There is, in the worlds of art and music, such a thing, a very real thing, as “The Philly Curse.” And the streets here are littered with men — it’s almost always men — who are The Cursed: People who have/had talent, and might have had something going, if they could only have Shut The Fuck Up And Done The Work And Played The Game, Even Just A Little. Like we say, throw a rock and you’ll hit one of these dudes in Philly, but tonight, it’s artist Chuck Connelly who will be immortalized as thee case study of all of this in an HBO documentary called The Art Of Failure. Connelly, who was something of a hot-shit painter in NYC in the 80s — his contemporaries included Julian Schnabel and Mark Kostabi — played his archetype to a tee: He bit hands that fed him, in turn overfed his own ego, and repeated the cycle until he basically became a ranting maniac so tied up his own tired my-machismo-is-my-genius schtick that he’s now basically a walking advertisement for Dirty Frank’s. Or is he? Check out Chuck’s handy guide to “The Art Of Failure” here, and watch tonight at 9pm as he becomes an object lesson for either yourself or everyone you’ve ever dated. Sigh.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 7th, 2008 at 3:08 pm.