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  • Jayson Scott Musson

Tonight from 6:30 to 8:00 pm at the Pacific Northwest College of Art (1241 NW Johnson St), New York-based painter and video artist Jayson Scott Musson will lecture about his work.

Over the years, Musson's created some great collections of paintings: Barack Obama Battles the Pink Robots is a spoof on the similarly-titled Flaming Lips record, swapping out Yoshimi for a president who saves unicorns from Abu Ghraib and defeats the Crude Oil Monster with his "green fist of power." Though, as awesome as Musson's paintings are, the artist is probably best known for his alter ego, Hennessy Youngman, host of the smart and hilarious YouTube series, Art Thoughtz.

Art Thoughtz is a faux-instructional series that filters various facets of the academic and institutional art world through alter ego Youngman's no-bullshit-past-this-line perspective. It's hard to say which episode is my favorite: Youngman's thoughts on Damien Hirst are classic, his take on relational aesthetics operates both as crash course and critique, and his comparative treatise on Joseph Beuys and Jay-Z is spot-on. Check out "How to Make an Art" if you're unfamiliar:

I'm not clued in as to what exactly Musson will lecture about tonight— perhaps something similar to the talk he gave last year at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art, titled "To Catch A Millennial," which focused on the measures museums can take to make themselves relevant to younger generations. Speculation aside, whatever tonight's subject might be, Musson has a way of cutting through convoluted art stuffs in a casual, smoking-blunts-with-friends kind of way.

Stop by PNCA to find out why the art world could use two of this guy.