we must separate the art from the artist

I don’t think I ever truly grasped the concept separating the art from the artist until I was in New York City and saw this aircraft carrier they have parked there, it’s a museum I ended up going to, you can look around the ship and a nuclear submarine and some planes and stuff like that… and I was just in awe of the thing. I love public sculpture, in particular huge public sculpture, and standing in front of this enormous ship, the scale alone is astonishing. It’s so beautiful. How did people make this thing? The power, and expression, it’s so pure and… well, yeah, beautiful. But I really hate what it does. I mean, it’s the worst thing there is, the military industrial complex, an entity completely comprised of death… and yet here I am. Finding it beautiful right down to my toes. I thought wow we really must separate the art from the artist. So I thought that earnest paradoxical and self serving experience was pretty funny and I thought about my lifelong fascination with all manner of weaponry and military technology and I especially thought of this particular plane, the A10 warthog, which is basically a plane that was built around an enormous gatling gun. It’s just so cool, it’s so ugly gorgeous cool. And then when I finished the shirt another thing occurred to me that I thought was really funny which was it looked like I was sending this brutal plane to separate the art from the artist, which I also think we should probably do more than we do… not really but… kinda really… ehehe. Anyway, I like this shirt a lot, it’s very funny to me, I love explaining more than I should as an artist, it’s really stupid.

Prints of this shirt are made on demand, so it will take a bit longer than a normal shirt to get to you. In my experience a couple weeks is not unusual.