Art is industry

Like I said, I really hate Mr Dalí. And I'm not even ashamed of it. I have very good reasons to hate him. First of all, he was an extremely disgusting person, to say the least. He had a pathologically egoistic personality and a particularly abominable penchant for the worst possible kind of aristocratic buffoonery ad nauseam. Other than that, he was openly supporting the Franco regime in spite of having played the super cool anarchist in his youthful years. I claim he would have been much better off shot in the head at the civil war, but I guess they just knew he would lick their boots after they win, for which he turned out to be very useful later on.

Well, okay! I have to make myself clear after calling his work "nothing but pure kitsch and visual nonsense", even though this is not that far from the truth. Regardless of this, Dalí was obviously a great genius. He was an exceptionally gifted painter with a talent for visualizating weird stuff seldom rivalled in the course of history. I would be a foolish philistine to deny his qualities. Although I must definitely note that it was actually the philistines who made the greatest bargain with him! The superficial beauty of his work is able to please even those without the faintest idea about arts while his pointless pseudo-surrealistic nonsense is making them feel totally artsy. This is how the business works: Dalí gets the money, philistines get a completely vague but nonetheless pleasurable feeling of avant-garde artistry. They can escape the ever more inconvenient guilt of philistinism without making any effort - especially after hearing all those euphonious rants about quantum mechanics and freudian psychology. Repeating these words in an arbitrary contexts while emphasizing their love for the painter is in no way an insurmountable task. After all, that's what Dalí himself did in the first place.

Actually I'm worse than a philistine. I don't even try to play artsy. I admit there are some pictures I like (1st day of spring, Galatea, disintegrated persistence, Madonna), some I find really funny (tigers jumping out of fish, virgin auto-sodomized), some having a good and shocking message (Face of war, birth of new man), some which deeply disgust me (Shirley Temple, Soft construction with boiled beans) and a lot of others which are just irritating kitsch (elephants+swans) and even more irritating logorrheous crap (narcissus).

My artsy friend didn't get the juxtaposition with Escher and I still think it's totally stupid not to get that in the first place. After I was trying to explain, he was complaining (bitching) about my rude and philistine sense of arts (see above), and that's really lame. One thing I really, REALLY hate hearing from artists and their supporters is when they want to suppress ordinary people analyzing and criticizing arts! I cannot tell you how much I hate this! I could really kick the ass of anyone, even my best friends, doing it. This is an extremely arrogant and hypocritical form of violent ideological oppression! This is why I hate Dead poets' society as well. The message of that movie is obviously not the freedom from opressive education but much rather the opression of simple rational analysis in the name of post-modernism. Anything goes, you know...

Postmodernism is the greatest and most intolerant system of oppression ever witnessed by mankind!

We must fight against postmodernism with all our forces and skills! We must not rest until the very last bit of this cultural aberration is completely eradicated from human society. Postmodernism is a mortal threat to the very existence of our species. We must fight for the right to analyze and criticize arts! Categorize, juxtapoze and measure them like hell! For art is not a way of life or anything like that. Art is production. Art is always industry and industry is always art. Artists are always workers. Some arts and crafts have been separated from others after the technological revolutions in the 19th century, but the methods of mass production are already claiming these arts as well. Computers will pretty soon be able to write novels, paint pictures and make music. The production of art in the world of mass consumerism is already systemized and formalized. Engineering is art.

Okay, so Dalí was a genius. But he was an evil genius like Rupert Murdoch or Joseph Göbbels. Some liberal and left-wing historians say even Hitler was a genius in his very own way. They have a good point, since he had to completely re-organize the nazi party in the twenties. Of course Dalí was much less evil than Hitler, but still he was evil. Idiotism and evil is the very same thing.

Escher, on the other hand, was a good genius. It's fairly obvious that the two are the exact opposites of each other. Dalí was a conspicuous immoral psychotic asshole, while Escher was a decent and rigorous good dutchman. His work doesn't contain any superficial beauty. No vivid colors or pointless logorrheous symbology. In fact, his pictures don't even have colors at all. They are extremely puritanic implementations of mathematical concepts and visual phenomena. He was building the infrastructure of fine arts without making stuff for revenue and fame. Escher was the greatest living example of the industrious artist.