Dealing with Art Know-it-Alls:
Snappy Responses to Unsolicited Comments

by Anna Collins

We’ve all been there – standing in a gallery, museum or maybe even a friend’s house, enjoying a certain painting when suddenly - (harpsichord music) - you’re accosted by some equine posterior trying to impress you by spewing their unsolicited comments, opinions and ‘artist facts’ in your face. Ugh. It’s just so annoying.

The joy of art is to look at it, ponder it and then come to your own conclusions about what you see in it and how it makes you feel. Or not. Maybe you just want to veg, and get lost in piece for the sheer pleasure of it. You don’t need someone supplying a running narrative and back-story about the painting unless you are listening to a docent to which you have specifically agreed to listen to. Otherwise, can these yammering artholes please be quiet and let us enjoy the artwork? It’s not about them, it’s about the artist and us. It’s personal.

Wouldn’t you just love to have a snappy comeback for all those artholes, instead of the usual lame responses that humor or agree with them in hopes that they’ll go away? Of course you would. And I’m here to help.

Let’s examine a few scenarios:

Scenario One
While at an exhibit, pondering a Jackson Pollack painting, the guy next to you, a middle-aged hipster dressed in a black shiny suit with a steel gray mock turtleneck underneath and sporting one of those popular “old guy” hairdos that looks like an overgrown crew-cut a la Harrison Ford, peers at you over his oh-so-trendy, rectangular, yellow-tinted designer glasses and says in a voice not unlike Thurston Howell’s:

“You know, Pollack perfected the technique of working spontaneously and subjectively with liquid paint. In creating art this way he moved away from figurative and definitive representation and challenged the Western tradition of using easel and brush, as well as moving away from the exclusive use of the hand and wrist. Interestingly, he sometimes used his whole body to paint in addition to employing the use of hardened sticks and basting syringes to achieve his multi-dimensional masterpieces. He did all this in spite of his repeated overindulgence in the liquid part of life. He was of course considered an icon of his time further confirming the magnificence of his brilliance.”

Lame Response:
Hmm..yes. Very well put. Gee, you’re really smart.

Snappy Response:
“So what you’re saying is Pollack basically ‘perfected’ throwing paint on canvases in any which way, maybe even flinging his personage in the mix at times, while he hoped for the best. He may quite well have been inebriated at the time, and for all we know may have actually fallen on the canvases in an attempt to reach for an out-of-reach whiskey bottle. Fortunately for him, no one could really be sure what was going through his mind during this chaos – so instead of looking at it as a bunch of random paint thrown in a mish-mosh on a canvas by an alcoholic madman – it was dubbed genius. Especially the turkey baster. I can definitely see your point.”

Scenario Two
You are at a museum that’s exhibiting some works of Paul Gauguin. While enjoying an especially colorful painting featuring some quite attractive, scantily clad young women, you hear an affected, slightly condescending voice say, “You know...”

You wheel around to see a 60-something dowager with a bright-red bob and thick, enormously round rhinestone glasses that make her eyes look nearly the size of her head, staring at you. You notice her lipstick is shouting out the word ‘fuscia!’ and has wandered aimlessly past the margins of her lip line. A whiff of her nauseating fragrance hits you; a thousand lavender bushes pummeling your nostrils like a pugilist on crack.

She continues: “…Gauguin was frustrated by lack of recognition in his native France and sailed to the tropics to escape European civilization and everything that was artificial and conventional. God knows he was always on the lookout for a simpler life that would suit his artistic sensibilities. Before landing in Tahiti he had made several attempts to find a tropical paradise where he could live on fish and fruit and paint in his increasingly primitive style. Truly a man who sacrificed himself for his art.”

Lame Response:
“Right, right.”

Snappy Response :
“Is that right? Of course the fact that Gauguin was financially destitute and had five screaming kids and wife to support back in gay Paree because he couldn’t hold a day job, had nothing to do with him high-tailing it for the tropics. Not to mention the prospect of painting beautiful topless Tahitian women all day long while they giggled and posed for him. I suppose in those days a canvas and a paintbrush would have held the same allure for young women as the vidcam does these days in the “Girls Gone Wild” videos. As far as living on ‘fish and melons’, he was certainly surrounded by plenty of melons. What a sacrifice. I can see he really ‘toughed it out’ for his art.”

Scenario Three
You are at a cocktail party. The host happens to have an authentic Picasso in his living room. As he is telling you how he acquired it, a rather portly gentleman, hairy everywhere it seems except on his bald pate, sidles up. Sipping a Kahlua and Cream and munching on a spinach canapé he just snatched off the tray of a passing waiter, the Tweedledum look-a-like, uninvited, interjects his take on Sir Pablo while little pieces of green fill in the gap between his two long and yellowing front teeth:

“You know, Picasso was truly a brilliant painter. Are you familiar with the Guernica? Oh my God, is that fabulous! Guernica is a painting Picasso was already working on at the time of the Nazi German bombing of Guernica, Spain. There were 24 bombers – it was April 26, 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. Picasso decided to name his painting after Guernica. The city was destroyed, although reliable witnesses believe that the damage was deliberately worsened by the garrison itself, using dynamite. In any case, a number of people variously estimated between oh, 250 and 1,600 were killed in the air raid –not to mention the injured. Picasso also expressed anger and condemnation of Franco and the Fascists through his art although he didn’t take up arms against them. Are you a history buff? Is that why you collect Picasso?”

As you and the host roll your eyes, you say loudly, to no one in particular, the only appropriate response: “Does anyone have a ball peen hammer?”

So there you have it. One last suggestion – if you really want to just enjoy an artist’s work on your own and don’t want to be bothered or even acknowledge the arthole’s existence, wear a pair of earphones and pretend you are listening to music. If they still persist and start talking louder, as they sometimes will, point to the two words emblazoned on the front of the T-shirt you have made up for just such an occasion: NOT INTERESTED!

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