A Comment

I started out writing a response to this and at some point in a grindingly awful day here in Manchester, overlooking the 'Ladyboys of Bangkok' pavilion and plotting hotels on a map of Milton Keynes, it became too long to put as a comment.

From the comfort of their well salaried jobs, transgression must seem exciting to academics and critics. It’s a bit of the ‘rough stuff’ to be discussed over dinner with a nice wine. Come live in outer nowhere, they’d meet people leading aimless lives, paying off the debts they amassed buying their big screen TVs which they *simply* had to buy because art to them is spending their nights watching Murdoch’s stream of effluent pumped in for £50 a month. Transgression doesn’t sound that exciting when all you naively want art from art is to be reminded that there’s something better in life. Certainly something better than genital mutilation.

The bus stops around here were recently advertising some ‘extreme’ art event they were holding at the Tate. It had absolutely nothing to do with the lives of the people queuing up in the rain. I don’t know how much the Tate spent advertising their exhibition – funded with EU money, I believe, along with Arts Council grants – but the people directly paying for it through their taxes had absolutely no interest in the art, the gallery, or transgression. You’d hear them talking about it when their bus was late and they had run out of gossip... ‘Look at this pile of bollocks.’ They’d laugh. Nobody would disagree. To them it was a self-evident truth. My mother’s name for Antony Gormley is ‘Antony Gormless’. That is as far as she’ll discuss modern art, despite all the EU grants encouraging her to do otherwise.
Of course, these people don’t understand art any more than I understand art. We’re all too uneducated to really understand the politics of transgression. Screw us. Let the academics share their self-satisfied, mutual-referential theories in their monographs. The rest of don’t deserve to have art in our lives. Except when it comes to being photographed.

Occasionally, I sit for lunch in a local art gallery (usually empty except for staff – there are lots of staff). The walls are covered by photos of disabled people playing sports. The exhibit was paid for by EU money, Arts Council grants, government funds directed to expanding participation in art. Nobody had asked if we really want to look at some 90 year old man in his jogging shorts. Nor did I want to see a close up of a stump, the result of a recent amputation, the product of a lifetime’s alcoholism. However, to the bureaucrat handing out the funds, it was a good use of public money. Art had been supported, supposedly. He doesn’t question whether we need ‘art’ that reminds us that life is full of sorrows; that every human being on this planet suffers in one way or another.

To the politicians, holding the purse strings, art remains a form of remedial social education. It’s the same way they treat literature in schools.

Only I’m bloody sick and tired of art that’s comes at me wielding a baseball bat smeared with dog shit. I tired of grants going to any artist willing to bastardise their craft (if any craft they have) to teach us about what it’s like to live in a sink hole estate. I’m bored with these lofty, pretentious, pseudo-creatives who dress up their high-concept torture porn with a decorous bit of modern typography on the wall of the exhibit.

And the reason I despise them so much is that they are amoral vacuums who suck in what little funding exists in the arts; money that might have gone to interesting artists who are instead ignored or demeaned because they actually care more about craft than they do marketing.

A guy in the office jokingly said to me that he wants to see the empty London plinth used for a ‘f***ing big statue of Churchill stamping on Hitler’s head’. With an absence of real debate about the place of art in our culture, this kind of response is natural. Sadly, it only encourages the critics to tut knowingly. ‘Jingoistic popularism celebrating the barbarity of war. It’s immoral! They know nothing about art!’ Or so the critics would smugly say before going back to their close ups of female genital mutilation.