When walking my greyhound, Herr Hooper, one day he stopped and expelled some solid waste on a neighbor’s yard. As I was pulling out a bag to remove it, a car drove up and parked in the neighbor’s driveway. As I was picking it up, a woman got out of the car and started walking toward me. “Keep your animal off my property” she screamed in a hysterical voice. She was almost crying. I just looked at her. She kept ranting, but was nearly impossible to understand. She was clearly unbalanced. She then said, “If it happens again, I am calling the police.” Stunned, I wasn’t sure how to respond as I stood there holding the bag of dog waste. I just looked at her and then calmly walked away. I wasn’t doing anything wrong or illegal. It would have been funny had she called the police.

Being a good American, however, I was unwilling to let the matter end there. I quickly got home and looked up her address online. I got her husband’s name. I searched his name on various websites and found out of a lot things about him, including his wife’s name. I searched her name and found out that was the woman who yelled at me. Of the many things I found out about her, she styled herself as an “Artist” and was selling her “Art” at studios and online.

I put “Art” in quotes because her work was amazingly bad. It was something that a drunk chimp could have done. Yet, she was trying to sell this shit for thousands of dollars. What the hell? Here I slave all day working and do okay. But this crazy woman slaps together some so-called “Art” and was living in a much nicer house on the water. I’m sure her husband was responsible for most of the wealth. He was an older attorney. But still. She was still likely getting regular checks for the mindless garbage she was putting out.

Now, I’m sure some “Art expert” will tell us that most of the crap that is modern “art” really has much artistic value to it. But I don’t buy it. Look at any modern “art” gallery and tell me that you couldn’t do most of that yourself. Sure the “Art expert” will tell you that is wrong. But the “Art experts” are in an incestuous relationship with these so-called “artists”. They both benefit by perpetrating this farce on the world. The experts make their money writing about and selling this garbage.

Now, if you have actual artistic talent, you should try making some good art and try selling that. But if you are like me, you are going to have to fake it like most of the other “artists” out there.

How should you get started? Well, you might want to consider taking a basic art course at a community college or even just watch some internet videos to learn the basic art terms and basic rules of painting, such as what type of paint, brush, and canvas to use. After you get that down, you are ready to go. I recommend getting drunk as hell, grabbing your brush and seeing what you can come up with. Don’t even go in there with any ideas as to what you are going to produce. Remember, some of the paintings selling for thousands of dollars look like something fingerprinted by a small child.

After you have produced your masterpiece, come up with some bullshit name that kind of sort of matches what you produced, but not really. Try for generic names like “Spring”, “Snowfall”, “Hope”, “Despair”, or maybe even go for an ancient theme. For example, name your work after a Greek goddesses or something stupid like that.

Frame it. Always find a nice frame. People love nice frames.

Then set a price. Don’t set it too low. Make the price something along the lines of $1000, at least. Try to market it online. Set up a website for yourself where you hold yourself out as an artist who is producing cutting edge work. See if you have art galleries in the area or a local bookstore or something else like that that might be willing to sell it on consignment.

If someone asks what your qualifications are, tell them that as an artist you have a special relationship with nature, yourself, and the universe and that you have been nurturing this artistic nature in yourself since childhood. Did you study art? No. But neither did any of the great masters. Who asks where Picasso went to school?

But your art doesn’t look like anything, someone will protest. “Well, fuck you,” (you might want to use a more fancy, less vulgar insult, “I am an artist. I am sorry that you cannot see the beauty of the work that I have created, but that is because you lack artistic vision. I am an artist. I am above you.” As long as you keep that elitist mumbo-jumbo artistic attitude, people will be afraid to question you or the value of your “art” for fear of being thought of as stupid and unsophisticated. The other members of the “artistic” community will embrace you because you are helping them to keep their farce going.