Pro tip: if you’re not happy with your work, don’t submit it. If you do choose to submit it, don’t disavow it with regrets written all over the piece. (I do wonder which part of this was the good start, speculating… perhaps a yellow rectangle?) It does reveal the weakness at the heart of the vague “mistfunk” current – empowering as it was (and it did inspire some great art!), it’s impossible to know whether you’ve got the funk or not. I’m not sure what Rage had, but I don’t think it was funk.
The typical compromise was that if we were on the fence about a piece, we’d run it anyway – otherwise a stung artist would flee to a less discriminating group to vent all their stuff, and we’d wind up cut out of the loop once their skills improved and they consistently wowed people. So despite everything, this went in the pack as an investment in the future. Only one problem: making this artpack, spinning this sow’s ear into a hypertext silk purse (we gambled on a big step into the future by trying to release an artpack-as-website in August of 1998… and lost big) fell flat and the attempt resulted in a total deflation of morale and momentum (from an historically unprecedented spree of monthly artpack releases), culminating in the end of Mistigris Classic and nearly 16 years of torpor. So it’s a lose-lose: we accepted Rage’s lukewarm art and never did get a chance to intercept his more skilled, confident work – indeed, we don’t even know his real name and have no way of locating him today now that we have gotten over ourselves. (And, er, probably my dragging his juvenilia through the mud will not much inspire him to emerge from the woodwork. As I said on Instagram – “Funk you too, Cthulu!”)
Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 23, 2016 at 2:03pm UTC
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