art opening

Had a great time at the Unfine Art’s 8th anniversary.

I had a piece hanging in the show—

I enjoyed Honey Vizer’s reading of the manifesto to Shawn’s awesome sax madness—

The Ninkasi and some of the food was delicious—

And I even had an attractive date to bring with me, who was willing to help re-build a bucky ball, and discuss the PNW-china connection with some strangers.

All in all a successful evening.

I reprint here the Unfine Artist’s Manifesto in its entirety, hereby psychically-like sign it with my brain, and bring it to your undivided attention:

Unfine artists represent the majority of people producing “art” on our planet today (this wasn’t always the case).

Unfine artists set the pace. We, the artists, influence the aesthetics of our era more potently than any sanctioned institution, museum, collector, or otherwise endowed art movement/clique.

We are not fine with the status quo, history, academics, or politics….

Instinctivel

y, and without premeditation unfine artists produce work that challenges the 21st century’s corporate multimedia spectacle merely by filtering and reframing cultural matter into a highly personal and complex assemblage of material entwined with subjectivity, ever creating new strands of cultural dna. The elite understands this power, and to keep it at bay they have developed methods of making it invisible, thereby maintaining their market share of an ever-tried culture economy, overstressed by a society’s rampant anti-intellectualism and addiction to football.

Unfine artists are not restricted to canonized materials, substrates, and paints that have been marketed as “archival”. All materials, are archival and all materials, including mass marketed art making products degrade rapidly. Down with canvas and matte board fetishism, and the hegemony of compositional standards that are beaten into the minds and hands of innocent art students around the world!

Unfine Artists aren’t concerned with immortality. We make art out of a need to communicate and interact with the world, express the unspeakable, survive in a world that seeks to eliminate our shaman-like power, and make the world a more beautiful place.

Unfine artists are not fulfilled, satisfied, fine, or ok.
We’re ecstatic, broke, self-taught, focused, homeless, loved, inspired, unrepresented, dying, stable, exploited, wild, lost, disciplined, exhausted, packaged, junked-out, ripped-off, ignored, hated, feared, appreciated, devalued, and accomplished. But one thing we all have in common is an undying need to make things that return cultural mojo to ourselves and our fellow humans. The mass media will melt in impotence and despair.

Behold a world of excellence and enlightenment,
without elitism.

-shawn mediaclast Jan. 19, 2010