The Painful Pleasures Of A Tattoo Convention

Art is personal in so many ways and perhaps there’s no more personal an art form than tattooing. For The New Yorker, Jackson Arn visits the New York Tattoo Convention to lean more about tattooists, their human canvases, and what it is that sets this art form apart from all the rest.

Sooner or later, every art gets scholarly journals. Something is always gained from this new scrutiny—most basically, the acknowledgment that the artists are serious people who deserve respect for what they make. Often, the process involves treating the art form like another, already respected one, and when this happens something is lost. Folk or hip-hop lyrics that get some of their bite from being uttered aloud are analyzed like modernist poems; graffiti sprayed on an office building loses its humor when treated as another oil hanging in a white cube. There must be dozens of journals devoted to tattoo studies, and yet the art seems to have resisted most attempts to intellectualize it—it remains, in 2024, proudly candy—and, by the same token, to convert it into something it’s not. You can, of course, pretend that tattoos are paintings on funny canvases (the premise of countless coffee-table books with titles like “A Treasury of Tattoos”), but then you’d be ignoring what may be the central thing about them.