-pubescent tits at fapping populations of sickly old perverts and tweens in lipliner across the globe. And The Roost shouldn't have to compete with them. But unfortunatley, all good ideas will eventually be bought from us at a cost we don't understand, and subsequently sold back to us at a price we can't afford.

In the meantime, I guess I will cash in my change at Coinstar to try and keep the lights on.