Abstract Pickup
Escape Artist Frees Self From Conversation With Pickup Artist
Escape Artist Frees Self From Conversation With Pickup Artist
Abstract artists are individuals who create artworks that do not attempt to represent external reality. Instead, they emphasize shapes, colors, forms and gestural or non-representational elements in order to convey emotions, concepts or ideas. Abstract art can take various forms, including paintings, sculptures, and other visual media.
Pickup artists are individuals who engage in strategies and techniques to attract and form romantic or sexual relationships with others, typically focusing on short-term or casual encounters. These strategies often involve tactics for initiating conversations, building rapport and escalating physical intimacy. Pickup artistry is often associated with misogyny, manipulative behavior and a lack of respect for others.
Stereotypical pickup artists are misogynistic males who feel disproportionately hard done by and are (over)reacting to the perceived antipathy from "all women" and a typical technique that they might use is "negging", or making a comment which is intended to lower their target's self-esteem under the guise of being perfectly normal (and even complimentary) small-talk. Randall has previously indicated his disdain for pickup artists in 1027: Pickup Artist and 1178: Pickup Artists.
The word "artist" has different meanings in these two phrases. In the first one, it means someone who makes paintings as a profession or hobby, and "abstract" narrows down the types of paintings. In the second, it means a practitioner of some activity, and "pickup" is the (reprehensible[citation needed]) specific activity. The joke is in conflating the two senses when saying that the two groups have merged.
White Hat is a representative of this combined group and in his usual fashion seems to have mixed the two in a peculiar manner, calling a bunch of cubes "cute". He's talking to a group of cubes he has just painted, which he describes as a melange (being an artistic term for a disordered mixture), in his role as an abstract artist. But by the end of his comment he has passed through a disarming compliment (that they are "actually pretty cute", seemingly saying that few other people will ever think the same), revealing his pickup artist tendencies by seemingly dismissing them as a "dizzying swarm" which few would call "cute" (showing White Hat's signature peculiarity as no one will call a melange of cubes cute).[citation needed]
In the title text, it appears that a third type of artist (the escape artist, again very different from both of the other types of artist) has fulfilled their own "role" by escaping from conversation with a pickup artist. Assuming that the escape artist is a woman, this might be an additional joke that pickup artists are not good at "picking up" women and instead just act like "a bunch of chains" to escape from.