If You Need Restraints Chop Off Your Hands

Eh!

Recently, over at HTMLGIANT, Blake Butler posted about Matthew Barney’s drawing restraints. The only thing I really know about Barney is that he made a very expensive movie that only people in the skinniest of jeans can appreciate.

Essentially, in these drawing restraints, Barney puts himself in odd circumstances or physical situations and then creates shitty looking art.

What the fuck. Why?

I admit that to a certain extent our culture likes restraints. We like it when poor kids become rich. We like it when handicapped folks excel at sports. We appreciate midgets with giant cocks.

Even with the arts, we like it when less trained, less skilled artists from unlikely walks of life — chiefly when they’re minorities and from places made of rust — muscle their way into becoming the culturally elite.

From a less politically charged standpoint, we are more forgiving of the low budget movie than we are of the blockbuster James Cameron feature. We ignore the hiss of a four-track produced album. We celebrate the self-published book’s typos.

You're A Fish. I'm An Asshole.

But I’m not sure I can get behind self-imposed restraints. If you are on a chartered boat — a boat that uses $500 worth of gas just getting off shore — and you’re catching a ridiculously over-fished species, and drawing with that fish’s blood, and your “drawing” sucks, it’s not because of the restrictions you have placed upon yourself, it is because you are the biggest fucking douche of all time. — Brian Allen Carr

Video: Douche