August 6, 2008
On the Prostitution and Exploitation of Artists
Today Pinky was hired to paint all day for a client who has a dead bird fetish. Here is the chicken he painted in the morning (wearing only his underwear and cowboy hat). She preferred dead parakeets and pigeons. By the afternoon Pinky had geared up the dead bird painting to paint the sweetest little dead parakeet in a little red dunce cap. It almost made him cry.
When I was, oh, twenty-five or so, I requested of an eighteen-year-old artist I knew that he draw me a picture of a man whose head had been pierced in one side and out the other, Injun arrow-style, by a weasel, then to draw me a picture of Jack Nicholson as an animated cartoon rat. He fulfilled both requests and didn’t charge me nothing. I guess that was some kind of exploitation.
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blast! i hope you have scans of your jack nicholson rat. please tell me that you do.
The rat sketch, it pains me to say, is no more. I lost the bulk of my possessions ten years ago, and that rat is one of the very few things over which I still grieve, along with other works of art given to me as gifts.
Now I did recently get back in touch with the artist, after many many years, and I suppose I could ask him to draw me a new Jack Nicholson rat. But under the circumstances, this time I’d insist on paying him (and I suspect he’d insist on payment!).
if you do ask, ensure that you make clear that you want cuckoo’s nest jack nicholson and not the modern day jack nicholson who gets hand jobs from kathy bates in a hot tub.
I did have in mind something closer to a retro Jack Nicholson rat.
I’m Pinky’s john. Daryl’s his pimp. It’s a nice little triangle.
Pinky Diablo: Midnight Cowboy. Painting-Drawing-Sewing Midnight Cowboy.
I would like to point out that I do not, in fact, have a dead bird fetish. I have a deep and subtle appreciation for dead birds and images thereof.
I do have a donkey fetish, though.