ART AND HAMBURGER

  SLOWINSKI, TV Man, 38" x 32", acrylic on canvas

Human beings, like cows, are for the most part conformist and drawn to uniformity, thus the success of the McDonalds hamburger. From Moscow to Beijing, in New York or Kingston, Jamaica, the Big Mac is the Big Mac. It is served up everywhere with the same disgusting drippy sauce.

This sauce is the glue that holds society together, without it there would be chaos. Imagine if no one followed the social order, if everyone decided to hell with it and no longer stopped for red lights, or waited in lines, or paid for food. Imagine if those normally respected doctors, politicians, and lawyers were spat upon and cursed. Yet though this special sauce holds humanity together, great creative minds throughout history have reviled and rallied against it. Degenerates, misfits, eccentrics all, the creatives work with a lack of conformity, celebrating the defiance of the norm. A hamburger to the creative mind, is not just a hamburger, it is a symbol for the social order and the underlying human compulsion to ant-insect conformity.

In total denial of the simian self, politicians and born-agains point to the bible in animal unison, praising a hierarchy born in queen bee-bug mythology. Critics, curators and gallerists, like columns of blinded ants, follow their own intoxicating hormone laden trail towards the promise of social ascendance. Where does it all lead? For one thing - to neat, orderly rows of tombstones surrounded by well manicured lawns; and to orderly, categorized series of paintings printed in numbered volumes, orderly labeled by historical period and stored neatly on well alphabetized library shelves. In this way, information is injected into the well trained, insect conformist minds of future generations of drones.

Television is a modern pheromone and special sauce combined. The beauty of television is how it replaced art in the popular culture, liberating it from the bondage of sticky sauce. By turning the minds of the masses away from art and into hamburger, television has changed the substance of art from pasty bun, burnt cow flesh and glop, to organic, soy based wholeness. TV and hamburger are the best things to happen to art in centuries...