Do you feel that "Mister Brain Wash" is a legitimate artist who is creating meaningful art?
Anyone can be an artist, but everyone has been one. Through the observation of the last two decades of my life, it is noted that my schooling experience is sprinkled with art classes and time consuming projects. Many of these projects had creative input and did not look half bad, yet most of them eventually found their way to the dumpster. My name is Nicholas Homler and I am an artist. Millions of people that I have not even met have also painted pictures, illustrated fruit bowls, and sculpted clay pots – every single one of us is an artist. I feel like Mister Brain Wash is just another one of those million people. He can be defined as an artist, but “legitimate artist” is a label that should not be associated with him.
To be a legitimate artist, I believe one must follow a certain set of guidelines. First of all, an artist is a man or woman who creates his own work with his own hands. They have developed the skills necessary to sculpt a statue, paint a landscape, draw a human face, etc. Mister Brain Wash does not even create his own art; he hires other artist with imaginative skill to carry out his concepts. Anyone can come up with ideas; it takes an artist to translate them into a medium. If Mister Brain Wash was a true artist, all of his work, if not some of it, could evolve and develop under his own hand. Second of all, artists spend years developing and discovering the personality of their art work. Traditionally artists find their style and work their masterpieces around that particular style. They become proud of their originality, developed texture, brush strokes, and color. Mister Brain Wash is all over the place with his art and has no set of guidelines that holds significant thought. He is a mess.
The largest issue I have with Mister Brain Wash is that he is a total fake yet people do not realize it. The largest hint I can feed off of it his name, “Mister Brain Wash”. As the title suggest, he is brainwashing people to believe that he is an artist and that his work has significant value. As we saw in the video, people believe that this man is a true inspiration and a new age artist. The line for his gallery included thousands of people and “Life is Beautiful” remained opened for weeks after opening. Were these people informed that the concept was his, but the art work was not? He is getting a lot of credit for having minimal skill. Also, in the video we saw that when Mister Brain Wash sells his work he makes up figures by random assessment. A true artist would have values preset based off of supply and demand and set price tag on each individual piece.
The only thing that I cannot argue against is if his “art” is meaningful. Art has different meanings to different people. Perceptions are unique to individual character and experience. However, I do not know how much meaning Mister Brain Wash actually put into his art. Based off the video, I want to say that the first thing that popped into his head was what he told the artist to render, or maybe he came up with a fresh concept and later developed meaning. It is tough to tell, but I have seen other artist do a much better job in explaining the concept behind their work.
If the world sees Mister Brainwash as an artist, then the expectations of recognized artwork have declined. If Mister Brainwash could stare at blank canvas with a paint brush in hand and paint his own concepts from skill, then I see little argument to withhold his artistic title. But for now, he is an insignificant artist in my book and should not be defined as a “legitimate artist” by any means.
