REGINALD THORNBERRY III: [adjusting cufflinks, examining the MS Paint Beach Boys cover with the expression of someone who's discovered a dead mouse in their caviar]
Good God. I've seen hostage videos with better production values. This... thing... looks like it was created by a concussed toddler given five minutes with a computer at a library circa 1997. The green is the color of institutional nausea. Those flowers—if we can dignify them with that term—appear to have been drawn by someone wearing oven mitts. And is that... is that a duck?
DR. NORBERT F. VENSMIRE: [leaning forward, eyes gleaming with perverse excitement]
Ah, but therein lies the sublime provocatio, my dear Thornberry! What you perceive as incompetence, I recognize as radical ab nihilo reconstruction of the Beach Boys' pastoral mythology. Observe: the primitive rendering—this deliberate reductio ad pixelum—strips away the treacly nostalgia of Wilson's original vision and replaces it with something far more honest. This is not incompetence; this is iconoclastic authenticity qua digital primitivism!
THORNBERRY: [taking a long sip of wine, price tag deliberately visible]
Norbert, you pretentious charlatan, you could make a virtue of sewage if it came with enough Latin. This isn't "radical reconstruction"—it's visual assault. The original Smiley Smile album cover, whatever its flaws, at least possessed intentionality. This MS Paint abomination suggests the artist—and I use that term so loosely it could fit a circus tent—spent less time on this than I spend selecting my morning socks.
Look at the typography. The letters appear to have been written by a drunk bee having a seizure. The composition has all the balance of a one-legged elephant. And those... creatures. Those yellow blobs. Are they meant to be Beach Boys? Minions? A warning about the dangers of nuclear waste?
VENSMIRE: [standing, gesturing wildly]
You see degradation; I see deliberate deterritorialization of the audio-visual contract! The Beach Boys, in their original iteration, sold us California dreaming—a polished, harmonious fantasy. But Smiley Smile the album was already a fractured thing, wasn't it? The ruins of Smile, Brian Wilson's collapse into paranoia and pills.
This cover embodies that disintegration! The garish greens speak to the toxic underbelly of the Summer of Love. The crude execution mirrors Wilson's mental state—fragmented, childlike, unmoored from conventional reality. This is not decoration, Thornberry. This is symptomatic rendering. The cover IS the drugs. The cover IS the breakdown. In extremis, it achieves what your precious "good taste" never could: brutal, unmediated truth.
THORNBERRY: [placing wine glass down with theatrical precision]
Oh, spare me your graduate seminar gibberish. You sound like someone who got tenure by accident and has been bluffing ever since. "The cover IS the drugs"? The only thing this cover is, is proof that Microsoft should never have included Paint in Windows 95.
I've destroyed better artists than whoever perpetrated this for lesser crimes. There's a watercolorist in Cleveland who quit the profession entirely after I compared his work to "a sneeze in a paint factory." This? This makes that watercolorist look like Caravaggio. At least a sneeze has spontaneity. This has the energy of a DMV waiting room.
VENSMIRE: [smirking]
Caravaggio! How deliciously ironic that you invoke him! Do you know what the Academy said about his work? "Crude." "Vulgar." "Too realistic." Every true innovation in art is first mistaken for incompetence by people like you—people whose aesthetic sense is actually just fear of the unfamiliar dressed up in expensive tailoring.
This MS Paint Smiley Smile commits the one unforgivable sin in your world: it refuses to try in ways you can recognize. There's no technical virtuosity to hide behind, no expensive medium to legitimize it. It is nakedly what it is—low-resolution, awkward, immediate. And that terrifies you, because it reveals that your entire critical apparatus is built on excluding rather than understanding.
The pixelated duck is more honest than anything in your mirror collection!
THORNBERRY: [eyes narrowing dangerously]
How dare you bring my mirrors into this. Those mirrors are conceptually rigorous examinations of—
[pauses, regaining composure]
No. I won't be baited into defending myself to someone who thinks a crooked yellow blob is "radical honesty." You want to know what this cover actually is, Norbert? It's lazy. It's the visual equivalent of showing up to a wedding in pajamas and calling it "anti-bourgeois statement." It's not brave. It's not subversive. It's just... insufficient.
The Beach Boys deserved better. Brian Wilson, for all his madness, deserved better. Even Microsoft Paint deserves better than this. If I were to review this for publication, I would simply print the image, set it on fire, and submit the ashes. At least then it would generate warmth.
VENSMIRE: [laughing with genuine delight]
And yet here you are, spending twenty minutes discussing it! Don't you see? Your rage is the proof of its efficacy. Bad art bores us. Good art pleases us. But art that truly disrupts—that violates our sense of propriety—that makes us feel something real.
Your hypothetical burning review would be an acknowledgment of power. You wouldn't burn something that didn't threaten you. This MS Paint cover threatens your entire worldview: that quality requires effort you can measure, technique you can authenticate, taste you can gatekeep.
But this? This bypasses all your checkpoints. It goes directly from amateur impulse to cultural artifact. And Ralph Rumpelton—bless his pixelated heart—has created something more memorable than a thousand technically competent, spiritually dead professional designs.
THORNBERRY: [standing, gathering his things]
I'm leaving. This conversation has become as aesthetically bankrupt as that abomination you're defending. When you finally tire of championing garbage and wish to discuss actual art, you know where to find me. I'll be at my penthouse, surrounded by objects that don't look like they were created during a power outage.
Good day, Norbert.
VENSMIRE: [calling after him]
Give my regards to your mirrors, Reginald! Tell them I said they're looking derivative!
[Vensmire turns back to the MS Paint cover, smiling]
[Quietly, to himself]
Actually... that duck is pretty terrible.
[END SCENE]
“Follow Ralph Rumpelton across the net.”
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