Artist Eli “Bonkers” Johnson will be opening his new exhibition, “Judged,” at the Lower Lawrenceville Center for Purpose-Driven Art tonight beginning at 7 p.m. The exhibit consists of Mr. Johnson sitting in a folding chair in the middle of an empty gallery. As visitors come in, he will judge them. He will maintain as neutral an expression as possible, and the art will consist of the collection of judgments formed in the mind of the artist. Several brands of cheap beer will be available for purchase in the gallery lobby, and patrons are invited to carry the cans into the gallery to aid Mr. Johnson in forming his opinions of them.

Caution: Sign on floor.

The Duck Hollow Museum of Art has issued a call for works for our upcoming exhibition, Challenging Bourgeois Assumptions in the Twenty-First Century. Ideal submissions will be two-dimensional works roughly the width of a smartphone screen (you might trace the outline of your phone as a template) and include an Instagram-ready phrase in five or six words about what’s wrong with the world today, as most of our patrons experience art by sharing it on social media. Under no circumstances should your work challenge the bourgeois assumptions of our museum patrons, as they wish only to see the assumptions of imaginary middle-class yahoos challenged and will stop their donations if their own bourgeois assumptions are challenged.

Ginger Brooks Takahashi: What Causes One to Break Their Silence, 2020.

This work in the Carnegie Museum of Art is art. We know that because it is in an art museum, and because it has a plaque identifying the artist, title, and date.

As a work of visual art, it could be criticized. Perhaps the most telling criticism of it is that Dr. Boli feels perfectly confident in publishing this photograph of it here, because any court in the land would hold that the visual aspect of the work does not rise to the level of originality required to establish a copyright in the United States of America. Copyright law is a mess in many ways, but it has its uses in the field of art criticism.

But it is not merely a work of visual art. It also speaks. The wall plaque says that the sound lasts for eight minutes and thirty-six seconds, but that is a lie. The sound lasts forever. It loops back to the beginning and starts over. The thing never stops speaking. It is not egregiously loud; it speaks at a normal conversational volume. But it never shuts up.

What does it say? Well, it talks about smells a lot. “Sulfur… rotten eggs… rotten eggs… rotten eggs… sulfur… rotten eggs… rotten eggs… like burning plastic… sulfur…”

Perhaps if it did nothing else, it would qualify as surrealist poetry. But art that is open to interpretation is not known in the world of art today. The interpretation must be controlled by the artist, because the artist has an important opinion that you must not misunderstand. Therefore, the speaking bullhorn also gives us enough context to understand that it is talking about the characteristic smells of heavy industry. Then it begins a long informative lecture about tariffs on foreign steel and aluminum.

The entire gallery is filled with this chatter, and it leaks into the next gallery. The voice is not interesting: we assume it is the voice of the artist herself, and she has no rhetorical skill. She drones. Because it is sound, it cannot be escaped the way one would escape an ugly picture by turning one’s back on it. The only way to escape is to leave the gallery and go to a gallery far enough away that it cannot be heard. If you wanted to enjoy some of the other art in that gallery, which holds objects from a wide range of eras, then, the artist might tell you, tough.

Now let us examine another work in the same museum.

Andrea Geyer: Manifest.

These words, as words, probably do rise to the level of originality required to create a copyright, in the same way that a corporate memo does. However, the doctrine of “fair use” permits us to reproduce a section of the work for the purpose of criticism. The actual work is much more extensive, because there are several more of these plain white fabric banners with plain black gothic capitals on them. (The banners are the art; the glass around them is just the building, which was there before the art and will probably still be there when the next generation of curators repudiates this art as a public embarrassment.) Perhaps you think we deliberately chose the dullest and most unpoetic of the banners to make a point. We invite you to visit the museum and draw your own conclusions. The banners are all similar lists of “demands,” and they all have roughly the same message: my view of what a museum should be is the correct one, and you are a bad person if you disagree. The demands are not expressed in poetic or colorful language, and the banners have nothing interesting about them visually, so the art lies only in the opinion of the artist. There is nothing else to it.

Together, these two works form a complete encyclopedia of what “art” has become in the early twenty-first century: unadorned declarative text and a bullhorn. The message had become the most important thing by the end of the twentieth century, but now, in the twenty-first, the message is the only thing. Everything else that might distract from it, such as beauty or complexity or ambiguity, is eliminated.

If you complain that these things are not art, or are bad art, then the people in charge of Art will call you names and dismiss your opinion as worthless, because the opinion of someone who sticks black letters on white fabric is worth much more than yours is. But Dr. Boli has been around long enough to develop an immunity to insults, so he is willing to say what others will not say. This stuff is bad art. It is not beautiful; it is not skillful; it is not interesting; it is not even informative; but it is annoying.

It seems that all the rules about what is art and what is not art have been repealed. And before we complain and demand that the rules be reinstated, let us point out the positive side of the current state of things. Because there are no rules, we have yammering bullhorns, and we also have Bouguereau. Since Dr. Boli knows that some of his readers are particular lovers of Bouguereau, he will end his complaint with one of Bouguereau’s trademark impossibly scrubbed and callus-free farmgirls. You can see it at the Carnegie Museum of Art, just out of reach of the blabbering bullhorn: Faneuse or The Hay-Maker.

Meanwhile, let us give today’s artists the credit due them. Ginger Brooks Takahashi created a work called What Causes One to Break Their Silence, and it caused Dr. Boli to break his silence. Mission accomplished.

One of the notorious art sweatshops of Pittsburgh in the late nineteenth century. Banks of degraded young women sat at easels twelve hours a day, dreaming of a time when they might escape to a life of dignified prostitution. This is why art is no longer accepted in respectable homes.

An illustration from a 1921 advertisement for Djer-Kiss face powders, talcs, soaps, etc.

Before you came to this blissful refuge, where advertisements stay in one place and are not allowed to dance around your screen and cover up what you intended to read, you were probably subjected to a visual cacophony of moving pictures. That sort of animated clutter is not allowed here. Out of our unbounded faith in the virtues of capitalism, we do allow certain commercial enterprises occasional space in our Magazine; but they must abide by certain strict rules. In particular, Dr. Boli never allows a display advertisement to use type he has not designed himself. There are standards to be upheld.

You will find but few other places in the World Wide Web where such standards prevail. If there is advertising at all, it is usually either unpardonably annoying or ignorably bland.

Imagine yourself living in a world, then, where this could be written and taken seriously:

At present, the bulk of professional drawing in this country goes to advertise our wares—a state of things which cynics enjoy. The offset is that while we are undoubtedly cheapening art by putting it to “base uses,” we are at the same time giving an almost compensating charm to our commercialism, and are making sure that artists can live—at least on a par with other professions. An exhibit of advertising “originals,” without their propaganda for this or that talcum or talking machine, is a really excellent art collection. The worker has his own standards of excellence, not altogether for sale; and meantime, the good by-product of better advertising is a training of the public taste in art. (“Drawing” in Book I, Education, of The Volume Library, 1931.)

Yes, it was possible to say that in 1931 and neither laugh nor be laughed at.

Now think of our advertising here in the middle 2020s, and ask this one probing question: Does it work?

Undoubtedly some of it does. But to limit ourselves to the Internet for the moment, what is the most usual reaction to an advertisement? When a panel advertising Malt-O-Cod suddenly pops up over the thing you were reading, do you give it your undivided attention? Do you think, “Ho, good, here comes something beautiful and well-executed by an artist whose work will improve my taste if I devote some serious study to it”? No; you do what it takes to make it disappear, often without even knowing what it was advertising.

But suppose it began to be well known that most, or at least many, of these advertisements were works of art by artists who deserved our praise and attention. What would be the result? We would look forward to the advertisements. We would see them coming and rejoice. We would give them our attention and even notice what they advertised. We would buy Malt-O-Cod.

This seems to have been the theory of the advertisers of the first half of the twentieth century. To a large extent, furthermore, it seems to have been correct. People did remember those advertisements and the products they advertised.

So what can we do? Nothing individually, but together we can do everything. Pledge yourself now to make your buying decisions on the basis of one question: which of the companies I am considering supports beauty?

Marketers themselves may be immune to beauty. They may consider the artistic sense an unfortunate curse and take drugs to suppress it. But they are mesmerised by numbers. If we show them that beauty sells, then they will give us beauty, because beauty will cause large numbers to dance in their spreadsheets and activate the reward centers of their brains. It is easy to make the pledge, because it seldom deprives us of anything worthwhile: when we are choosing between two detergents or toothpastes, it is usually true that they both work perfectly well. We can make our choice as whimsically as we like. Start making your choices on the basis of beauty, and see how quickly the marketers start shoveling great steaming heaps of beauty in our direction.

After much acrimony, twelve artists whose submissions had previously been accepted were banned from the upcoming “Pink Rules” show at the Duck Hollow Museum of Art. Each artist was to submit a canvas entirely covered in Mexican Pink, but the twelve rebel artists were found to have used Barbie Pink instead. According to a museum spokesperson, this deviation indicated that the artists did not take the theme of the exhibit seriously and were bad people and should be shunned. When the ban was announced yesterday, the twelve artists immediately formed a countermovement under the name “The Pink Secession” and announced a counterexhibit at the Acorn Hill Countermuseum of Counterart. However, the Pink Secession has since split into eight different artistic movements, each championing a different shade of pink, and the counterexhibit has lost its corporate sponsorships.