Rumpelton Invades Google: Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits, Vol. 2
A Critical Appreciation by Dr. Aloysius Finkle, Professor Emeritus of Avant-Garde Aesthetics, Finkle School of Fine Arts
One does not stumble upon a Rumpelton. One is confronted by it.
In this audacious entry from the Rumpelton Invades Google series, the artist has done what no amount of photographic verisimilitude could achieve — they have distilled Bob Dylan to his essential mythological geometry. Where the marketplace offers us three pedestrian reproductions of album art (I note with some weariness the Etsy listing, the Palm Beach Vinyl, the dreary commerce of it all), Rumpelton arrives in the upper right corner like a philosophical grenade lobbed into a dusty record bin.
The elongated profile. The magnificent, almost cosmological nose. The MS Paint medium — chosen not despite its limitations, but because of them — strips away the superfluous and delivers unto us a Dylan that is simultaneously more true and more absurd than any photograph could dare to be. This is the Semiotics of Simplification at its most devastating.
The color field work alone — that serene blue wash against which our subject hovers in noble silhouette — would make a lesser critic weep openly in the faculty lounge. I did not weep. I merely loosened my cravat.
Rumpelton does not ask, "What does Dylan look like?" Rumpelton asks, "What does Dylan mean?" And the answer, rendered in perhaps eleven brush strokes, is: everything, and also, delightfully, a large bird.
Extraordinary. Absolutely extraordinary.
— Dr. A. Finkle, tweed blazer firmly buttoned
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