Dobs

I like wandering around the online MFA. I like wandering around the actual MFA, too — don’t get me wrong– but it’s not exactly right down the street. Even if it was, I’m kinda busy here. 11:30 pm suits me fine.

Online archives are wonderful in this respect, because they don’t close and don’t sleep and don’t charge you, generally. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston has a fine online archive, filled with interesting things.

Now, my favorite painter is John Singer Sargent. I know you’re really not supposed to have a favorite painter, as this might lead to fantasy art leagues being formed, and paint spreads being published in the newspapers every week before the big exhibition.

I didn’t just write that, did I?

At any rate, old Sarge could daub, I’m tellin’ ya. And the MFA always has a bunch of him, as John Singer Sargent used to be their housepainter, sorta; and since the stuff is painted right on the walls, they can’t sell it when they’re hard up for money to buy pictures of blue broads with three ears and a nose on the side of their head. They’re stuck with it.

I don’t know why Sargent painted this picture of a 1950s wrestler. I think he’s Irish, what with the harp and all. The girls are wearing too many clothes, but they’re pretty all the same. It’s nice of one of them to hold that dish behind Gorgeous George like that. Looks heavy. It looks like there were half a dozen muses in Boston at the time of the painting, but only one hairdresser. Times have changed since then, I see. Now there are thousands of hairdressers in Boston, many of whom would be keenly interested in our wrestler, no doubt; and if not many muses, plenty of mousse. Thin lipped college girls with their stringy shoeblack dyed hair, skinny glasses, grim expressions, and Doc Martens and backpacks stand in for the muses today. They rarely dress in bedsheets like the picture, as they obscure their tattoos and ruin the general effect they’re driving at.

See, I don’t know much about that painting. Sargent just put it on the wall and said: Take that! He didn’t explain himself or nothing. What a dope.

Someone told me an artist isn’t an artist if he has to explain himself.

I bet that someone was… an agent.