so i definitely snagged this from trisha...but i'm giving her some props here cause i heart her BIG time!!!! and just so you know before you start reading, it's about ART!!!

Express Yourself: It's Later Than You Think
this is an article by an illustrator named Brad Holland...

Contemporary Art: A handful of people who grew up before TV still think that all artists either paint like Picasso or like Norman Rockwell. That was true eighty years ago, but these days all artists want to be popular. If they were starting their careers today, Rockwell and Picasso would probably both be painting on black velvet.

Art History: In the Stone Age, artists expressed themselves with bold pictures on the walls of their caves. Then there was a period of transition that lasted roughly 10,000 years. Then came modern art. Now we can express ourselves again. If you want to know the details, you can go to art school and spend thousands of dollars, but this is basically what they'll teach you. I've boiled it down.

Dada: Dada artists were ironists. Duchamp was their star, and his masterpiece was a urinal. He ended his life playing chess. He claimed he was making an art statement. My grandfather was a prankster, too. And he ended his life playing chess. But since he did it to keep from being bored, no one thought it proved anything. This suggests that Dada artists are exempt from the general rule that ironists are the biggest victims of their own irony.

Star, superstar, black hole: A modern Renaissance man is unlikely to become a celebrity. But any celebrity can be a Renaissance man. The great number of entertainers-turned-painters testifies to this. Look at Tony Curtis, Tony Bennett, Anthony Quinn, Billy Dee Williams, Red Skelton, the artist formerly known as Prince, Ron Wood, and Frank Sinatra. They all have galleries for their paintings and, as far as I know, there are books about their work. I read an interview with Sylvester Stallone in which he talked about his graffiti paintings. He said that drawing and color aren't important, as long as you get your feelings 'out there.' I confess that after years of struggling with drawing and color, that was a load off my mind.

Cutting-edge art: One percent inspiration, 99 percent attitude.

'Sometimes you gotta break the rules': One of the things not enough people appreciate about modern art is that its philosophy can be summed up as a Burger King commercial.

The left brain doesn't know what the right brain is doing: Cutting-edge artists who attack tradition must secretly believe that tradition will survive to enshrine them as the wild and crazy geniuses who destroyed it.

Self-expression: The crowbar used by artists to pry open the Pandora's Box of self-indulgence for everybody else in society. Fifty years ago, it was the dream of every bohemian artist to be seen getting out of a limousine wearing blue jeans and sneakers. Today, it's the dream of probably half the people in the country.

The miracle of authenticity: The faith that if we're all authentic and express ourselves, society will benefit. A charming ideal, but it overlooks the obvious. There are a lot of authentic jerks and idiots in the world. Encouraging them to express themselves will never do anybody much good, much less society.

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world: It's every artist's fantasy to run things. I know personally, I'd be happiest as a dictator of a small island. The problem is that romantic artists are usually too disorganized to run their own lives, let alone their societies. And most societies are too sensible to let them try it.

Consciousness-raising art: An all-purpose excuse for the artist to cast himself as a pearl before the swine of democracy. Whenever I know that an artist is trying to raise my consciousness, I have flashbacks of Jane Fonda, Sissy Spacek, and Jessica Lange lecturing Congress about the realities of farm life.

Political Art: Political art expresses the cliches you agree with, unlike propaganga, which expresses the cliches you don't.

Painter/Activist: I distrust anyone with a slash in his or her job description. I've met too many actor/waiters and rock musician/electricians.

Mixed-up media: In Modernism, reality used to validate media. In Postmodernism, the media validate reality. If you don't believe this, just think how many times you've described some real event as being 'just like a movie.'

Forever Jung: Postmodernists believe that truth is myth, and myth, truth. This equation has its roots in pop psychology where people also believe that emotions are a form of reality. There used to be another name for this state of mind. It was called psychosis.

Life imitates art: Not true. Art imitates life. Life imitates high school.

Multiculturalism: Multiculturalists believe that an individual's self-worth is a function of his ethnic identity--a philosophy of self-esteem arrived at through the logic of racism."