There are two ways to become a painter.
The first way, the safe way or, if you use ‘cool-speak’: the “unsafe” way concerns 99.999% of painters. These have been drawn into art by the irresistible odor of its prestige, for the prestige of painting is unsurpassed. Do you call yourself “doctor”, “lawyer” or “Indian chief”? Have you earned the title “priest”, “philosopher” or “statesman”? Very well, but however much prestige these fine honoraria carry, no designation shines as brightly upon its designee as “painter”. So potent is the prestige of painting that even six decades of the art world’s clowish, fake, futile and degrading antics have failed to dim its brilliance enough to disturb its preeminence. Furthermore, while all other titles of repute require years of tedious education and training, or accidents of birth and criminal opportunities which depend on luck, to be a painter neither preparation nor accidents of fate matter. Even painting is unnecessary! The aspirant need only proclaim themselves “artist”. Nothing more is wanted. This ‘sui generis’ proclamation, all by itself, is universally and uncritically accepted as authoritative. The aspirant painter, abruptly elevated to the status of artist, instantly enjoys the unparalleled prestige of a publicly recognized association with painting because it is popularly acknowledged that, as an artist, a person has powers of creation which will not only astonish and confound the limited understanding of all other people but, art being the most potent form of culture, culture notoriously being upstream from such lesser things as politics, the artist is ‘ipso facto’ a moulder of the zeitgeist or, put another way, pilot of the ship of history, maker and breaker of the fates of ordinary men.
How has it come to pass that any person, without training and on their own initiative, uncontrolled by guild, licensing agency, institutional accreditation, diploma, mandate or authoritative sanction of any kind, without even popular recognition or acclaim, can promote themselves, on their own authority, to a status which can only be described as god-like? The answer to this question is a long one but may be succinctly resumed as follows: with the death of God, killed in the 17th and 18th centuries by alleged advances in so-called “rationality” and technological power, and first announced in a mischievous pamphlet by a disaffected horse soldier and failed composer suffering from dyspepsia, certain people took it upon themselves to become Over-men, or Supermen, and step into the shoes of the defunct God. The dictates and prophesies of these Supermen thereafter guided humanity into its future, guidance which has led us to our present situation. This situation is characterized by how artists or creators, of which Supermen are one species, are endowed with the ability to generate out of themselves the beautiful, good and true, and thus determine the course of history. By virtue of this transcendental power the prestige of art out-shines every other, no matter how glittery and blovated, no matter how large its claims.
The world used to be covered in churches. These are now burned down, transformed into mosques or used for sewage treatment. Today the world is covered in art museums, temples to our new gods. Upon entering you stand respectfully, attentively and expectantly before the miraculous and sacred object the painter hath wrought. In prayerful self-effacement, metaphorically on your knees in worshipful receptivity, creative power is communicated to you as you recognize and confirm the god-status of the painter. Given this state of affairs, is it any wonder that thousands and millions of people become artists? And since any artist, simply by being what he, she, they or zur proclaim themselves to be, controls force sufficient to twist the fate of the world, is it any wonder that these astonishing and god-like creatures command respect without equal?
The second way people become painters, the actually unsafe way, concerns only .009%, or one in a hundred thousand; for every hundred thousand painters only a single one has been attracted to painting for the love of painting itself. This virtually invisible minority has missed the boat of history. It is misguided and out of step. It lives in a reality which may or may not have existed in the past, some time prior to the death of God, but in the present it is a square peg in a round hole. It does not fit. Failing to collaborate it is a danger to the preeminent prestige of art. It is a traitor to painting for its existence calls into question the legitimacy of the god status of millions of artists everywhere. It undermines the hierarchy whereby artists, as makers of the future, are as gods who can look down upon the ‘unter-menchen’ in contempt. It wastes its time painting paintings in the ridiculous hope of contributing to a so-called “tradition”, now long dead, and of living up to the ideals of so-called “old masters” whose out-dated and now historically irrelevant work it pretends to admire even though sociologists and historians from prestigious universities in peer-reviewed dissertations have scientifically demonstrated that art of the past cannot be understood because it is the product of a zeitgeist not our own, a now exhausted culture which in any case was in a primitive state of development. The illusory ideals of this tiny minority are contemptible, unrealistic and pathetic. They are also dangerous and unsafe for the majority.
Having renounced the transcendent contemporary prestige of painting, what do these so-called painters hope to achieve? Conceiving themselves as mere artisans, no better than plumbers and garbage collectors, what is the point of their activity? What do they hope to gain for themselves by their solitary and obscure activity? They malevolently prepare or blindly plunge the world into a cultural catastrophe! They would take us back to a time when women were oppressed and could not have bank accounts, and white people whipped black people, whom they call “niggers”, until their backs were a bloody mess. What evil motivates, what perversity inspires their retrograde productions? Beavering away in their studios they struggle to add yet another still life, yet another flower painting, yet another landscape, yet another portrait or nude to the moldering heap of these worn-out genres which do nothing but gather dust in museum store rooms or provide food for mice in attics. No one wants more of these out-dated bourgeois status symbols, and yet these daubers persist, thinking, as a 19th century fool painter once replied to a pertinent observation, that “what the masters have done has not been done enough”. Already, two hundred years ago, clear-eyed questioners realized that God was dead, and the old art with it, and tried to help painters who “love” painting, already a minority, see the light. The irrational persistence of this mulish stupidity is unsafe and starting to require firm reaction or, better yet, suppression.
It goes without saying that this dangerous group, obviously fascist at heart, is extremely conservative and fanatically right wing and MAGA in its rejection of progress and human fulfillment in all its phases. Its campaign to thrust society back into a world of arbitrary popish and neo-liberal power structures is the greatest threat to freedom today for, should the debased and retrograde appeal of their derivative work, with its superficial and simplistic prettiness and sentimental and kitschy affect, influence popular feeling against the art relevant to today, we will face a social upheaval which could compromise the presently favorable status quo. It is crucial to constantly denounce these unsafe painters as Nazis, conservatively extremist and condemned by history. Their work should be ignored and excluded or, where this is not possible, attacked as crap, incompetent and irrelevant, and the painters themselves labelled uneducated, mentally defective and deranged, unevolved and culturally backward.
True artists, heed this warning as you value the god status hard-won for you by the heroic Supermen who so favorably evolved the zeitgeist to its currently advantageous condition! If the evil one in ten thousand painters who love painting for itself, caring nothing for the god status they inexplicably reject, are allowed exposure they may pollute, deform and denature the popular mind with unpredictable results. Remain vigilant! The situation is unsafe. Impede, block, derange, insult, denounce, silence and exclude them at every point! Your prestige, the very reason you became an artist, is at stake.
Born in 1956, Paul Rhoads, somehow survived being raised in New York, that dumpster fire of a city where dreams go to get mugged. At the ripe old age of eighteen, he wasted several months “studying” at The New York Studio School, doodling stick figures while pretending to be profound. Then he bounced around like a lost ping-pong ball to The Boston Museum School, The Art Students League, and The New York School of Visual Arts. During this glorious mess, he suffered under the so-called guidance of Mercedes Matter, Andrew Forge, Esteban Vicente, Clarence Washington, Will Barnet, and Herbert Katzman. Say their names. LOL.
Paul Rhoads, triumphant in all flame wars since the beginning of the century, is universally feared by the internet as an unmanageable and consistantly victorious troll. Unexspectedly attacking any and all pundits he finds wanting, he drives them into entertaining rages.
But oh, the real tragedy? The next ten years he spent “studying” with Aaron Kurzen, this guy he knew from Dalton High School back in 1971 to 1974. Kurzen was part of the Hans Hofmann circle, and a Duchamp fanboy. Rhoads’ dad, George Rhoads, was another surrealist weirdo, dabbling in every style on God’s green Earth. His expressionist cityscapes from the 1960s got shown at the Dintenfass Gallery a few times, big whoop, like that proves anything in the art world’s circle jerk.
An unrepentant boomer Rhoads delights in shaming newer generations for their ignorance and baseless pretentions. His claims to wide knowledge of literature, history, philosophy and the arts, in addition to a profound wisdom delightful to his eager followers, is contested by his victims whose obvious stupidity discredits their claims.
Rhoads is an unclassifiable quantity. The contrast of his eclectic relations and rigid principles confounds all attempts at pigeonholing.
Throw in some more “formative influences” like Herbert Katzman (again?), Robert d’Arista, and Gandy Brodie, and you’ve got a recipe for artistic fail. Paul Rhoads has been hiding out in St. Gabriel les Chats, France since 1990. Still alive. Fortunately.
Bio edited by The Unsafe Journal co-founder Sina Khani
Check out Paul Rhoads video shenanigans on Odessey.