Welcome to PISS on, the column where we write about something because we like it, it’s chic, fun and you should know about it too. Also, if we think it blows! This is PISS on: Picasso’s Assholes.
Picasso is the quintessential asshole really: a womanizing, prodigious artist who, at all of 5 foot 4 inches (that’s 1.63 meters for the rest of the world), terrorized the feminine with extremes of godly worship and the kind of street pissing performed at 3am by a drunkard whose mother couldn’t love him. As Peter Schjeldahl remarked on Picasso’s paintings, “forget romance.”
The assholes in this book are like a constellation of everything an asshole in real life can be: dainty, scary, hairy, absurd, reserved, grandiose, self-obsessed, obsessive-compulsive, hot, ugly, mean, boring (the worst of all the assholes because the reason you hate them is like badly used negative space) etc. There’s a little something for everyone. Several assholes remind me of various family members. One appears to be an exclamation point, saying “Hey, you! Look at me I’m not your average asshole, I’m the exciting asshole!”
It’s’ interesting to me that so many people who work in art are, themselves, assholes. Jerry Saltz is a self-described “art asshole,” and how fun is that! He’s a nice guy. But what about all the other assholes in art and like that are eclipsed by Picasso’s massive douche status? Is it possible that we are breeding generation after generation of assholes in the white cubes of the Western art world? What went wrong for the Spanish revolutionary in gay Paree?
Reilly Davison, the writer who penned the introduction to Picasso’s Assholes, got the gig from an asshole of her very own, an ex she thinks of with disdain which according to her is a fate easier than grieving love. I would not doubt that he worked in the arts, or publishing. He probably has an email job or something and is not as prolific in his work as Picasso. But why does this drive men to become insufferable, tortured creatures? Is there something about allowing your creativity to shine in public that makes them squeal?
Maybe it has something to do with their perception of the artistic as being linked to the feminine, that their self-expression is a compromise to their auteur masculinity. Maybe the jokes on us, and we’re all just assholes for giving a shit and should really calm down. But I’ve known those arty types to screw-over many a friend.
While scanning Picasso’s asshole being spread by a muse with fingers like the Grinch, I realized almost all of the previous assholes I had done were upside down and I hadn’t realized. I guess that’s just a force of habit seeing them that way! Oops! There are several horse assholes which bulge out with a particular foulness that some might find invigorating, or a reminder of an evening they recently had.
These assholes really started popping up all over the place in the last 8 years of Picasso’s life when by divine artistic intervention he decided to produce as much work as when he was a teenager. Sometimes, I think that Picasso’s disfigurement of the feminine in his cubist works is an act of anti-feminine psychosis (only two holes belong to anonymous dons with dicks).
Clearly some of his muses, the “Evas,” were thrown so high into the sky Picasso would need to squint to worship their forms, but the act of blurring their bodies with his brush seems akin to the manipulation the most insidious asshole you know employs in their daily practice. I wish I could just resurrect him to ask why he decided to start doing all those exclamation point badussies (dick, butt and pussy, obvs); Was he just that excited or was he giving us a warning? Do not enter. Not that I would know.
Picasso’s Assholes are considered. They are characters in their own right. They are storied and each have their own special look, though the exclamation point holes might all be related, creating the same effect of surprise and disturbance as when you realize it’s not the kid’s fault, they’re a little shit, it’s the parents! Not all of us announce it like Beavis screams he’s the Great Cornholio, but some get close. Picasso was one of those people.
No one can really fathom the depths of their own asshole behavior, it’s like a built-in immunity designed to protect us from ourselves. We look at people who walk too slow on the street or yell at old ladies and service workers, people who run red lights and don’t call their mother with the universal understanding of what these behaviors make them. ASSHOLES. We yell it in the street. We mumble it to ourselves. It’s one of the few pejorative curses that transcended feminism, because who would buy a book called “Picasso’s Bitches,” (well… me… and probably you, but that aside there would be so many Hannah Gadsbys making statements about it we’d all have to cry)? An equal opportunity name.
Which asshole are you?
You can’t tell where these assholes come from either. This books is kind of like a printed glory hole of Picasso’s anal adventures. It’s this thrill of anonymity that makes the book so exciting! It makes you look closer than you can at a gallery like Gagosian where the assholes lie behind a thin metal rope and people in suits which look at you like you’re going to shit on the floor like one of his equine defecators.
I wonder who my favorite asshole is. Maybe I’d have to say myself if only to prove how self-aware and evolved I am, obviously. But now when I look at people all I see are their assholes. Or which of Picasso’s they are.
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