LE REVUES

Cultivating a Discerning Eye for Good Art
When you work in a strange genre like I do, you get a lot of people coming up to you and saying, "Hey, my third-grade daughter could do better than that! What makes this painting so good?" The fact of the matter is, good art is like an unripe watermelon: most people don't know it when they see it. At least, not until they cut into it and it's all white and bitter and gives them a stomach ache.

Well, I don't want you to get a stomach ache from looking at bad art, so I'm going to teach you to tell the difference between good art and bad art. Suprisingly, it's pretty simple: the difference is the WOW factor.

Now that isn't like some crazy anagram thought up by the stressed out TA leading your freshman Art Appreciation class. No, it's as simple as it sounds: good art makes you go WOW. Like take my paintings for instance. Sometimes when I get done with my latest piece de resistance, I'm so blown away, I have to go lie down for several hours. The last thing I finished, I couldn't even look at it for a week, the WOW factor was that high. I had to lock the door to my studio and lay on the couch and drink Fanta and play GameCube all week. It was traumatic.

Art without the WOW factor, however, is just overrated. Let's look at some examples:

Yeah, we all know this one, right? Supposed to be all mysterious and everything? You know what I say: BORING. We've all seen that smile. That's the "You're being tedious and unfunny in the middle of this highly awkard social situation" smile. You can actually feel her trying to strangle you with her eyes.

Trust me, if old Leo had had one of his crazy wooden helicopter contraptions or those rickety Batman flying wing things, Mona would be volunteering to be test pilot number one just so she could get away from his lame jokes and weird stories about cutting up cadavers. WOW factor: ZERO


Hoo boy. Yeah, this is just great, a real dazzler. I thought mug shots always came in pairs.

Poor Whistler's mother, she's so grumpy because her overrated no-talent son is taking FOR-ever to paint her stupid picture. Why is it taking so long, anyhow, he's only using like three colors.

This is a clear case where the painter has decided that he's not going to be the only one suffering for his art. WOW factor: nada!


Aha, finally something to talk about. There's lots of crazy stuff going on here, but it's not the WOW factor as much as it's the WHAT? factor. Like he's doing a nice job of drawing an ear, and a skull, and a meat cleaver. But hey, guy, let's try to get it together! First of all -- everything is a different size, that's just plain confusing. Then you have stuff like one guy's legs have turned into trees or something. And is that dude waterskiing naked? And why is there an onion on that guy's head? You want people to say WOW, not "Wow, this is really making my stomach ache." WOW factor: two, WHAT factor: two thousand!

Hopefully we've all learned a little something to help us develop a discerning eye for art. If nothing else, remember to thump it a couple of times before you take it home and never swallow the seeds -- that's a surefire formula for a stomach ache right there.