Is Fat the New Punk?

You know why fine art has gone into the shitter over the past century? There's nothing left to push against. Who can look at Michelangelo's Last Judgment without imagining the painter contemplating the uncertainty of his own eventual fate? Even that hack Madonna got to wring a little outrage out of Catholic iconography. Britney Spears could be photographed with Amy Winehouse banging rails off a crucifix shoved up her ass and people would yawn. They have nothing but the abyss of their own drug-fueled insanity to peer into.

Then again, I wonder if we aren't at the dawn of a new age of art. The bourgeois is never eliminated, it simply comes under new management. If today's housewives in Wellesley are into transcendental yoga and a little recreational pony play (don't Google that at work) now and then, the new religion is the temple of the body. Smoking, eating red meat, and drinking more than the FDA-recommended two units of antioxidant-rich red wine before driving home in your emissions-exempt 60s muscle car is the new antisocial.

My friends, we're all theater fags now.  ¶ 10:03 AM