Burnham V. Art

 “Art is Dead” is a very bizarre song that simultaneously gets everything right about art & everything wrong about art. 

“Art is Dead” The song which it can be argued is the most well known of any of the works by Bo Burnham gets it’s title & main idea about art completely correct. Art is dead because art has never lived. Art is not an organism it is not an ecosystem it is not even truly a system. Art is simply the tender relationship between the creator and the consumer. The Tender relationship is all that art is & a tender relationship is not a living organism so in that aspect Mr. Burnham gets many things right. 

Mr. Burnham also makes  many extremely bizarre statements that are blatantly false such as his truly bizarre assertion “I am an artist, please God forgive me, I am an artist please don’t revere me, please don’t respect me, feel free to correct me” now this statement seems to suggest that Mr. Burnham has no concept of the tender relationship. An artist like a human must be forgiven by God yes but there is nothing interesting there, the assertion “please don’t revere me, please don’t respect me” also flies fully in the face of the Tender relationship as reverence and respect are relational ideas the only way to not be respected as an artist is to be an extreme absurdist like Greta Gerwig. Burnham also seems to have no idea that he is in a meaningful tender relationship with his listeners as he transitions from times of aggressive output to no output & seems to berate himself & anyone who ever cared for him in a wide variety of his songs.