All the big ideas in Art have been explored to death: beauty, sex, death, power, history, fear, haystacks, etc. Today’s artist has to find his or her unique niche like a ball bearing in a Pachinko game finds its niche: by falling through big cracks into little ones…Not a good analogy? This one is better: There’s a trickle of water that doesn’t want to be an anonymous thread in a raging river, so it dives into a sandy embankment until it carves a channel and becomes a small stream. That stream grows and the yearnings of anonymous globs of water sprout divergences from that one too.

The history of anything can be adequately represented by this branching river analogy (evolution, programming languages, flavors of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream), but the added dimension of condescension barely applies until we get to the arts. Our noble (and entirely human) desire, nay!, need to cast off anonymity and “improve” on all that has come before is also an easy target of ridicule.

After taking the long way around (the leisurely elbow of the river rather than the commercial lock) I bring you to today’s featured visual and performance artist, the woman who has made antisocial behavior her life’s work for the sake of art: Lilly McElroy.

She videos and photos herself behaving in ways so desperate, cheap and obvious that your first giggle is followed by a curse. Then you realize, “It’s OK. It is funny. She’s funny. Or maybe she’s just being funny. But it’s still funny.” And that’s about as far as it goes. And how far could the confluence of run-offs from Cindy Sherman and Marcel Marceau “go” anyway?