The Talking Stones of Rome
The subject of my painting is homelessness. My minor thesis is bad art. I am not defending bad painting, or arguing a contrarian position. I am an advocate for style, technique—all of the accepted formal criteria—appropriate to the subject. I maintain that a conscientious artist must take a good, hard look at what he can do, and after doing so, choose a subject appropriate to what he can do. Sadly, that is not always how it is done and, the result is, bad art.
Art takes more than talent. It's a matter of individuality. As in everything, it's who you really are that's important. To be honest, I can't fake the truly bad art style, in the manner of the dilettante, which would be most appropriate to my subject. A painting of a bum should look like it was painted by a bum. What to do? I'm not a bum.
Any novice can paint badly better than I. I can't compete. I am not being modest when I say I don't think I'm the greatest painter that ever lived, because, I know that neither am I the worst. What is important to me, is, that I can tell the difference between good and bad. It is my trusted guide.
A taste for everything is a taste for nothing. An artist, particularly, can be a mediocre artist and yet have taste in art, which is, in effect, the rejection of the tasteless in art. And, on behalf of incompetent painters, may I point out that it is the worst art (or worst of anything), which can inspire the best criticism, which is inseparable from critical thinking (without which nothing matters.)
It is precisely the poor artistic quality of those exhumed-and-resurrected relics of classical statuary found in Rome, “The Talking Statues,” six infamous examples of the worst in classical art, that invite the satirical Pasquino. Despite the embarrassment caused by these satirical graffiti, the magistrates who put them there, and ordered them to remain there all these centuries, knew what they were doing. If they are at once unworthy of exhibit in a museum, or some private person's elegant villa, they are nonetheless entitled to respect.
The damaged, deliberately mutilated, “talking” statues can be compared to the homeless, those who “live rough,” -that permanently outcast caste of society. They are alike in that they both smell; the statues, figuratively speaking, the bums, literally. And, they both refuse to move on. They both exhibit no self-respect, nor respect for others. They are a constant reminder to passers-by of mankind's pitiable (and pitiful), condition. The wretched state of both cries “outrage!”
They both squat in the midst of busy pedestrian (public) thoroughfares. And that's the thing which touches a nerve. They both (statues and homeless) have rights. The right of both to exist (existentially) is a hotly contested argument. Both the ugly statues, and the universal class of The Homeless, are (as they have always been) attacked, both verbally and physically. As a result they are—and must be—protected.
The Cicerone guide to the sights of Rome (which I hold in my hand), points out that the typical Pasquino plastered upon “The Talking Statues” is unsigned. It may be taken for granted that is from fear of reprisal by the authorities. Magistrates are the usual target of the satirical barbs. Imagine, if you will, what Il Duce would have done had he caught a Pasquino satirist red-handed. Perhaps that is why I can find no reference to pasquinos during Mussolini's dictatorship?
Pasquino epigrams are highly contextual. I will admit, I don't understand the scandalous “backstory,” to which they refer. I do know that all politics is local, which means (in this discussion), that you had to be there to get the joke. You must read between the lines. I believe “inter-textual” is the current term. An example of the literary merit (you decide) of a random Pasquino, captured in a high-resolution photo taken by a tourist at the site, and roughly translated by yours, truly, yields the following sense:
Songs, colors, flags
those roads pass by
[illegible] would like to say
to those who cannot hear
that the truth is there,
made free citizens,
brains that think,
souls that tremble,
passions that march
with universal ideas,
always strong for young people
and who never [illegible]
But come [?] bothered [?]
who, how wounded [illegible]
claims to command
without understanding that
authoritarianism is not [broken-off]