wasting one's life

I'm addicted to online celebrity gossip. Maybe it's the circumstance of being here on a residency with all my time my own but really, this began before I got here. (maybe it's the side effect of being a freelancer?) http://pagesixsixsix.com (although their last post was a frantic search for a lawyer—uh oh!), http://gofugyourself.typepad.com/, Ted Casablanca Thursdays on E! Online (http://www.eonline.com/Gossip/Awful/index.html?fdfour1 )—I spend an inordinate amount of my time reading these pages, often about people I've never even heard of since I don't have a TV! The ridiculous thing is I can't stand to look at the print equivalents that my sister subscribes to—People, Star—and I will go off on how this kind of mindless obsession with celebrity is part and parcel of the anesthetizing of the American populace and that's how we end up with Bush—but I can spend a good chunk of my time obsessively checking these sites for updates, new information, new pictures, etc. It's a complete waste of time though I have to admit that Perez Hilton of PageSixSixSix is hilariously insane and profane and anyone who worships both drag queen Jackie Beat (http://www.jackiebeat.net/) and born-again former Facts of Lifer Lisa Welchel (http://www.lisawhelchel.com/) is worth reading at least once a week.

So I was joking with my friend Myra about how I should just throw caution to the wind, unite my various interests, and turn this blog into an art world gossip column and she forwarded me this really interesting article about the New York Diary section of artforum.com, which is apparently essentially a gossip column: http://www.artnet.com/magazine/features/jsaltz/saltz4-26-05.asp
I don't know whether it's good or bad to read that we (my friends and I) are not alone in our criticism of the shallow star worship of the contemporary art world (which is really just a mirror of the growing disparity between the haves and have-nots in America) but I remember an L.A.-based arts professional friend who recently did two years in New Jersey/New York saying she couldn't get over how shallow the whole thing was, that if you didn't wear Prada you were no one, and I thought, wow, is this what my parents supported me through college to do? Is that what I want the sum of my life's work to be? I don't think so!

I wandered into a store today in Taos and had a long chat with the proprietress who said that $10 per hour in Taos was really good money and that every other clerk she knew in town was an artist, writer, or some kind of creative person, and that a friend in his 50s had only just recently begun to support himself on his art. Reality check, not that I needed it—the majority of creative people struggle to make a living and most of them do something else in order to do so. My partner and I have had this discussion often, that many really talented people with MFAs but without trust funds give up making art after they graduate because they can't sustain it. Jerry Saltz, the author of the above-mentioned article, writes, "There's nothing wrong with showing work when you're young, but art has to be its own reward." Really? Why do we perpetuate this notion that art doesn't have to be self-supportive? What that really means is that only the people who can afford the time to make art make it, the result of which is a very narrow representation of creativity. Why can't we come up with a system in which art is something we value and we all support (me coming from a state which ranks 50th in arts spending)? Any culture in which a guy who cuts celebrities' hair can earn $120,000 per year (see the May issue of Vibe) but nearly everyone I know in the arts is struggling just to find or keep a job is one that needs some serious overhauling.

(The Butchies; http://www.thebutchies.com/)