Caustic Armadillo...
That wouldn't happen to be the 2005 Artimation Festival in Chicago, would it?
( Digeridude Lord Wellington's Beef Trapeze, Wed 28 Sep 2005, 21:49, Reply)

The Turner Prize...
...always confuses me. A few years back, the winning entry was a room with a light flicking on and off.

On a Art trip a few years back, we went to the Arnofini in Bristol, and one exhibition there was a pole leaning against a wall. The teacher said we had to draw one exhibition, and so my drawing of a pole was quite simply the best picture I'd ever done.
(piffpuffpickle, Wed 28 Sep 2005, 21:48, Reply)

Animation night
A whole night of animated shorts, courtesy of an animation film festival.

Most of the films were ace, except the very last one,
which was about 15 minutes of the same old man being interviewed on the street just blabbering on about his philosophy on life in a horribly monotone shouty voice,
while his face was constantly being animated (mostly vectorized) in barely different styles.

I later saw parts of a movie called "Waking Life" on TV, which was essentially the same thing, but thankfully I had a remote then.
(Caustic Armadillo consists at least 30% out of custard, Wed 28 Sep 2005, 21:15, Reply)

Pretention and fifteen year olds.
I went to a hard-as-nails full on comprehensive secondary school...seriously, a few years back a kid put a cat's head on the headteacher's desk, there was a stabbing in the playground and most of the year 9's smoked pot at breaktime. Most teachers only lasted a year and we took great delight in seeing how long before we'd make them cry (that's just to set the scene...)

For some reason unbeknownst to everyone, we were given some government spening money and they snet us to a schools music thing with loads of artsy private school posh kids who'd heard of our school and didn't want to talk to, work with or stand near us. The final number of this extravaganza consisted of a total ponce teaching us a song a verse of which is :

Drop in the ocean
Drop of emotion
I'm just the part of an ever changing tide
I rise up as rain, I fall down as thunder
I'm just a drop in an ocean of tears.

I know. Awful. Fucking awful. Our school (placed at the back) laughed so hard that the conductor told us to shut up, resulting in cheers from all the private school twats, resulting in us kicking them in the backs of the knees during the performance to make them fall over and trying to out-sing them. By shouting.

And that's why pretention and comprehensives don't mix.

Length? Pfft. It's nothing on the school music day.
(Pixel, Wed 28 Sep 2005, 20:54, Reply)

School trip
For a yr11 english trip we went up to london to see romeo and julliet.

It was played by for blokes minicng around and kissing eachother. The weird thing was i dont think they noticed that they were performing to a theatre full of 16 year olds and seemed offended when people started shouting faggot and the like
($wift, Wed 28 Sep 2005, 20:41, Reply)

Let me take you on a lovely journey...
I did vaguely media related gubbins at university and as such saw my fair share of utter (and sometimes hilariously drunken) wank passed off as art. By far the best was a showcase from the Photography students. There was the usual portfolios of pretty ladies and the even more usual walls full of pictures of goths trying to look moodily at trees whilst looking more like the bastard offspring of Gene Simmons and Alan Titchmarsh.

One display caught everyone's eye however. It was a flip chart, being slowly turned over from page to page by the artist, a girl looking very pleased with herself. First was a photo of black, then a photo of the inside of the toilet, then an underwater photo, more water, more black, some sky, some sea and so on and so on. Eventually the final sheet was turned over to reveal the title, as if you haven't guessed.

It was called "The Journey Of A Poo".

Several points need clarifying here.
1. This is honest to god true.
2. I instantly started laughing my ass off. This girl was a comedy genius! As I did so the 'artiste' turned and stared at me with a look of such hatred I felt as if I must have just raped her dead mother. She wasn't a comedy genius, she was being serious.
3. She got a 2:1 for tackling (again no word of a lie) 'a brave subject in an interesting way'.

So there you have it, turns out modern art is quite literally shite.
( Gleeballs is mostly made out of chocolate and hate., Wed 28 Sep 2005, 20:33, Reply)

My last installation in the Tate.
It was a fettid pile of solipsistic post-masturbatory wipings-up.

Contemptible, childish, lacking in import. Ashamed of myself. I have seen the light.
(petrofski, Wed 28 Sep 2005, 20:24, Reply)

Derek JAAAaaaarrmmmannnn .... YYAAAWWWNNNNNN!!!
Derek Jarman's, 'Blue' --- THE most utterly pointless load of extreme bollocks ... A film with no visuals, just a blue screen, and somebody narrating some pretentious poetry wankshite over the top ... Here's some lines from the script (No, I didn't remember them. There's actually sites dedicated to this crap)

Look left
Look down
Look up
Look right
The camera flash
Atomic bright
Photos
The CMV - a green moon then the world turns magenta
My retina
Is a distant planet
A red Mars
From a Boy's Own comic
With yellow infection
Bubbling at the corner
I said this looks like a planet
The doctor says - "Oh, I think
It looks like a pizza"


What?? A pizza??? Wtf??! Imagine that sort of shite for HOURS ...
(Paolo, Wed 28 Sep 2005, 20:16, Reply)

we have an art teacher at our school
who thinks if you make it, its art. as soon as we all caught on, art lessons were soooo easy!!! a piece of card here, a splash of paint there, a giant chunk of polystyrene on top...tada! a 'maquette' (wtf?) of a piece of public art to go in hull city centre!

(this got me a level 6 by the way. how i laughed)
(hamstrungbarber chris, 1990, united kingdom, Wed 28 Sep 2005, 20:15, Reply)

The most pretentious thing I tried to see in the name of Art :
I put on a curly/frizzy wig, sang Bright Eyes from Watership Down and tried to get in to see Paul Simon for free at The Royal Albert Hall.

I got turned away despite protesting loudly "Don't you know who I am ?"
( beaubodor blogless, Wed 28 Sep 2005, 20:11, Reply)

oh god
please don;t get me started on myspace kids.. i could talk for hours and hours and hours about THEM!
(harrietthespy, Wed 28 Sep 2005, 20:10, Reply)

Look!
I read Look at school about 21 years ago...my son read it last year at the same school...in fact it was possibly the same copy!
I would probably say the most pretentious things I've seen are emo myspaces.
( moogy boobles, Wed 28 Sep 2005, 20:07, Reply)

Surely you remember this
Those reading books in primary schools? The most pretentious (and patronising) book was the first. It's called 'Look'. On every page there is one word. Look. This continues for several pages, possibly taxing the reader to search for more words. On the last page, you will find them. 'Look at that'. Yes, look at that, you've just wasted my fucking time, and now I'm last in line for the tuck shop you WANKER!
(hamstrungbarber chris, 1990, united kingdom, Wed 28 Sep 2005, 19:59, Reply)

dollydagger! about LCF!
i go there too! that guy with the straw hat looks like such a twat!

and he's in my class!!!
(harrietthespy, Wed 28 Sep 2005, 19:31, Reply)

more on pretentious art wank
there's a gallery in edinburgh that used to have sales of stuff every year to help raise money ... some well known names from the edinburgh art world and beyond would contribute (postcards one year, CD cases made into art another etc, all small stuff but fun), punters would buy a ticket then get a random bit of art ... possibly worth something or not ... was there one year, paid the fiver or tenner or whatever it was, and got a print thing on canvas of a chinese lucky cat ... the person running the gig told me the artist was "just over there" [pointing] if i wanted to meet him, so wandered over to say "hey, cheers mate, got yer cat, what else you up to?" (standard sociable happy chat after couple of glasses of cheap red). miserable cunting wankflap was standing with a mate who looked supercilious and said in a voice dripping with sarcasm "oh lucky you" (subtext: "i'm an artist so i'm above scum like you") ... never heard of him again though which cheered me up considerably
( writerblock ... embedding disabled by request on, Wed 28 Sep 2005, 19:09, Reply)

Old prog rock joke
How do you spell "pretentious"?

"E L P"
(gordonjcp, Wed 28 Sep 2005, 18:46, Reply)

artfag london pub
A man dressed as a crab terribly drumming what he called 'abstract' while two hippies danced then stopped and laughed shyly at themselves followed by more 'dancing' - twunts.
(Gargh, Wed 28 Sep 2005, 18:43, Reply)

La la la
human steps. or human sex. or whatever.

They have different titles, but every single performance consists of the blonde woman in a filmy dress and army boots flinging herself around on the stage, doing these horizontal twirls over and over again. She never falls so I guess that makes her a dancer. Or a cat.

Also, La Cirque du Soleil, though they're too popular and commercially successful to be considered alongside all the heavily subsidised "art" in this list. Still pretty pretentious.
(cox2inhibitor, Wed 28 Sep 2005, 18:42, Reply)

stupid photo art woman...
I suffer from the wish to produce art that looks like things that are recognisable and stupidly thought that doing a fine art degree would aid me in this endeavour... However, if you happen to tell an art teacher that you know what you want to do, and that's to paint still-life or portraiture, they get very upset and express that you couldn't possibly know what you want as they've not yet shown you how to think. I'm from a very rough council estate and am about as pretentious as a manhole cover - which meant that there were lots of arguments between lecturers and me - because I refused to draw without looking at the paper, paint with my left hand or many of the other stupid, ridiculous bollocks that they spewed out...
Anyway, we once had to watch a video where a woman lay on a big piece of glass, naked, twisting her body around whilst a bloke took photos. This was supposed to show how womens bodies have been distorted by men through history. At the end of the video the lecturer asked what we thought. Nobody said anything. She insisted that we must have an opinion - so I piped up with "Pretentious art wank", which I then had to justify - fair enough, so I did (mainly through pointing out that the supposed artist was the one distorting her body and she was the one paying the bloke to take the photos - so how come men were getting the blame?). This phrase (unfortunately for the lecturers) then became the standard response for most of the class when we were asked what our opinion was..
I didn't last very long at art school... but have had my (boring, unoriginal) stuff on display and people have offered me money for it - so I think I'm doing OK, despite the fact that I don't know how to think properly...
I love a lot of art, but cannot stand most of the artists I've met - self-deluded imbeciles who talk rubbish and can't bleeding draw..
(thebadangel, Wed 28 Sep 2005, 18:41, Reply)

tracy emin
and all her 'works' which are only outdone on ugliness and pointlessness by herself.
(moik, Wed 28 Sep 2005, 18:29, Reply)

ye gods..
Every single kid in a band I ever have the misfortune of meeting.

Hi I came here to get drunk and have fun, not to have my musical taste pissed all over from a great height just because more than two people have actually HEARD of the band I like.

edit: Ok so some of them aren't like this. But most of them are. Maybe it's just the area I'm from.
(sporky, Wed 28 Sep 2005, 18:17, Reply)

Re: I only came for the penguins: "MA student dons a pair of wellies and thick rimmed glasses. Sits in the corridor for three days talking into a FisherPrice cassette recorder about her childhood memories"...
Where can I buy this?
(RowdsterDelux, Wed 28 Sep 2005, 18:07, Reply)

Open nite shite
I used to go to an open mike evening in a pub where sometimes there were some pretty good acts.

Once these two fellas walked on "stage", sat down and started tuning their guitars, turning the little pegs up & down, the odd note here and there. One had a tuning fork which he would occasionally bang on the mike stand then hold against his guitar.

Everyone present watched for no more than a couple of seconds then noisily resumed their conversations while waiting for these guys to finish tuning up.

After about two minutes they stopped, one said "thank you" into the mike and they started looking around the audience and doing that smug nodding-smiling thing.

Everyone assumed they were joking and a few people laughed out loud. However it was only the gradual change in their expressions from "cat-that-got-the-cream" to "seven-year-old-whose-hamster-just-died" that caused people to gradually realise that this had actually been their act.

There was then some more laughing out loud.
(Ali Bongo 9000 Ali Bongo 9000, Wed 28 Sep 2005, 17:57, Reply)

Sort of counts...
People who think they're sophisticated by going to see Shakespeare.

Obviously they don't realise it was written for medieval peasants, most of whom couldn't read. Well done morons, that's very fucking sophisticated.
( Iki I think my camel is dead., Wed 28 Sep 2005, 17:34, Reply)

Sometimes you can judge a book by it's cover
My missus did a degree on art history, and still has a few relics from those days knocking around.

Hence, on my shelf, there sits a book entitled "New Feminist Art Criticism".

I have yet to read it so cannot explicitly confirm its pretentiousness or bollocksness. However were I a betting man....
(Ali Bongo 9000 Ali Bongo 9000, Wed 28 Sep 2005, 17:34, Reply)

People who...
quote Shakespeare with............. "highly dramatic" .... pauses.
(Beans goes up to eleven, Wed 28 Sep 2005, 17:28, Reply)

Leeds festival.
It's about midnight, and the bands have finished. There's some kind of show in the comedy/cabaret stage, and my friend told me I should go see the band that were doing the backing music (I'd missed their main slot as the Pixies were on.)As I arrive, the somewhat pleasant music pipes down, and all there is to see is this dippy tart dressed in black swaying in a melancholy fashion on the stage, while annoying noises and nonsensical images loop on the speakers and screens. After about 10 minutes of this, I figure that she's not going to do anything of any interest, so I wander off and invent drinking games with my mates. Ace!
(matthyaouw, Wed 28 Sep 2005, 17:28, Reply)

Theatre School Kids
Every single one of them.

Air kisses when they meet, when they part and while they're discussing Jocasta and Tarquin's latest parts in toilet paper adverts. They're all over Marylebone station every bloody morning.

They're all so sure they're going to be the next Laurence Olivier/Dame Judi Dench, but they'll all end up as second rate Denise Van Fucking Outens
(lardyboy Next stop, Fissplap Central, Wed 28 Sep 2005, 17:26, Reply)

I love art.
The belgrade studio in cov... won't go into too much detail, same old bullocks, lots of ugly nudity, some screaming, lots of confusion. Generally the audience were being patient, trying their best to get it, lots of chin rubbing. We don't get much kultcha in the midlands, and so you have to try and absorb.

But there was a classic moment when the main "character" had a red flower pot on his head, and walked to the front of the stage, and a series of black strings fell from one of the lights, gently resting on the flowerpot. Yup, a perfect Tommy Cooper fez.

My friend and I turned to each other and remarked: "Jus-like-that"

The whole audience creased with laughter, ruining the "climax" to this "performance"

The Q+A session afterwards was fun...
(kev.cc, Wed 28 Sep 2005, 17:20, Reply)

The film:
Elephant.

Utter boring shite, shite acting, shite story, completely fucking pointless.
(Slyph, Wed 28 Sep 2005, 17:18, Reply)