> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://hyperallergic.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# Art or Monkey Fart?
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/art-or-monkey-fart/
- Published: 2013-04-16T01:22:34.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:35:28.000Z
- Description: For those who need a break from following the news on what has turned out to be a horrific day, we offer this short bit of humor — 2 minutes and 46 seconds of hilarious art satire.
- Author: Jillian Steinhauer
- Tags: Opinion, Art Criticism, LOL, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 06:51 (2012, 2013, part 1)

For those who need a break from following the news on what has turned out to be a horrific day, we offer this short bit of humor — 2 minutes and 46 seconds of hilarious art satire.

The video is a critique of “Monkey Farter,” a pen on lined paper drawing by “the artist known as Will.” The drawing with text — or the “assemblage of both textual and representational elements,” as the narrator refers to it — is a crude stick figure representation of a monkey farting … *or is it?*

“On closer inspection, the *objet* does not so readily give over to the expectations of monkey or monkey-ness, rather looking like a Cubist bird or an angry clown, perhaps a jab at Picasso’s harlequin phase,” the narrator explains as he leads the viewer on a nearly breathless, harrowing, often alliterative journey into the heart of the artwork.

“And here, here is the epiphany,” he proclaims a bit later. “What is the essence of a fart? Is it some Aristotalian abstract notion of form, or is the fart merely the sum total of the representations of the fart?”

Undoubtedly a question we’ve all pondered at one point or another. (I, for one, had a professor in college who wrote a [book about farting](http://www.amazon.com/Its-Gas-A-Study-Flatulence/dp/1879378035?ref=hyperallergic.com).)

I don’t want to ruin the joy of the final realization, which will really blow your mind, but consider this: “It is as if de Kooning erased his own drawing. There is no ‘it’; there is no monkey; there is no farter; it is just I. The monkey farter is me!”

As one [YouTube commenter](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGfHnJ1KTA0&ref=hyperallergic.com) wrote so well, “This sums up my five years of fine art education.”