Throw on Your Best Cardigan and Celebrate Fall 2011 with the Gays of ILX

i've met him too, he's a sweetie

but generally, yeah, "cute boy art", meh

i started a thread about something related to this a while back, and i mentioned sepuya's fotographs in there, tho i don't think by name Sex, drugs and art (and you)

n+1 had an article recently about the "two ryans" of contemp art (mcginley/trecartin) and how they represent a divide in thinking about/expressing queerness post-21st c and what have you. my allegiances are pretty firmly with the latter (messy and boisterous and exclamatory over tasteful and "looking"-y and overly, uh, aesthetic or something)

I mean it's not that I don't love looking at beautiful people- of course I do- but we have a pornography industry and a fashion industry and a movie star / TV / media "hotness" factory already- yes we also have an art practice that is free to draw on everything in order to fuck around with what gets called art- yadda yadda- but so often I feel like "cute boy art" is dog-paddling along on cuteness/hotness in ways that are so derivative of industries which are a lot more honest about their agenda- a jeans ad knows it's a jeans ad, porn knows that it is porn, but "cute boy art" stands in bad faith to those domains thinking that it is art if it's in a gallery and for sale and made by somebody with an MFA from some program in which they were graded more easily by their older gay mentor because of their entitled cute lil face- I'm not saying it's not art, just saying that it's bad art in that it contributes nothing other than "hey! a cute person! over here!"-

I mean, think about how "meh" you feel as a gay man when you see, say, an American Apparel ad with a hot chick in a tight/skimpy outfit- you see it and you recognize it for what it is and it does pretty much nothing for you from the waist down- that's what the str8 world gets out of gay coffeetable book after gay gallery after gay art show after gay retrospective of "cute boy art"- nothing more than the sense that "wow these gay dudes sure are obsessed with skinny twinks looking bored in sparkly white apartments, aren't they? anyway . . . "- which is, y,know, whatever- but if "gay art" means CARAVAGGIO-to-WARHOL and not *just* WARHOL (and yeah I picked these artists because both are relentlessly aware of male beauty as subject and problem) then "cute boy art" just isn't doing anything that ought to be celebrated or rewarded with our attention and care- the bar needs to be set higher in terms of technique, meaning, consequences, internal relationships- and that would probably bridge the gap from the cute to the beautiful in the process- sepuya's guys are cute, jack smith's art is beautiful; james bidgood is the ultimate problem here because it's "cute boy art" that transcends that to attain beauty (he's the Hegelian synthesis)

i can give or take much of ryan mcginley's work (tho he is occasionally stunningly brilliant) but i have a thing for ryan mcginley the person

I suspect the poetic equivalent of Cute Boy Art is Rupert Brooke. Aesthetic too.

I've been photographed by Ryan, I like his work, and he's hot (otherwise we wouldn't have taken our clothes off for BUTT) but . . . I can still call a spade a spade

i really love what you're saying.

i mean - i would LOVE to have a jeans ad hanging up in my apartment

really would

but not a sepuya :(

i also think that art is often made in a kind of social way, or that milieu and coterie impact heavily on how and why people bother making things. desire and bodies. what irks me more is the self-consciousness of it, the obsession with certain codifications of how that milieu should look, a focus on a certain stylisation: this poetry salon seems so deliberately reverential and referential. my god a salon. or even that butt magazine style revival of a sortof retroed queerness. although really a lot of this is just people with money having high concept parties.

To play devil's advocate: if I'm a queer scion and putting money into a "scene" or look, I want my money's worth, i.e. attractive butts reading fourth-rate homo poetry.

i mean its your money i guess

yeah i think butt mag has a lot to do w/ "cute boy" art, like it's always bothered me how they focus more on the subject's looks and sex life than the work that they do?

than on the work that they do

not trying to blame butt magazine for the phenomenon obvs

best gay male zing line about poetry's relationship to getting laid is frank o'hara's: "As for measure and other technical apparatus, that's just common sense: if you're going to buy a pair of pants you want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to bed with you. There's nothing metaphysical about it.”

only now we've got the consequences of that flippant remark but not the brains and nous that backed it- a poetry salon scene that is, ala Dr. Seuss, "a pair of tight pants with nobody inside them"

(that said, I can't dislike Eileen or Brenda or Susan etc. i.e. their cast of Ladies They Love has some undeniable greats)

Huh, poetry day. Now I know how Morbs feels when the topic turns to food.

I have to admit that I've always been closed off to the artistic power of poetry outside of the weird exception of Robert Creeley.

heh, i was in a writing workshop class w/ sepuya @ nyu

like wtf is this

http://paulsepuya.com/newsite/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/1120515cb-450x600.jpg

o WOW how insightful

i can't.

rawr, et al, fuiud

haha surm

I try not to think about the whole "cute ____ boy" thing too much bcz it just frustrates me. Like, "Okay we're all going to be wanted and win at everything because of this sorta arbitrary thing that we just happen to have and you can just go stand in that corner over there"

Like, sorry I'm not beautiful. Don't even bother having a conversation with me or anything; clearly I'm not worth talking to and won't have anything interesting to say.

you are beautiful

that picture of you with chocolate all over yourself from a while back - shits all over all of it :)

yeah really stevie

Hah! I totally forgot that existed--did I actually post that?? Ooops. I mean I guess that sounded way more mopey and self-pitying than it was supposed to and it's not like I think I'm hideously ugly or something but idk, sometimes I think it wd be nice to be more "conventionally attractive" or whatever. Of course, this is mostly just insecurities talking and 99% of the time I'm p damn content w who I am and fuiud, etc.

Poetry only breaks through to me on rare occasions, E, so don't feel so bereft.

The more I plumb the depths of an alluring man who's not 'conventionally 'hot, he seems infinitely sexier than some unapproachable random lovely.

rawr, et al, fuiud

― dor Dumbeddownball (Eric H.), Friday, 4 November 2011 13:27 (27 minutes ago)

pretty cantankerous lately, huh? or has that always been your thing?

What, I'm the only one that can't lay down the fuiud card?

it was just kind of random but do what you need to do

It was not random and fuiud.

Larry Kramer mad.

Sun sets in west.

what should i order for lunch

Corned beef and hash, mimosa.

what abouuuuuut . . . . . a falafel wrap and tabouleh?

I guess there's a point to being mad as long as gays are stupid enough to love Obama and give $ to HRC.

man, talk about a morning where all i'm doing is catching up on my internet ranting and rebutting and raving....

Alex Dimitrov is a self-serving, assimilationist, trust funded, elitist piece of garbage. His poetry is fucking awful sentimental garbage with no insight into anything of much substance except feelings that housewives and dumb rich faggots can appreciate. Fuck his salon, fuck its attendees, fuck him.

Seriously, I encourage everyone to go here and read this shit: http://alexdimitrov.blogspot.com/ .

He is the one who once said to me, "I'm not interested in politics, I'm interested in poetry," which is perhaps one of the most ignorant statements I've been witness to in the past couple of years. And that's saying a lot, as I'm sure you all can surmise.

wow, this guy is a real dumbass

i never want to look at that website again.

i'm hardly an expert on what constitutes 'good' poetry but that one on the front page of his blog is pretty dull

the picture of him in paris pretty much says it all

he comes from the Mark Doty/Sarah Lawrence school of poetry that says and does nothing except appeal to the trite emotions of the ruling class. There are plenty of ways to write beautiful, inspiring poems that actually have some substance, politically and socially. But his do not.