What the critics are saying:
>>Dr. Norbert F. Vensmire
(b. 1947, location disputed)
“What Rumpelton achieves here, in his MS Paint reimagining of Slip Stitch and Pass, is nothing less than an epistemological affront to the entire notion of album art as mnemonic object. By translating Phish’s chromatic labyrinth into the palette of the pixel, he exposes the futility of digital nostalgia qua artifact reproduction.
Observe, if you will, the sphere — once photographic, now reconstituted as an ontological question mark — hovering over a beach that seems both rendered and remembered. The result is not parody, but an act of semiotic exfoliation: the surface peeled back until nothing remains but intention.
In extremis, Rumpelton’s choice of MS Paint is itself the critique. Like a medieval monk illuminating a cereal box, he converts commercial ephemera into devotional praxis. One suspects Phish themselves, architects of the jam-as-endless-digression, would approve.
This is art that refuses clarity. It is, in the truest sense, a slip, a stitch, and a pass—a gesture both ludic and lamenting, suspended between the sublime and the absurd.”<<
>>Gerald Thimbleton
Few spectacles better exemplify the sorry triumph of novelty over refinement than this accidental Google image collision: the iconic cover art for Phish’s "Slip Stitch and Pass" rubbing pixels with a spectral aberration—a digital doodle from MS Paint, that unyielding Nemesis of draftsmanship. Let the record show, for all who hold brush and bristle dear, that what we see in the upper right is not a painting, nor an homage, but a kind of art world prank.
Phish’s album art was already a curious artifact—equal parts cryptic and collegiate, with a palette better suited to purple jelly beans than serious contemplation. Yet next to the brash, cloud-borne sphere floating over an MS Paint afterthought, the original looks almost stately—a Rembrandt beside refrigerator graffiti. If this is what populist art movements have to offer—blurred blobs, scribbled landscapes, the awkward attempt to mirror a professional photo with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer—then give me varnish and turpentine, and send the pixels packing.
To compare this digital apparition, born of a thousand mouse clicks and little aesthetic restraint, to anything in the canon of painting is, as I once declared, “a slap in the face to traditional art—and possibly to the entire medium of oil paint.” That said, in an era obsessed with accessibility and spectacle, perhaps this slap is precisely what modern taste demands—quick, loud, and leaving a mark that, for better or worse, Google’s algorithm cannot ignore.<<
>>Phish – Slip Stitch and Pass
by Beatrix Hollenstein
Here, in this crude digital rendering, we witness nothing less than the collapse of artistic ambition—a Microsoft Paint eulogy for the live album that dared to capture lightning in a bottle. The original cover: a meditation on perception, the grid, the dissolving boundary between observer and observed. And now? This. A childish sphere thrust against a manufactured sky, its shadow falling where no shadow should fall, its perspective an affront to geometry itself.
This is not homage. This is desecration.
The artist—if we dare use such a term—has taken Storm Thorgerson's hypnotic mandala of human formation and replaced it with the visual equivalent of a scream into the void: flat, graceless, technologically primitive. Five days ago, they tell us. Five days since this act of cultural violence was committed. Five days since beauty died on a Windows 95 canvas.
Slip Stitch and Pass deserved better. The 1997 live document, raw and ecstatic, now reduced to this—a monument to our digital decay, our willingness to reduce the sublime to mere pixels, our tragic acceptance that art can be murdered by anyone with a mouse and the hubris to click "Save."
The ball mocks us. The sky weeps in gradient. And somewhere, Storm Thorgerson turns in his grave.
Grade: F (for Funeral)<<
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