Practical Sainthood Part II

In Dadaland, the world of the future, artists have successfully manipulated cultural climate change so that no senseless mass slaughter on battlefields ever occurs, despite the heroic efforts of folks who like that sort of thing. The artists run the risk of being pegged as "saints" and consequently going through the slow horrible death that is traditional among saints. One way of avoiding this is trying to blend into the populace and become invisible, much the way that a green tree frog blends into the leaves on a twig, a Zebra blends into the tall grass of the savannah, or a treehopper pretends to be a thorn on a rose bush.

This method of blending into the populace has been tried many times, notably by nuns. Young nuns wished to resemble old widows, lest they be raped by Vikings or, if they were blonde under the wimples, hauled off in the dragon-headed ships to Spain, to be sold for a pretty penny to Moors who believed, with no scientific evidence, that these girls would breed especially healthy children. Nuns, however, tended to lack fashion sense. That is to say, they were so busy reciting psalms that they did not notice when women began buying clothes they did not actually need in order to be wearing something different from what they wore in the previous month. After about four hundred years of this, approximately when Twiggy in her mini skirt burst out of London's Carnaby Street into the mass media in 1963, the nuns finally noticed that they no longer blended in with the populace. Fortunately, the Moors had, by then, been driven out of Spain and the Vikings had given up rape and taken up furniture making.

Nonetheless, in Dadaland, it will be highly inadvisable for an artist to dress like a nun. Even a claim that he or she is merely engaging in "Performance Art" may lack crediblility. This was done, in the 1960's by a companion of Paul Krassner, editor of an underground periodical called "The Realist" : the pair went to various public places and performed acts of passionate saliva swap and wimple disarray. Performance Art is, in Dadaland, just sooooo twentieth century.

Preferable to dressing as a nun is playing golf to blend in with the populace. An artist who plays golf will probably be able to openly say "I am an arist. I manipulate the cultural climate so that no senseless mass slaughter on battlefields ever occurs, despite the heroic efforts of folks who like that sort of thing." His or her golf companions will reply "Yeah, right, tell me another one." The International Dada Centennial Committee is, in fact, planning to establish a special golf school for artists to be ready for this world of the future when artists are the dominant life form on Earth.

To be continued...