*** On art, nihilism, western culture, WTC, and politics ***
While those barbarians Osama, Atta, John Walker Linde and co were destroying the buildings I showed my 18 year old in 1999, to show her what people are capable of [she liked New York], and which I first admired in 1974, Irwin Jacobs and co were rolling out CDMA around the world for humans to communicate anywhere to anywhere, anytime and Mr and Mrs Jacobs were donating a fortune to engineering education and to a symphony orchestra.
Energy, creativity, beauty vs the grotesque, destructive and hateful.
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This opinion piece is the tenth in a new series of "PC's Weekly Opinion" - a
pithy, heavily spiced editorial from Peter Cresswell that can be delivered
to your in-box once a week. If you like what you read then feel free to
forward it to everyone you've ever met, and to subscribe at libz.org .
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PC's Weekly Opinion
RETURN OF THE CON ARTIST
By Peter Cresswell
Andy Warhol is exhibiting again, opening at London's Tate Gallery this week.
Fifteen years after he died, Andy is still making waves. Indeed, in an
artistic climate in which dissected animal carcasses are displayed floating
in formaldehyde and semen-stained blankets are described as "haunting,
powerful and provocative," Warhol's simple images seem relatively benign by
comparison.
Sure, Warhol's early work did "explore images of death" like electric chairs
and car crashes, but today he is remembered more for his charmingly clumsy
commercial images of soup cans, Marilyns and Elvises and for his camp films,
silver wigs and overweening obsession with celebrity.
Andy was an artist - a con artist. He realised early something many of his
predecessors never did - that the 'art' they were producing was rubbish, but
with the necessary intellectual collusion it sold by the truckload anyway.
Agreeing with P.T. Barnum that one should never give a sucker an even break,
he set out to test the limits of what the pretentious suckers would fall
for. It turned out they'd fall for an awful lot, just as long as their
pretensions could remain un-punctured: The rich saps queued up to buy
whatever overpriced trash he and his offsiders produced. It turned out that
Andy's art (such as it was) lay in knowing how to play this scam to its
limit. He made an entire career out of fooling most of the people all of the
time.
Most are still being fooled today by new artists with the same con. The con
is so simple that infant readers of 'The Emperor's New Clothes' can see
through it, yet the pretentious poseurs of the artistic establishment
persist in willingly blinding themselves to the ineptitude of the Damien
Hirsts, the Martin Creeds and the Colin McCahons at whom they blow today's
faux kisses. They wander black-clad through galleries with unmade beds,
flickering lights and urine-soaked Christs, and wallow in the
'sophistication' of 'sculptures' made from elephant dung and human faeces.
Meanwhile the ghosts of Duchamp and Picasso and Warhol piss on them with
knowing laughter.
But not all of the people are being fooled. People who do have eyes to see
are (thankfully) beginning to see through the con - a few people in the
artistic mainstream are beginning to point out that these enfant terribles
of the artistic world in fact have no clothes:
In the early nineties a small gallery off London's prestigious Cork Street
eschewed the formaldehyde, the faeces and the semen stains. Its mission,
said gallery director Alice Jackson, was to hang and sell only figurative
art - and not just the limp apologia of the tourist trade but sturdy,
inspired figures worthy of heroic contemplation. The reaction to this heresy
from the artistic mainstream was predictably dismissive, the Evening
Standard's 'reactionary' art critic Brian Sewell one of the few not to
patronisingly pan the gallery. Jackson's gallery sold few paintings and
closed within the year, but the first shot had been fired.
A decade later, the attacks against the con artists are becoming bolder. In
the January New Statesman, Ivan Massow, then head of London's Institute of
Contemporary Art, confessed: "For a number of years, I've had a nagging
voice in my head telling me [contemporary art] is all hype and frequently no
substance." He attacked so-called conceptual art as "pretentious,
self-indulgent, craftless tat that [he] wouldn't accept even as a gift," and
warned that the art world is in "danger of disappearing up its own arse."
By any objective measurement he is of course right on the money, but the
reaction from the poseurs has been swift, virulent and venomous - not to say
utterly predictable. Massow was fired from the ICA on Monday but remains
unapologetic, comparing his sacking to "facing a really bad firing squad"
and beginning to put together a group with which to brainstorm that includes
painter Michael Newberry
Massow has chosen his allies well. Newberry himself recently declared that
he wanted to re-conquer the world for "real art," issuing a manifesto
calling for a "moral revolution of human values in the arts," and penning a
piece in which he compares post-modern art to terrorism. "Post-modernists
have infiltrated our civilisation's greatest art institutions," he says,
"and they have done it with our na・e blessings." Like Osama bin Laden's
Twin Towers' terrorists, the aim of the post-modernists is the destruction
of beauty and of all human values. He says we should make it clear to both
the terrorists and the post-modernists that their nihilism is not wanted.
Newberry has a point. Art is too damned important to leave to the
pretentious, self-indulgent, craftless gits who would disappear up their own
arse without the establishment's accolades and cash being showered upon
them. Art is the only way we have of seeing our own souls on show for our
own contemplation - to remind ourselves of the beauty, the possibilities and
the glories of our human potential.
The squalid souls of the post-modern con artists may well be best
represented by semen stains and formaldehyde, but the rest of us should
refrain from giving their stuff house-room.
We have nothing to lose but our pretensions. We have our souls to win.
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Michael Newberry's essay Terrorism & Post Modern Art can be found online at
freeradical.co.nz , and his 'Conquer the
World' manifesto at michaelnewberry.com . As part of his 'Conquer the
World' campaign he will be at the SOLO Conference in New Zealand, Waitomo
Caves Hotel, Feb 22-25. Conference details at freeradical.co.nz .
© Libz.org 2001
This column may be reproduced anywhere, anytime, by anyone - just as long as
it is reproduced in full, with attribution to libz.org, and that you let
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