And, yes, it's time for the Bay Guardian Wank of the Week. This little bit of po-mo mojo concerns a new art exhibit.

Basically this guy downloaded porn images from the Web (only to do his artwork, of course), pixelated them, then painted over parts of it so that it only slightly looks like porn, but instead mainly looks like cool Photoshop tricks. Actually the description sounds kind of interesting, especially as it's something I could do. Naturally, the images mean something a whole lot more than just a good excuse to downloaded naked pictures of women. Because art is never that simple. Gotta love any review that manages to get in the words misogynist, fetishistic, and milieu. It's like hitting the art theory trifecta.

"Whereas pornography hung on the wall as such would be confrontational (and would disturb the casual social milieu of a bar like the Latin American), the abstraction produced by Connelly's reproductions provides a distance from their subject matter that allows them to be enjoyed as if they weren't pornographic. Much like Kurtis Blow sings "don't do it" on "White Lines" and then proceeds with his encomium to cocaine, Connelly's distortions serve as a censor that (paradoxically) enables the pictures to be enjoyed in their obscenity. At the same time, Connelly's close attention to the images' pixelation reveals truths about the enjoyment of digital porn. His paintings articulate an instrumental (and perhaps specifically misogynist) fantasy of sex objects reduced not merely to body parts but furthermore to objects of pure illusion – as a stimulus only to the eye and the mind – which he captures in his titles, such as zuztu030.jpg, 31.jpg, and 05.jpg. He doesn't paint women; he paints digital files. He presents the digital screen as an object of desire, a surrogate for the pleasures of the flesh, and a fetishistic defense against the vulnerabilities they entail – as if to say not "you can look but don't touch," but rather "you can look and don't have to touch."

Side note- I actually had to look up the word "encomium." Not that I'm an editor, but my feeling is that if you use a word that has to be looked up in reference to "White Lines," you should probably think of using another word. As the song says, "don’t do it."