The Best Talking Paintings, Vol. 1

Actor and Comedian Brian Morabito makes classic art come alive in a way that vividly encapsulates the wonders of metamodernism. This new Retro series features five of his best works at a time.

Introduction

A core concept in metamodernism is that authorship is neither cultishly sacrosanct (as it is often held to be in Modernism) or dead (as in postmodernism) but plural and palimpsestic—as you might expect with a cultural paradigm that features the “meta-” prefix.

Simply put, metamodern artists, whether literary or dramatic or material, sometimes engage with works originally composed by others to enliven and renew them. And what better vision for what art can be in the digital age for Retro to shine a light on?

As Retro readers will know, reinvigorating the past with the knowledge and technology we have in the present is one of the calling cards of this substack.

What makes the work of artist and comedian Brian Morabito particularly rich in this regard is that it echoes the sort of behaviors many of us have engaged in with respect to classic art for many years. Because I grew up the son of an elementary school art teacher, pioneering graphic designer, and amateur painter and photographer—and because I grew up just outside Boston, a city that’s brimming with top-shelf museums—I spent much of my childhood hanging out with my mother in museums and other art galleries across Massachusetts. I can’t count the hours I spent in the Museum of Fine Arts, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Harvard University’s Fogg Museum, and many other such establishments.

I even spent a lot of time in frame shops, as my mother was—and is—understandably invested not just in looking at great art but gauging how art prints can best be framed.

And when you’re a kid as I was—introverted, imaginative, prone to daydreaming, born to (a) the artist, teacher, and entrepreneur described above, and (b) a man who made multiple attempts at a Ph.D. in English at Rutgers University before opting to go into product management in the software industry, instead—you spend your hours in an art museum or art gallery imagining the paintings you see as stories rather than mere still images. Narrativizing non-narratives is something all of us do habitually, of course; it’s how we make sense of the world, especially when (as with some percentage of artworks we see) we lack the information required to process certain visual stimuli.

So the series of “talking painting” (my term) YouTube “shorts” Morabito has done is at once an exemplar of metamodern art, a paean to nostalgia, a way to illuminate and deepen our appreciation of the small gestures in paintings that we might otherwise miss but that Morabito seizes upon to hilarious effect, and an opportunity for Retro to continue to honor its core mission: finding content that is either in the “language of art” or the “language of information” (a sometimes tenuous distinction that my old mentor at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, acclaimed poet Cole Swensen, used to make) or some mix of the two that (a) produces happiness and/or wonder in those exposed to it, (b) mixes the old and the new, and (c) offers to us abiding, evergreen pleasures in a way that so much today—especially on social media—cannot and does not.

I have rewatched many Morabito shorts multiple times, laughing each time and even picking up on new subjokes, context clues, and clever narrative techniques each time.

My goal with this new series is to feature five of the best Morabito talking paintings, in no particular order, at a time. Needless to say, Morabito deserves all the acclaim for these works and you should definitely follow him on all his socials (YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and his personal website).

My role here is, as it sometimes is here at Retro, to be a curator of the digital artworks of others. This is something I do with journalism as a curatorial journalist, but which I also spent years doing as a tenure-track professor of digital culture at University of New Hampshire—where a key part of my job as a curriculum developer was to find art that eludicated the contours of our contemporary culture, illustrated the dominant cultural paradigm of the digital age (i.e., metamodernism) and encouraged students to deeply consider how they too might generatively, idiosyncratically and even profitably interact with bleeding-edge technology, meme culture and the elusive joys of poetics.

I hope you enjoy these “talking paintings”! Each comes with an MPAA-style “rating” that gives you a heads up if strong language or any explicit sexual content lies ahead.

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Five Morabito “Talking Paintings”

(1) The Blue Ballet Shoes

Rating: PG

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(2) The Boat Trip

Rating: PG

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(3) The Homewrecker

Rating: PG-13

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(4) The Betrayal

Rating: PG

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(5) The Shrink Ray

Rating: PG