This month's art exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, by American artist Joseph Van Reeken, is trash. I mean that quite literally. It does not even rise to the level of "my third grader could do better". I went so far as to call up Joe and asked him to explain himself. Far from assuaging my concerns, he confirmed them: he'd originally thrown away the odds-and-ends from cleaning up an epoxy project, then thought better of it and fished it out of the garbage and called it art: "The Mess is Permanent".
This particular artistic endeavor resembles a martini cocktail in a plastic cup with two short straws. But with wadded up toilet paper in place of ice cubes, and solidified epoxy replacing liquor. He'd used the cup and straws to mix the epoxy for a different project and used the toilet paper to mop up stray drips. He'd left the sticky mess to cure in the cup so it was easier to throw away later. Then called it art.
I have to ask myself, am I truly an art critic anymore? Is art even a thing in this day and age? Do I have to put up with this? Rather than reviewing his, um, piece, I could have spent my afternoon puttering in my garden. I stand ready to wax eloquent about the subtle palette strokes in an oil painting of a still life, or to explain the deeper meanings modern artists are conveying through insightful creations in unexpected media. But this! This is simply trash, no better and no worse than a greasy discarded fast food wrapper, a collection of cigarette butts, or a pile of cut-up cardboard boxes.
And yet ... it IS evocative. Trash is a defining characteristic of our age. Especially nondegradable plastic trash such as this. We buy, we discard the wrappers, we throw away the remains. A constant stream of waste fills our landfills. Even metaphorically, our literature, our music, our art is treated ephemerally. Like the cocktail his "art" resembles, designed to give us a quick buzz. Cheaply generated, glanced at, then discarded forever. Not destroyed, oh no, just consumed then forgotten. It all sticks around but we hide it and ignore it. Our cultural waste, like plastic, is kept preserved. It just keeps accumulating. I have to ask myself, is there anything I have seen in recent years that is not equivalent to Mr. Van Reeken's cup of trash? And does that raise his artwork to, well, true art?
Nope. It's still trash.
This was in response to my own prompt on Reddit r/WritingPrompts.
I also had an artificial intelligence set this to music.