Secret Pamphlet #1

secret pamphlet
regarding the future
of art and the universe




If you were to tell your mother that she is a fish, like Faulkner’s child protagonist in As I Lay Dying she would no doubt shrug and offer you a cup of tea. Nothing would come of it.

It seems the greatest crime against the artist of late has been to take art too too too seriously. I mean, please, people. When are you going to give it up?

We might be ‘figuring out the nature of the universe’ as some propose.

We might just be making art, because that’s what people do. Who knows?

It doesn’t have to be special – or any more special than anything else you do – not that I don’t think you are special, you with your art and your art b.f.a. degrees and all that special stuff, but as much as you try, art just won’t mean any more than it ever has. What do I mean right now? Just that. It won’t mean more, because it can’t mean more. What could possibly mean more than it already means? What could mean more?

“If you want to sell books, you gotta make books that people want to read.” That’s what I was told as a nine-year-old budding writer growing up in Tuscany, alone with my smith corona. Well, it didn’t take me long to realize what a line of bullshit that was. First of all, people, you don’t have to make books people want at all. You just have to put them out there and people buy them. I mean, you don’t even have to put words in them. They sell blank fucking books, people. Blank.

Of course, you know the only way you can decrease the monetary value of a blank piece of paper, right? Print a poem on it. Doodle.

Beware wet ink!


(Paraphrasing Duchamp. I got a lot of nerve, don’t I.) So here you are reading this so-called secret pamphlet hoping to learn about art and the universe.

Here goes:

1. Art resembling physics and physics resembling art is no secret.
2. Gauguin said there are only 2 kinds of artists: revolutionaries and plagiarists. Well, let’s cut through that dualistic delusion: the plagiarists are the revolutionaries and vice versa.
3. Everyone – I mean everyone – is an artist. Not just humans. Everyone.
4. Being an artist is not an elite mode of being in the world. It is a mode of being in the world, however.
5. Being an artist does not mean belonging to a special club; ‘being an artist’ and ‘being’ mean the same thing.
6. Being an artist is difficult if you expect people to treat you in a special way because of your art.
7. Being an artist does not entitle you to be an asshole. Being an asshole is a waste of time. Time that could be spent making art.
8. The lack of Reality, as such, means that critiques are also a waste of time.
9. Critiques, criticism, workshops, etc., are a waste of time. Time that you could use working on art.
10. Dividing up the universe into groups that are superior and inferior – i.e. artists and plebs – leads to the fallible dependence on a concrete Reality – something that does not exist.
11. Sure, we might very well be evolving, as many claim, but that doesn’t make the future more important than the past.
12. Since neither the future nor the past exist, all art exists in the present moment.
13. Taking art too seriously means boring boring boring art. Inscrutable art. Elitist art. Bland art.
14. Yes, it is about magic.
15. Magic is another word for reality or the universe or art or you.