A couple of milk-faucets

Washington has been good to me, but I still can't get past the goddamn seriousness of the place. There are bars for democrats, and bars for republicans. The friends I have here are either married or working in healthcare or politics, the two most santimonious industries around. Aside from them and others like them, there's an old lady dying in my living room, a too-serious repressed homosexual liberal chauvinist living across the hall (the old lady's son, who thinks he's multicultural for making Mexican food), an old friend who's become a marine and walks around with a stick up his ass and a bunch of obese tourists asking you how to get to the Air and Space Museum.
So it was refreshing for me to see the following piece of portraiture, entitled Mom and Dad:

Steve DeFrank
New York City, New York
Hand-dyed Lite-Brite pegs in light box,
2005
60 in. (152.4 cm) height
Collection of the artist, courtesy Clementine Gallery

Nice little bananas on Mom's chest, huh? This is the kind of art DC needs--visual prunes to relieve its constipation. I'm not sure if it's particularly good, although it's certainly more radiant in person than it is above. But that's not the point: however skilled or "meaningful" the modern art at the Hirschorn may be, much of it seems to lack humor or surprise. In some sense, that was really supposed to be the point of modern art--to shock you out of your serious aesthetics. But when such art is bought by a committee and turned into an attraction any thoughtful, liberal tourist must go to in order to say they've been, it gets sort of boring.

I'm sure all of this offends someone and I'm saying something that I'll regret later, but to tell you the truth, I don't really care enough about art to argue with you about it. Or perhaps you weren't offended until you read the last sentence but now you are. But it doesn't really matter to me, just so long as I get a little bit of mommy's ass over there.