I’m currently in the process of preparing my next work for sale. ‘The Madonna’ will be available from approximately the 12th of September onwards, and will again be produced as prints and printed canvases up to a maximum of 44 x 55". I am also working on a new piece called ‘Brangelina’ which I expect to be completed in the next few weeks (if all goes to plan). Why am I telling you this? Because I’m getting link exchanges rejected left. right and centre. I don’t know jack about ranking a site, but I do know that if you want to make a mark on the web then content is king.

I’d love to say screw Google and every directory out there who doesn’t count art work as content, but what’s the point. If I’m ever going to get some exposure for my work I need to sell my soul like every other sucker. The media is malevolent, regressive and obsessed with the bottom dollar, but I need them. I need them like a junky needs a fix. Perhaps one day the people will be the media and artists can get a fair crack at the whip the way that so many neo-conservative hard-right bloggers, penis enlargement pill sites and porn does right now. You can only hope, and then realise the futility of your empty belief in human nature, and then continue going through the motions for the sake of it.

I’ve waited a long time to get to this stage of my life. I almost never made it. I’ve been in and out of emergency rooms and mental wards throughout my life. Perhaps it was the drugs. Perhaps not. I’ve had some healthy experiences whilst under the influence of various psycho-active substances, I’ve worked my way through some bad trips too, but I think, on reflection, the self-inflicted pain and hardship in my life has done me some good. The filters are down. My depth perception is shot. Reality is only a surface impression. We are in an age of mass communication, but so far no one seems to be saying very much, and those that do don’t get the attention they deserve. If I knew who they were I’d pay more attention, but delivery never really impressed me, only the message, and most of them are rather glib, simplistic, and generally cause more trouble than they’re worth.

There is no such thing as good news. Good news doesn’t make money. Bad news makes headlines. The only trouble with bad news is the human race’s tendency to immunise itself against further emotional attack. The media can only puncture our senses so far before we the consumers turn off, if they haven’t made a sale in those first few brief moments of desperation and panic, they never will. I create my art (art is such a dirty word) to relieve my own internal pressures, a head full of populist junk, televisual vomit, political rhetoric, iconography of the meaningless, fears and hopes to achieve the same ends. I’m defecating over the paper-thin culture of our times, I’m doing it because it’s more truthful than celebrity gossip or political punditry, I’m a dead man walking, and it realy doesn’t matter any more if I do this or not, or rather it doesn’t matter to you. This like every other scrap of language I pick up these days is just another stinking heap of PR and marketing. Except I don’t offer any easy answers, if I did I’d be rich, or god, or dead, or something other than myself.

I’ve come to terms with my obscurity, my failure to achieve something more than my own internalised and highly personalised recognition that I have no purpose. Those who say they do are psychotic, those who say you do are sociopathic, there really is no fine line left to tread. Success is the murder of every genuine belief an individual possesses. To age is to compromise, a trade-off between perfection and disappointment, and how disappointing the truth is, always… I will continue to hold the C21st cultural vacuum to ransom, I will reject the intellectual, the spiritual, the politic, the iconoclastic, in a vain attempt to keep this space clear. The space between my ears and behind my eyes, it’s the only room i have, the rest is filled with everyone else, their juvenile hopes for the future, the planet, humanity.

Take it from me we’ve already passed the brink, it’s back there sometime between The Age of Enlightenment and The Industrial Revolution. This is not The Information Age. If it was I’d have no more questions. I’m filled with unanswerable questions that sit at the bottom of my stomach and gnaw away at any semblance of a healthy body. I smoke myself through everyday, a coward’s way out, pondering exactly what happens next, after all this carbon-based crap we’re playing with here and now. I don’t think I’m gullible or penitent enough to believe in a God, logically speaking I suspect there’s more than pure coincidence at play in all our lives, this hasn’t all been left to chance,

I definitely have no luck, at anything, and that streak hasn’t broken in years. If it did I may be distracted for a while, long enough to be sucked into the game again, but from a distance it seems tediously familiar. You win I lose, I win you lose. Wake me when they ban money and force all celebrities to fight for a living, physically, with each other, on worldwide TV. That might be worth rising from a cerebral grave for a moment. I’d like to see the world tear itself apart in the name of something a little more worthy than fame and fortune for once.

I love the ordinary, I’m even envious of those who manage their equilibrium, subtly, without prejudice. I whine, I moan, I gripe, it’s better that I draw it rather than spill it out in narrative fashion, but Google like every other control-freak corporation insist I conform. So I will and have, you’ve just read it, it’s called user generated content. I’m the user, the generator, I’m a messaging machine, part of the great I am that is our wonderful world of mass communication.

Tea. Smoke. Bed.

This post is tagged art, blog, conspiracy, content, critique, death, Google, hell, insanity, narrative, Paul Baines, truth