Pam’s Drunken Dogs of Judgement

Got over to the Portland Art Museum (Pam) yesterday. Checked out the new Mark Building which houses the Jubitz Center for Modern and Contemporary Art. Got followed around way too closely by a security guard that looked like Buddy Holly. He looked determined to catch me shoving a Rothko down my pants, so I played along and made many furtive movements, darted around corners quickly, and generally just stood excessively close to paintings and statues. It was a real post-modern cat and mouse game.

If I was indeed going to steal a piece from Pam, it would definitely be Jean Baptiste Greuze‘s ‘The Drunken Cobbler‘. This painting just sings with moral judgment. I’m surprised it never ended up on a straight-edge album cover. Anyway, I love it. It’s so melodramatic and over-the-top.

Over-the-top drama really belongs to the Baroque paintings – most of which I find very creepy; it’s like watching reality television with it’s distorted reflection of culture and the use of drama for the sake of aesthetic ornament (note: America’s Next Top Model, for reasons I can’t really explain, falls hypocritically outside this critique).

Perhaps it’s the pervasive use of dogs in these Baroque paintings that really creeps the crap out of me. Seriously, next time you go to an exhibit of Baroque, check out the dogs. They’re ubiquitous and they’re fucking evil as hell. Usually tucked into one of the peripheral corners of the painting, sometimes half-transparent, mostly sporting a countenance of cruelty, and always rabid, these dogs look like they have the hunger for the flesh of man.