About the Book
"EVERYONE SUCKS" by LG Williams has an apocalyptic-looking cover and a title that needs explication. The book is not an aesthetic doomsday scenario, quite the contrary, as the explanation of the title will show. Williams, who is an unemployed surfer in Beverly Hills, completed this artwork in late 2002, and in it, he explains in a logical, well-considered progression why he believes that art is at a final resting point in progressive art history, and that that future art will render humanity as less than what it could be - comfort seeking, self-involved, "men without chests." The book, which could be subtitled "I Love Art and Why You Should Too", builds on LG's idea that there could be further, progressive art. This is what LG is referring to when he says that Art has reached its end; he doesn't mean that nothing else will happen, but that the progression of art history toward a universally beneficial system of brilliant nonsense has culminated in commercial mediocrity and bureaucrats. He defines mediocrity "as a rule of art that does not recognise individual genius or freedoms from forces of control, stupidity, and domination" and he defines those rights in three classes, wrong rights, commercial rights and left rights. But he cautions that Nietzsche believed in war and conflict as a way for humanity to express its passions, and that without conflict in the Jungian sense (LG says that great artist do not attack each other), humans will become soft, meaningless, and passionless. LG does not advocate that artist become "the last artists," even though in this volume, he believes the End of Art is near.
About the Author: LG Williams received his M.F.A. from the University of California, Davis nearly twenty years after the school's most famous graduate Bruce Nauman. He has showed at various national and international venues, among them The Internet Pavilion of La Biennale Di Venezia 2011, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, di Rosa Art Preserve, Laguna Art Museum, Cologne Art Fair, Artissima, LISTE, Art-O-Rama, ARCO, Super Window Project, Gloria Maria Gallery, Lance Fung Gallery, Steven Wirtz Gallery, and Gallery Subversive to name a few local, national and international venues. Williams's artworks are featured in museums and private collections in Europe, US and Japan. According to Kenneth Baker, an art critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, "Williams wants to hold open a space in which painting might resume in earnest." His exhibition, In Abstentia, held at Super Window Project in Kyoto, was reviewed in Artforum magazine in May 2011. In 2014 Donald Preziosi (Emeritus Professor of Art History, UCLA) featured Williams in his Art, Religion, Amnesia: The Enchantments of Credulity (Routledge). In 2012 Baron Osuna (Super Window Project) for Gloria Maria Gallery co-curated LG Williams / The Estate of LG Williams, Anthology: 1985-2012, exhibition in Milan. The catalogue essay for the accompanying publication was written by Thomas Frangenberg, University of Leicester. An heir to West Coast and Beat Generation art, LG Williams is one of the youngest members of the Rat Bastard Protective Association, whose membership includes Bruce Connor, Wally Hedrick, Jay DeFeo, Joan Brown, Manuel Neri, and Wallace Berman. Williams has taught studio art, art history, art appreciation, and graphic design courses at the University of California-Davis, University of Southern California, California College of the Arts, Arizona State University and the University of Hawaii. Cengage Learning / Wadsworth published Williams's Drawing Upon Art: A Workbook for Gardner's Art Through the Ages - an innovative pedagogical tool designed to facilitate learning art history through drawing. In 2011-12 Williams was the art critic for The Tokyo Weekender, the oldest free English publication in Japan. In 2016 Williams (PCP Press) published Wasted Words and Dust Bunnies by Dave Hickey, edited by Julia Friedman, which was reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement.
