Smoking Dragon: An Exclusive Look at the Art

Greetings art fans throughout the world! My name is Tom "Smoking Dragon" Clancy, and you are all undoubtedly well aware of my history and impact upon the art world. I am a certified avant-garde artist who has been leaving his mark upon global culture for years now. Recently Something Awful contacted me and explained that they needed somebody to educate their readers in the exciting, innovative world of modern art. I was a little hesitant at first, as I am very busy between the art show in New York next week and the upcoming unveiling in Milan, but in the end decided it was my duty as an artist to bring this knowledge to the uncultured masses. To give you a little background about myself, I have been a Mannerist / Dada artist my entire life and have achieved great fame with my world renowned "Smoking Dragon" Series, which define our lives and aspirations as human beings. I've won many awards for my work including the illustrious Pate a Pate Artist Award, an honorable mention at the North Carolina State Fair, and Time's "Man of the Year" (as you can see). My art can be seen in over eight hundred of the finest museums and private galleries around the world. I hope this short tour of some of my works will help you better appreciate the cutting edge art that so many of you have missed out on.

The first is entitled "I saw the Figure Five in Gold #2." This is a blend of new-style romanticism, traditional surrealism, and just a hint of Rococo artistic flair. Notice the brilliant use of lines and white space to create an image which talks to the inner child of the viewer and blasts the rampant materialism of modern western society as we know it. Also note the use of dream imagery to convey my moral outrage over censorship of the arts in this so-called "liberal" society. You don't see many artists using repoussoiresque techniques to create images of the subconscious anymore, and it's very depressing. This piece was the first to be bought by New York's Museum of Modern Art, which earned me quite a sizeable sum of money. It was a long battle convincing them to buy it since half the purchasing committee is made up of Warhol worshipping ignoramuses who wouldn't know a good Maquette from the average garbage spewed out of the academic pseudo-artists they eat up, but in the end, I triumphed and their commercial tripe took a back seat to my cutting edge material which would lead to a revolution in the art world.

This brings us to my personal favorite, "C'est Noir!" When looking at this one, the viewer will ask himself or herself questions such as, "what does the cigarette mean to me?" and "What is my purpose in life?" They are forced to by the way the cigarette smoke impedes upon the otherwise blank and morally empty canvas. The trick is that the canvas is not really blank; it has a dragon painted upon it. Otherwise it would just be an empty canvas with cigarette smoke and no dragon. This leads to the ultimate question, "if there is no blank canvas, is there no smoke?" I used this motif of requiring the viewer to question himself in many of my pieces; it takes a certain Je ne sais pas ce qui which is becoming more and more rare these days. True avant-garde artists just simply don't exist anymore; I blame the rise of the bourgeoisie class and their images of mass popularity (that's a little artist's joke I just made up; I should be a comedian!).