Someone Wants To Know My Opinion On "Mapplethorpe"

No, I hadn't heard that Hollywood was doing Robert Mapplethorpe, eventually they celebrate and romanticize every depraved phony, don't they.

I know nothing about the movie except what I saw in the trailer and it doesn't look like it will be an in-depth investigation into the self-hating, self-destroying, racist, sexist, thrill-seeking-because-too-stupid-and-lazy-to-not-be-bored nature of his photography and, from the little I haven't managed to avoid knowing about, his personal life.

Which reminds me of the old sketch from That Was The Week That Was (the U.S version) in which a young Allen Alda is approached by an interviewer and asked:

Can I ask you a personal question?

What's it about?

Your sex life,

to which Alda replies,  I thought you said it was a personal question.

Just thought I'd throw that in.  Oh, and that's paraphrased, I don't memorize comedy skits like a 12-year-old future asshole-comic of America.

I detest Robert Mapplethorpe's photography and the quasi-fascistic world of high-price art that he was a part of.  He and virtually everyone I know of who was associated with him has way too much of an easy and cosy relationship with something bound to lead to fascism.  As a gay man, one who was of the same generation, I watched that destroy too many of us and damage even more.  Modernism is a two-edged sword and like all two-edged swords, both of them can cut you and kill you.  If they wanted to make an interesting movie, they could make one about one of his boyfriends, Jack Fritscher who is a more nuanced and more interesting study in the genre.  Only I believe he was a writer and no one collects his work.  If Mapplethorpe didn't produce photos that were part of the meat market that the commercial art scene is, if his work didn't represent large wads of cash,  no one would be making a movie about him.

I never looked at a single one of his pictures and saw anything but the most obvious of cliches and stereotypes, many of them self-hating-homo-hating, many of them racist, many of them sexist, with good lighting.  He wasn't really any more original than Thomas Kinkade, he just did a different genre of conventional kitsch for another superficial market of collectors.

Patti Smith is boring and devoid of talent, too.  Just to throw that in.

The man died of AIDs, for fucksake.  Unless the movie discourages promiscuity it will be an ad for getting infected, like the massively pathological and immoral "bug-chaser" cul-de-sac in gay porn and online hookup, which is an excellent argument against free speech, free press absolutism.

I will confess, I literally I hate people who use gay men to encourage self-destroying-self-hating behavior in us and in, especially, young people who are screwing around without condoms too much, already. 

Update:  I looked up some of his images online and I take back the phrase "good lighting".  I don't see anything in that that hadn't become a cliche by the 1940s.