Is it good when artists think of themselves better than their contemporaries? It is probably a survival strategy, an appeal to the inexorable judgment of the future that will mock the blind contemporaries and verify the genius of the misunderstood artist. Judging by that, I was often surrounded by pure geniuses.
Genius from the neighborhood
One of them moved into my building in the eighties. He had a heavy Montenegrin accent, a mustache and a logorrhea - he could speak without a semicolon, and the pronoun "I" was extremely frequent in the local vocabulary. That little word was the valve through which he connected the outer and inner world - he took fuel for his ego from the environment to inflate it like a balloon and raise it with his verbal hyperventilation. He was stringing words about heroic deeds that had been done long ago, of course, in another place, or were yet to follow. Before he went to the registrar with a girl from our town, he studied art pedagogy in a Montenegrin town known for its beer. Was an art teacher, but also much more than that. Even then, in his own eyes, he was more important than Picasso, Kandinsky and Chagall combined.
I lost sight of him when the nineties destroyed both the neighborhood we lived in and the country we were born in. He contacted me after three decades. He got my phone number and profile on one of the social networks. We heard each other. In a voice that seemed to be frozen in the eighties, he explained to me that he owns a house in the capital, that he is successful according to all transitional criteria, that he wants fame, but money does not bypass him.
Avetinja from the past
I was forced to occasionally correspond electronically with the boaster. Very quickly I had to remember that his greatest talent was stubborn, aggressive braggadocio. Unlike the "louisville talker" as they called Cassius Clay who would later become Muhammad Ali, he never went from words to actions. Epically old-fashioned, with a Chaplin mustache, even as a young man he looked anachronistic.
Back then, in the Bosnian province, he liked to get involved in things he didn't understand. One of his favorite delusions was - basketball. He claimed that far away from that place he trained in a Yugoslav first league team. He tried to prove it as a coach of a local club in the beginning. The problem was the demonstration exercises. His movements resembled a Pink Panther suddenly attacked by Parkinson's disease. Nothing was in coordination with anything.
The most impressive move, by which all Kasaba basketball players remember him, was his attempt to reach a ball that was coming out in a slow arc over the edge of the concrete playground. As if in slow motion, he waved his hands at the increasingly elusive ball, and then stuck to the concrete like a board. The result was a broken forearm.
Afterwards, with a cast on his arm, he talked about his dramatic sacrifice, which turned an important game around. I imagine him painting with that hand today. And just the way he played basketball.
Naked Savina and decorative kitsch
What I was learning about my ex-neighbor through the serial messages on my smartphone didn't endear him to me. He alternated between sending me photos of naked starlets, photos of his artwork, and some pretty dumb internet jokes. Even from the old days, I knew about the glutton: if you give your neighbor a finger, he will rip off your hand. That's why I didn't react to the naked ladies, his art, or his jokes. He started with an insert from "The Unseen Miracle". Of course, Savina Geršak was born from a mother in front of the eyes of a monk, but very quickly he switched to the Instagram nudity of girls who could be his granddaughters.
However, he caused a bigger pornographic effect (surprise and a little disgust) by presenting his colorful art work. He destroyed Mark Chagall's "Rooster", almost literally copied the birds of an artist from Tuzla whose exhibition I visited back in the eighties. He was photographed in the pose of Picasso - navy shirt, palms on view. He rode on the "Blue Rider", taking from Kandinsky geometric forms that resemble musical notes. And so ad infinitum.
Sometimes he would directly call me names. He asked me to admire him. "Picasso is for me" - um, let's soften his juicy vocabulary - "vaginal fog". "My blood is Montenegrin, I am a world artist".
Cocking as an artistic attitude
At first I thought this character was joking. But the increasingly frequent verbal abuse left no room for doubt: "Organize an exhibition for me to show your team what a genius I am."
I don't know if it's "Hubris syndrome", a perceptual disorder from which powerful people suffer - this man has never had worldly power, and he is neither sufficiently educated nor intelligent enough for spiritual. Or is it a question of hypertrophied love for one's own character, born somewhere on the native road Pljevlja-Nikšić-Cetinje? I really can't tell if the crux of this foolish behavior is some kind of narcissistic personality disorder or just innate rudeness. It must be a mixture whose recipe is the neighbor's biggest secret.
People with these disorders seek undivided attention and admiration, they do not tolerate criticism, they do not understand the feelings of others, but they are unsurpassed in flattering their own mental bubbles, they are pompous in trying to elevate themselves by degrading others.
Having spent several decades associating with poets, self-proclaimed or true, journalists, mediocre or excellent, unknown musicians and gifted painters, I can say based on experience that I am able to discern what kind of ancient Roman Genius accompanies them through life. More or less creative people like to thump the surface of life with their palms in a bohemian manner, in order not to produce foam on it, like water in a bathtub, which will beautify it. But the best of them, the ones with the greatest reach, had no need to represent their work as bad Balkan copies of Hollywood agents. True creative spirits are more interested in the diachronic cast of their art, the reach through time, than self-promotion. They also considered strutting without self-irony as a rural deviation in primitive characters.
Neighbor, neither dead nor alive
What should I do with the Picasso from my old house store? Nothing. This is his time. Only in the chaos of war and post-war looting could such types get the space and opportunities that their meager talent would never have provided them under normal circumstances. Only the cesspool of social networks, artistically uneducated journalists and superficial media can swallow his narcissistic story as authentic. His official biography is steeped in fiction. Alleged exhibitions in Germany of which there is no trace either on the Internet or in professional magazines.
In the XNUMXs, the magazine "Kapital" started an annual evaluation of living artists in the world. That ranking list, called "Art Compass", has listed the German Gerhard Richter as the undisputed number one painter in the world for seventeen years - not according to the prices of the paintings, but according to the evaluation of the professional public. Among the dead artists, Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys are at the forefront.
My neighbor is not in the "Artistic Compass" neither among the living nor among the dead. If he had heard Richter, the most important artist of today, speak just once, he would have been amazed. In one of the rare interviews, the humble Richter said: "There are no longer any criteria, what we buy and sell and what collectors buy. It's increasingly falling apart. They only buy fun nonsense".
The neighbor considers modesty to be a kind of disease anyway. But he realized in time that the path to success is the path of producing "entertaining nonsense". In a country without a critical professional public, he rummages through artistic waste from the beginning of the 20th century. A little Picasso, a little Dali, a little ethno-kitsch. And it moves in an eclectic manner unmistakably towards the 19th century.
Our stupid Pablo
Sometimes he sends me photos of naked girls counting pennies. He knows that in a country where basic values have disintegrated, it is enough to be somewhat likable as a craftsman and to claim to be great. In the absence of real sizes, the bazaar will, winking a little, and believing a little, declare you to be their bland Pablo. Post-Yugoslav postmodernity is a paradise for all kinds of arbitrariness.
The only problem is people like me, who remember the character and work from the analog era. Those who see the sight of a mustachioed narcissist with a Montenegrin accent, tripping with one foot on the other trying to reach the basketball. I see his hand with a fist grasping the air in vain, a hand that in less than a moment will make a sound like the snapping of a dry hazelnut stick. With that hand, the Chaplin owner, according to his own bold claims, would later perform the most significant artistic feats on canvas, the most impressive sculptures.
My Pablo didn't find his way from the slaughterhouse to this record as an artist, but as a typical palanquin example of a global trend where every kind of viral lie would like to convince us that ours is the only truth. And so that he reaches into our soul and pocket. The meager epoch in which indolence is constantly staged as opulence has its most realized expression in self-styled geniuses. They carry their own exaggerated, distorted self-image as a cross in both the real and virtual worlds.
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