in which the author descends to cattily dissing unnamed local minor celebrities

For all I know, he could be a really wonderful great guy in person - but a certain local art personality (whom I'm not naming, since local readers will know whom I'm talking about, and no one else will care) seems determined in his public gestures to come across as rather a dickhead.

Let's see...first, there's the grandstanding temper tantrum of closing his art gallery and resigning his leadership of a local arts organization over the approval of a bronze statue of The Fonz slated for downtown Milwaukee. Now the idea of this statue is as painfully tacky to me as it is to anyone else...but people who are confident that they do in fact live in a real city would recognize that, hey, idiots live everywhere (even in Paris or New York), and sometimes those idiots will impose their dull and inane tastes on everyone else. (Like honoring a character fictitiously from a Milwaukee whose residents speak in suspiciously Brooklyn-esque cadences.) Much smarter just to ignore it.

And now here's this guy in an interview in the local edition of The Onion's A.V. Club (which doesn't appear to exist online) proclaiming that among his latest "art" projects is that he's started smoking. Uh, okay: do something stupid, obnoxious, and harmful that no one in the world will be impressed by; call it "art," and hope there are a few suckers who'll fall for it. His other art project? "Taking pictures of [him]self in tighty-whities." Well...surely no one's ever done that before either. I really shouldn't mention the pink-dyed Dairy Queen faux-hawk, but what the hell: pink-dyed Dairy Queen faux-hawk.

I'm sorta hoping this whole thing is part of a huge performance piece: you know, "I've been acting like a big pretentious idiot and you all fell for my 'art' ha-ha."