(Originally published by McSweeney’s Internet Tendency:)

What was that out there? You call that a circle? It looked more like a soggy donut dipped in weak, watery coffee from some generic New England diner with abrasive neon lighting like they have at the DMV. Is that what you want to evoke with your painting? Because that is what people will see. You’ve gotta want that circle. You’ve gotta commit to the circle. You’ve gotta bare your soul for that circle! We’ve traced ‘em a thousand times in practice, and here we are at your live art show, and you’re absolutely choking.

What the hell are these still lives? You’re just going through the motions with your painting, kid! These are high school level art class toss offs. You wanna make it to the kind of cutting edge galleries whose walls are bare and only open to B-list celebrities on Tuesdays at three in the morning? You think a smudgy pastel rendering of an inoffensive, submissive, realistically colored little peach is your ticket there? What if it were rotten? What it if had a deformed arm sticking out of it? What if it had dinosaur fangs that represented capitalist desire? These are exactly the kinds of thoughts real artists think. Do you even think? You need point of view in your work rookie. The artwork needs to drip with your disturbing vision.

This is the worst line work I’ve seen in thirty years of coaching artists. You’re phoning this sketch in rook!! Where is the desire in your cross hatching? Where is the emotion and the guts in your shading? You’re like a robot sitting in front of a sketch book. I’d expect better cross hatching from R2-D2. I want to see some innovation and some signature moves in your style. How are you gonna differentiate yourself from all the other artists crammed beneath the crust of the art world you’ll be competing with for wall space.  You gotta get hungry in this post-modern, minimally styled artist loft you’ve paid three grand a week to rent out and listen to my comments in!!!

Why are you laughing? Do you find something amusing in that ill-conceived cartoon of a bird? Do you think  putting a beak on a businessman makes you the next Parra? This is a New Yorker wanna be. You’ve gotta draw differently if you want to turn your illustrations into a globally viable and self-sustaining brand. People have to think there is something wrong with you. If you want your cartoons featured in Juxtapose magazine and find your pithy, pedestrian illustrated type on the pages of FFFFOUND, you gotta get crazier. This is just lazy sketching. Don’t bother scanning that shit in and adding color separations in Illustrator. In fact, I’ll rip that page out right now…

Are you mocking my art coaching by smearing some coffee over your colored pencil rendering? Since when did this artist retreat ever stand for haphazard mixed media compositions? Is that something you read about us in our brochure? That’s a trick question! We’d never have a brochure. You’ve gotta shift your mind kiddo. Making these fanciful, typical collages in your notebooks may have earned you creative credibility in high school with the goth crowd. But I assure you, this tranquil space of kindred artists will not tolerate these random acts of artistry. We build sharp, hungry, flesh-eating (or appropriate vegan metaphor) artists here. Were not an artist colony of dabblers. We commit to our canvases and sketchbooks in a way that is meant to scare our contemporaries and our rival artist retreats. We’re in the business of training cult leaders here.

You are not Banksy. You are not even WK-Interact. I don’t care how many pop culture references you scan into your little MacBook Air and rasterize in Illustrator with a grungy photocopier filter over it. Your social commentary isn’t biting or sharp enough to use the language of street art as your vehicle. You don’t take risks with your work. You scan conservatively. You use the Adobe Creative Suite like you’re still following the tutorials.

I can’t take this anymore. You have five hours to create the next game-changing art movement. I’m gonna go find some inspiration on Tumblr.