I Will Paint The Greatest Painting
For any impressive painting, the first thing that’s always asked is: “How many nudes?”
This will be the greatest painting of all time. After its debut, when people ask each other what their favorite painting is, they will always qualify their question with: “Besides Justin’s, of course.”
For any impressive painting, the first thing that’s always asked is: “How many nudes?” I assure you, there will be enough nudes. Not a gratuitous amount of nudes, but — to be clear — no viewer would look upon my painting and say: “Yo, duder, where are the nudes?”
They will be both tasteful and provocative, the nudes, and while gazing into my painting’s silken face it will be both appropriate and highly appropriate to find yourself weeping, yet fully aroused, yet high-fiving everyone. “I get it,” you’ll say to the other onlookers, their hands also full of their genitals and their tears. “Humanity!” Then they’ll give you a soft, knowing smile while they offer up a high-five. With their free hand, of course.
My painting techniques will bring a raw richness to the nudes, and also to the spooky cowboy skeletons. Every frumpy and haunting figure I paint will have a greater intensity and magnitude than even the most fascinating or most naked of mortals. No one in my painting will be exempt from this grandeur — not the fly-fishing nudes, not Madam Bones who runs the brothel, and certainly not the nudes doing Fonzie impressions.
I fully expect a few critics and hipsters to pan my painting at first. They’ll carp that it’s too engrossing, that the sagacious truths expressed are too insightful, and that modern society is better suited to live in cities rather than in a massive shantytown of billions surrounding my painting. Though, as I will handsomely prophesize, they will all eventually come around. One critic in particular, while trying to patch things up with his estranged shanty family, will notice the painting’s two nude brothers playing tetherball, and everything will hit him. It’ll hit him hard, like a sobering sunbeam after a depraved evening at Madam Bones. He’ll drop from his waders into the tide of tears and bodily fluids as the baptism of high fives rains upon him. Through sobs, he’ll lament his having ever become a critic and claim that he would have been far happier doing that discount carpet business idea with his half-wit brother. His redaction will be famous — not “Painting Famous,” mind you — but it’ll prove to be a watershed moment. Every critic and cynical hipster will soon follow and affirm that “the world needs no other creative expression” and “yes, there is the exact right amount of Fonzie impersonators.”
News of universal approval will travel swiftly by word of mouth across the favela tribes, as all printed type and electronics will have been deemed “distractions from enlightenment” and will have been destroyed or cast out with the briny tide.
The painting will remain at the center of our world until the Earth is destroyed, the world finally reveling together in an egalitarian utopia, albeit it one of slums and literal cum gutters. All media and religion will have been replaced with a single breathtaking painting, and all I’ll ask in return is for massive tributes of gold and opium.
So, yeah, Dad. I have a plan. Don’t worry about me quitting law school.
