Teeter Totter: the second movement of Beethoven's last quartet in F Major, collage and colored pencil on canvas, 20x20 inches, $800.
am I annoying you yet?
In this collage we have bees bugging the crap out of the squirrels as revenge for their act of theft in the last collage.
The bee artists may also be perturbed for another reason.
Sometimes artists get annoyed at the general public who seem to enjoy only simple art that doesn't make them think, like how the squirrels seem to love playing with their childish teeter totter.
Because of this, artists can also feel cranky toward other artists who are more successful with less training or who find success by making work that is "more accessible."
While understandable, I don't think that's particularly fair, but...
In that vein, I feel like the second movement of Beethoven's last quartet plays with this common annoyance among artists.
It seems to make fun of a country band and dancing peasants. The instruments sound lost on purpose, they have to take a moment to pretend to retune and catch up, and then they play the same 5 notes 50 times in a row.
To me the bees represent those 50-ish times Beethoven repeats the same 5 notes, but I only cut out 34 bees, and yes, they are each individually cut out and glued on.
It's almost like Beethoven is saying, "I understand you like dumb crap, so here, have I dumbed it down enough for you?"
In reality, this movement is incredibly hard to play.
As a semi-professional musical comedian, this is the kind of joke that I appreciate the most.
It warms my heart to see someone putting in a ton of work and skill to ultimately create something that's just plain silly.
Popular taste and lack of sophistication among audiences has long been a butt of jokes for artists, and for me there's an echo of this sentiment in this quartet movement.
I'm also reminded of Kurt Cobain's lyrics to Nirvana's song In Bloom:
He's the one who likes all our pretty songs
and he likes to sing along and he likes to shoot his gun
but he knows not what it means
The idea was to get the audience singing along, and basically make fun of themselves. Each person singing would only privately know if they were ironically getting the joke, or if they just liked the tune.
The idea of secretly making fun of your own audience right in front of them is punk AF, and it goes back hundreds of years.
Part of being an artist is becoming comfortable with annoying people, and it turns out there are endless ways to annoy.
For example, I spent years hardly ever writing to this email list because I didn't want to bother anyone. Luckily, I've gotten over it.
Thank you for being here! It means the world to me that you're willing to allow me to annoy you.
...God, can you imagine if Beethoven had a mailing list?