Luc Tuymans is very interested in being an #artist.

He smokes indoors during interviews and describes himself as “gifted.” He might nerd out with one artist like Kerry James Marshall about another artist El Greco for 550 words in a conversation that he turned into an interview about his art.  He seems to think of himself like a kind of art-corpo Jesus which maybe explains the messianic thing going on in Speech from his series Corporate. Lone figure, bathed in light, addressing an invisible audience. Mail-order messiah! Just add tunic and holy water!

Does the figure in the painting look guilty? Tuymans blames his own fallibility, which he doesn’t bother trying to describe, on Catholic guilt. This of course makes him exactly like most European artists, propelled to greatness by acute self-loathing.

Usually self-hatred has me locking the door to my room, but it seems to make Tuymans completely unable to shut his trap, he could probably drone on about the darkness in his art and the way paintings work for the rest of his life and never paint again. The Germans have told him that he talks too much.

It was probably the German press he was referring to when he used the suspect term “ghettoized” to describe how painting is treated by the art world. Or maybe it was another Jesus reference? Or maybe it was a reference to that time he got convicted of plagiarism for painting from a photo.

Don’t worry, now he paints legally from iPhone photos that he takes of pictures from his computer screen.

Nowhere in his incessant talk does Tuymans seem that bothered by art becoming corporate, or by colonialism or Disney or really anything that he paints about. Probably nihilistic fallout from the whole Nazi-apologist dad, Belgian Resistance mom home-dynamic. The only thing he seems really passionate about is destroying the profession of art journalism by saying everything on video before we have a chance to write it.