I’m getting bored to tears by aesthetics built on darkness and degeneration. I’m no puritan, but seriously — evil is becoming boring as hell.

There was a time when there was a sense of freedom that came with celebrating darkness, entropy, self-destruction, sado-masochism, chains and leather, drug and booze binges, and death, demons, dragons and skulls.

Like when I was 15.

It’s probably safe to say that we all probably needed time to be rightly pissed about a couple thousand years of sexual repression and domination by the church, and that self-destruction and delighting in devilishness is one of the best ways to break those chains. But now it seems we’ve made an industry — a creative industry no less — out of destruction.

I don’t know when, but somehow we’ve become far too comfortable with being drenched in putrid negativity. Somehow we manage to find irony and delight in painting a skull over the face of Alice in Wonderland (which isn’t just dark, it’s artistically lazy). We watch videos of homeless people beating the crap out of each other for money. We pleasure ourselves to leather-strapped dominatrices spewing Russian poetry.

We chant, “Everything is hopeless, and I knew it before you did!”

Yeah. Way to go.

I’m officially fed up with kitschy, cerebral sado-masochism, self-immiseration and compulsive self-destruction passing itself off as hip. Self-mutilation is banal, stupid, and reeks of fear and weakness. Creation that derives from destruction, art produced in the name of entropy, has become a pathetic parody of itself. I’ll concede there is power, even beauty, in darkness. But all this nihilism is a joke at this point. Ask yourself — why produce or consume art that makes everyone more unhappy?

Maybe it’s because the death-squad avant guard seems so smart, powerful, and slick. But spend some time around most of these folks, and you’ll notice that most of them can’t really think, fight or fuck their way out of a wet paper bag — living in a make-believe world filled with ever-growing piles of empty beer and wine bottles, dirt, meaningless bric-a-brac, pointless gloom and gnostic self-disgust.

Trust me, kids; slow death only looks romantic and cool in big-budget Hollywood films.

Hell, we live in a society that sells us a parade of commodities with images of death and degeneration. Hollywood and major corporations had it all figured out a long time ago. Meanwhile, we run around like a bunch of little Charlie Manson devotees, pretending we’re living the rebellion.

It takes no guts at all — none — to be an art sadist. Morbidity lies at the aesthetic center of our entire culture. Highbrow hopelessness, groovy ghoulishness and delighting in misery is just plain tired. For all their lip service to hip, revolutionary abstractions, the doom squad offers us about as much true liberating energy as the FBI and the Church.

Art — even art that uses darkness as its foundation — has the power to amaze, promote abundance, inspire revolutionary rage, aesthetically shock, and promote freedom and life.

Insurrectionary joy or reactionary death mongering. It all comes down to what you want, I suppose.