The Gay Art Monkey? What the hell is that?

"What the hell is a Gay Art Monkey?" This is probably the first question I will have to address in my blog. I heard the term "Art Monkey" applied to myself and my co-workers about 9 years ago when I started working for an adult video direct mail company. I dunno who first coined it, but it basically is any graphic designer who is part of a marketing team, but yet has little to no control over the art that he or she produces.

As a single member of a creative team, sometimes one has to bow to the wishes of the majority, and thus what a seasoned graphic artist would deem "a good design" is then sent through what the author of the book, "Hey, Whipple, Squeeze This: A Guide to Creating Great Ads, Second Edition", termed as the "Koncept Krusher 2000", wherein it is smashed and diluted and generally niggled to near death, until the resulting design is a tepid, gangly awkward abomination that bears little resemblance to the original great artistic idea that was eventually (horribly painfully) destroyed in its creation.

When I first joined my current company, this "artistic castration by committee" was a day-to-day occurrence, and I got to see some really cool ideas and concepts get beaten to death faster than a poorly performing pitbull at Michael Vick's house. Over the last few years however, either my ideas have conformed more to the box that the teams I work with like to think inside, or my intonation of "artist prerogative" in regards to drastic design changes to my art has finally landed with them, and they've realized that there's only so much "koncept krushing" I'll tolerate.

So, for the first few years, I was an Art Monkey. My parents find it greatly amusing and somewhat ironic that, as a gay man, I go to work and pour through thousands of str8 XXX movie pictures each week in my attempt to throw together catalogs, flyers, order cards and other mailing pieces to appeal to horny str8 men in their mid-20 to their mid-70s. They found the term "Gay Art Monkey" equally entertaining in its explanation.

I've come to believe my parents are finding out that kharma is a very real thing, and that all the grief and shit my three sisters and I gave them growing up is now coming back to bite us all on the ass. Two of my sisters have children, which are the living embodiment of the kharmic comeback, and my other sister has two cats and a husband that we secretly refer to as "Princess." I won't go into that much further but to say that if you knew her (and him), the kharmic smackdown she's getting would be pretty obvious.

Me? I get my kharma back by having to look at pictures of some of the worst god-awful boob jobs since women started going under the knife, gaping pussy lips, man-foam facials, girls that are more hirsute than most artists' renderings of the elusive sasquatch, and other sexual positions and variations that would make most gay men cringe and throw up into their mouths on a regular basis. Although after 9 years of somewhat desensitizing myself to most of the stuff I see, I can honestly say that I enjoy my job, though I probably could have seen the irony baseball bat swingin' at my head on my 5th day of employment, when my co-workers snapped a delightful polaroid shot of a porn star named Carly Sparks giving me a pair of "mickey mouse ears" from behind... with her boobs.

My father asked if I could send him a color copy of that picture. He believes seeing it will be the proudest moment of his life. Yeah. Kharma's a bitch.