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Painter Justin Bua Might Just Be Art’s Most Outspoken Defender of Skill

"Look, people can do whatever the fuck they want to do… I just think we have to be a little more guarded about calling everything 'art' just because someone did something in a gallery."

Justin Bua’s disembodied head is floating at the bottom of my phone’s screen, his tousled grey hair framed against a video of an artist smashing a mirror with a hammer. “What you see is not you–deeper than you know–” is printed on one side of the mirror. With a hammer, the artist smashes the other side. In the mirror’s reflection, a half dozen people are standing in an austere gallery, intently watching the artist create his piece. Beneath him, Bua explains how this piece is a “devastating intervention of the economy of the gaze.” He goes on to spew a few semesters’ worth of art school dialectic, talking about the “consolation of a coherent reflection,” the “ego fractured against the very apparatus that once produced it,” how “each shard is the indexical trace with the self; a meditation on fragmentation as the only honest portrait available to the civilization that long ago forfeited its self-reflection.”

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“Pure genius,” he calls the piece, before his furrowed brow morphs into a subtle smirk. “Nah, I’m playing,” he says. “Somebody smashed a mirror and slapped a price tag on it. This is dogshit. Complete dogshit.”

For the last three years, Bua has been posting these critiques (takedowns, really) to his Instagram. They’re almost always the same, with Bua appearing at the bottom of the screen, explaining why he thinks the work is, for lack of a better term, dogshit. Behind him, a video of some contemporary artist or another plays. In one, an artist topples a stack of sand-filled buckets. In another, two women scribble on a wall, their arms connected by a rigid glass rod. One artist smacks a pile of butter with a microphone while another kayaks in a small pool at the center of a gallery. And almost always, the observers present stand in rapt attention as the artist rolls in........

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