This is a project where I pay workers on Amazon's Mechanical Turk to review my art and website and pay them $5 for 500 words. This is the 64th review I've received.
"At first glance Paul
Shortt’s art reminded me of the artists in New York in the 60, 70’s and 80’s
with their performance art that only the deepest, hippest thinkers could
understand. There were a lot of pretenders with a drink in one hand and a
cigarette in the other squinting and nodding their heads. Looking harder at Paul’s work I see
he’s a Midwesterner. What does that imply? Midwesterners have a history of
humility for one thing and are hardly pretentious for the most part. I liked
the idea of “Please No Photos”. The message I got from it was the hypocrisy of
the most famous for the sake of fame, pretending to hate the paparazzi. If he would
have taken this further and gotten someone famous to stand behind the no photo
symbol it might have had more impact.
It was a fun idea that didn’t go far enough.
Many of his pieces seemed more
psychology than art such as “Three Hour Tour” where he takes 3 volunteers
unknowingly to a hospital to walk around and discuss their feelings about it
afterward. “How to be Narcissistic”, a sort of workshop on the art of
Narcissism, “Contemporary Farewells”, “Modern Greetings” and an early work
called “Interactive Signs” are a few of his works that require participation
and possibly leave the participants thinking after having a bit of fun. People
don’t usually crawl up stairs or hop right and left in front of an exit without
a sign telling them to do so. Maybe in this way Paul is giving people
permission to let loose a little. I got a chuckle out of “Missed Connections”.
This was a project taking personal ads and placing them in odd ways such as on
a decorated cake, written with icing in the bakery section of a grocery store
(my personal favorite).
“The Car My Father Gave Me” is
a piece that felt too personal and too long. It left me feeling that only Paul
and his family could really appreciate it to its fullest. The biggest surprise
in Paul Shortt’s collection was “Paul Shortt Shocks Chicago”. It was a short
description of Paul with a classic hand buzzer shaking hands on a Chicago
street, then giving the buzzed a buzzer to continue the gag and so one. He has
a few photos on the page of buzzers and a hand holding a buzzer. That’s it!
It’s left to your imagination. Maybe that’s the art of it, just story telling
where you think the rest of it out yourself. In this day of YouTube I felt he
could have gone so much further and made a great video but that would be too
predictable I suppose. The series titled “Literally and Physically” is just the
New York art I was referring to earlier that I would have expected to see some
decades ago. The answer to this might just be that Paul Shortt is this
generation’s New York elite, but not in New York."
For more info on this project and to read all the reviews please check out my website: http://paulshortt.com/Pay-For-An-Audience-5-Star-Ratings
