The Love Artist

As far as I can tell, I am the world's first self-descirbed love artist.

There are a few others. There's a conceptual artist and yoga teacher who owns www.theloveartist.org (I own theloveartist.com). She runs workshops as a love artist--and promises better fucking, which is great--but I don't see much in her site or work that goes beyond Kundalini Yoga and a somewhat hippie/liberal/romantic notion of love as being really nice.

Annie Sprinkle has a site called loveartlab.com, which is surprisingly boring for such a vaunted performance artist. For a fee (I assume), she and her partner will hold a cuddle-in--where they install a bed and have bystanders cuddle between them on it for minutes at a time.

Which sounds like hell to me. To me, that doesn't even sound intimate--let alone like fucking--let alone loving. Why is being touched by strangers love? (Unless you're on X maybe.)

But I do like that the notion of a love artist is bubbling up in the collective unconscious.

So what's my claim to fame? Or at least origination?

I started writing my book The Love Artist around 1995. The first thing I got was the title. And then, laying in the grass at my family summer house, I asked myself: "what the fuck is a love artist?".

If I had come up with an answer, I wouldn't have needed to write the book.

But I couldn't, and so I did.

What was interesting was that, if anything, I started off with a fairly conventional notion of being nice to everyone as being loving, and had that repeatedly dashed on the rocks. Like it was being beaten out of me. (And believe me, I was as nice and as big a pussy as you would have met.)

It turns out that love can just as easily tell people to fuck off, when that's what needs to be said.

Love is loving yourself--it's just like oxygen masks in airplanes in that respect--you can't really do it outward until you know how to do it inward. Which is why so many well-intentioned attempts go awry: i.e. welfare, trust funds, being a "giver", putting others before yourself, etc.

And so many supposedly hateful approaches work so smashingly: capitalism; individualism; boundaries, borders and fences; taking, etc.

There are lots and lots of manipulative people out there and if you're "being nice" to them, then you're spreading emotional molestation, not love. Showin 'em the hand is love.

I published The Love Artist in 2000 and bought theloveartist.com shortly after. It wasn't until after I put it out that I learned all the money and fucking stuff about love.

It's all wrapped up into one neat little ball. Money, fucking, love.

And any artist who pretends to be dealing with one without EXPLICITLY and OPENLY addressing the other two is full of shit.

A nice artist. And likely better at theory than painting, writing or making music.

Always go by the work. Even with me. Don't give me shit for how clever, witty or "smart" I am. None of that means shit. Though concepts are of more importance than ever, conceptual art itself is bullshit--just reasons the mind makes up to cover a lack of talent, a fear of venturing into the truly unknown and wordless frontier. If it's valuable, then it's applicable. And should have examples in abundance.

An artist trying to sell theory is like a real estate guru trying to sell seminars. If the shit really worked, why is he running around teaching it instead of logging in from Bermuda for an hour every third day and doing the damn thing?

Read a fucking poem, check the paintings, buy the book. I'm off to get my hair cut.