do_no_evil

Hear no evil see no evil ….does it follow that you are doing no evil?

 

Google has a very snappy little slogan ‘do no evil’ ; I can just imagine a group of bright young things sipping their espressos at a slick table throwing ideas  around until finally ‘do no evil ‘ hits the shiny surface and *bing* a giant flashbulb goes off and everybody is simply thrilled with their cleverness.

 

A sexy and apparently very good slogan. But it must be asked why Google felt the need to give itself such a wide margin of error. Perhaps it is because those bright young things have never had the opportunity to face true evil and simply cannot imagine the amount of things you can do completely wrong before you are defined as evil. Evil is the last degree of bad; herein fall such deeds as raping babies, slow and brutal torture, the wanton destruction of the planet, Hitler, Idi Amin Dada and the Rwanda massacres ; these are things that fall into the realms of evil. I am very happy to know that my daily computer companion has taken it upon itself not to venture down these paths. But again - why are they giving themselves such a wide margin of error?

 

Perhaps it is sheer laziness or an increasing level of illiteracy or the need to always seem the best, and today 100% just doesn't’t cut it, it must be at least 120%. This trend in excess also sees us using the most extreme words to describe the everyday. We call just about every half way decent thing awesome, when last were you really awestruck? Do you even know what that must feel like? Hyperbole and sloppy language use in the everyday hides a multitude of sins, including a couple that can truly be called evil

 

I recently sent a PETS petition about the skinning of fur animals to my entire mailing list. The video is apparently horrific - I am a complete wimp when it comes to such things - I saw the first blow and was ready to stop but forced myself to watch a little longer, when that poor beast twitched as the skinner ripped the pelt from its living flesh that was me , done. It seems , although this petition is very well supported, the general feeling is that the blame is out there somewhere, anywhere but here. It is an easily dismissed fact that the Chinese would not be skinning those animals, in which ever way they do it, if we were not buying the fur. They do it, not because they have some sadistic need to torture animals, they do it because they need to feed their children, house them and hopefully send them to school with new cloths once a year.

 

The recent Chinese history is one of deprivation and hunger . The Chinese population aged 50 years and older lived through 'the great leap forward'- an event that I believe falls within the realms of evil-they can still feel that hunger and can still remember someone who starved to death. The generations that followed lived in abject poverty under the yoke of their oppressive communist regime. It is only the last two decades that has exposed the Chinese to the inconceivable wealth and waste of the West, and asking them to understand why they should not have it too is a bit rich. To waste is the height of cool in China; go to any fancy restaurant in China and you will be astounded at how much food the host will order for his table of guests. There is no chance that the food will be eaten, it is all just a show of money. This is the West ; Chinese style. To waste is to be super cool, to waste is to be sexy, to waste means you are getting to the top of the pile and the more you can waste the higher up you are. Fantastic for capitalists not so very good for the weather or for those poor furry beasts.

 

 I know for a fact that I cannot raise a chicken then chop its head off, rip it's feathers out, gut it and then roast it for Sunday lunch - it is a mental impossibility - but give me a nicely packaged supermarket chicken, squeaky clean and wrapped in glossy cellophane, well then I am capable of rustling up a large variety of delicious chicken dishes and eating them with relish. Most Chinese however, still know that an animal must die for it to be eaten or its fur to be used, they have unfortunately taken the killing thing to its blasé extreme; the wanton cruelty of humans to their fellow earthlings is legendary.  Humans seem programmed to be cruel to others, even within their own species . But who is more in the wrong; me in my cellophane wrapped hypocrisy or the Chinese who actually know exactly where their next meal is coming from.

 

If you are jumping about shouting  ‘yes but it is not about food but about the fur trade’ remember a time not so long ago when western men attacked tiny immature fur seals- those cute white fluffy ones-  with bludgeons to prevent their pelts from being damaged. These poor beasts were also skinned then and there. Were all those little seals well and truly dead? When you have a couple of thousand fur seals to skin in a week you are not going about taking the pulse of each one. The difference is they didn’t have mini-cams and internet in those days so the sins were more easily hidden.

 

Today we still want our furs. In the latest edition of ‘Intelligent Life’ a light hearted article about cocktail rings proclaimed that, as we can no longer wear a fur as we might have a can of paint thrown at us, we should indulge in cheap jewellery. Just there lies the hypocrisy; to not wear a fur because you fear the paint can is not the point and will not stop the Chinese from skinning living animals. What we have done to absolve our guilt is to move our atrocities to a place where we hoped nobody would ever see them.  It would be bigoted in the extreme to plead innocence and to blame the Chinese for something we have equal part in creating. It smacks of the same sort of thinking that makes one country believe it is better than another if not the best country on the planet. The point is debatable but what is true is that this is the best planet we are ever likely to inhabit so the aim would be to stop dumping our garbage in someone else’s backyard and then start pointing fingers.

 

 The West  has squandered the earths resources in a one- hundred- year-party in which we have used and abused every one of the planets resources. We have left the hangover and the mess to the developing world and they don’t really like us for it. They want a party of their own. How are we going to stop them and make them believe that they are having a better time than we did. This is going to make telling someone to go to hell in such a way that he enjoys the ride seem amateurish.

'"You have to work much harder than we ever did ,but you cannot have the big house, the smart car, the three hundred pairs of shoes, the swimming pool or any of the other thing that we demanded as our just desserts. In fact sorry folks, we had the dessert , the cake and the cake shop is bankrupt " - are there any good really really good diplomats out there?

There are no more easy outs, there is no more passing the buck because that buck comes from the west, and after it has paid for dirty energy, dredging of coral reefs and the skinning of live animals it is going to end up right back in your wallet, with all the stains of its wanton course around the world embedded in it.

Next time you step out to SHOP because you cannot think of anything better to do, think of those ‘f'ing’ Chinese skinning those living animals; hearing no evil and saying no evil does not mean you are doing no evil.

 

The_decline_of_art

The decline of art

 

In the city of Rubens – Antwerp Belgium – the work of that great master abounds in churches, public buildings and in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts where, in a dedicated hall, his finest pieces overwhelm the vast space. When looking at these giant glowing works of masterful composition, painterly craft and intelligent concept, I am sure that no Joe Public was ever moved to say disparagingly; ‘I could do that!’ These works inspire a sense of awe and wonder at what we humans are capable of achieving. When you walk away from them you are filled with a purpose to try a little harder.

 

Antwerp also claims to have discovered the - I quote from the blurb in one of the catalogues in the Xeno gallery - most famous female artist of all time, Marlene Dumas. The Xeno gallery is just across the road from the Royal museum; here fifteen Dumas works hang in a much publicised exhibition. Small paintings, modest in colour use and niggardly in craft. At the opening I watch the faces of the public viewing the work, they are blank masks, and no word is spoken. Is this a sign of silent reverie in the presence of greatness? Or simply one of complete incomprehension and the fear of seeming stupid if an opinion expressed might stand in opposition to the great reputation of this artist.

 

The images on display are of blotted vaginas in raw umber and blue, a bad copy of a Man Ray eye, portraits that are vaguely reminiscent of Marlene Monroe, a set of pouty lips and a portrait of her mother that sends me suddenly into “Physco” the scene where we finally discover the secret of the woman in the rocking chair. The craft of the work is questionable and the composition limited to placing a fuzzy object more or less in the middle of the canvas.  As the intellectual concept behind the work is always more difficult to fathom, I leave the gallery to try to find the meaning behind it all. Here is where contemporary art leads the public on a merry chase of the said and unsaid, by using mangled philosophies - expressed in words with far too many syllables - to describe meaning that is not there. My conclusion is that Dumas is in favour of the accidental in art. Sounds very philosophical but accidents happen; to leave the spill of coffee on the table claiming that it enhances the room is absurd, but in contemporary art this thinking is elevated to greatness.  It is also said she understands and paints the human condition with the sparse brushwork of a master. With this background information I decide to give Marlene Dumas’s art a second viewing.

 

In an empty gallery I open my mind to the experience I meditate quietly, surreptitiously glancing at the images out of the corner of my eye to try and catch that fleeting magic that defines a master piece. I employ every method of looking that I can think of to try and find some sense of achievement in these pieces but the magic eludes me.  All the while I have in the back of my mind the knowledge that the public was proven wrong in rejecting a host of artists that presented a new way of seeing in the past, and I could be missing something quite fundamental. But then I console myself with the fact that we - Mr and Mrs Joe Public - have also made vast advancements in our way of seeing the world and with the endless stream of visual stimulation that we are accustomed to processing every day I feel quite confident in expressing my opinion about the works of Ms Dumas.

 

The Dumas world is inhabited by sad somewhat scary individuals. Why is sad and suicidal so much more sexy in the art world than happy and joyous? Is it that the art dealers are just so numb to joy that they find it repulsive, or could it be that as soon as a thing evokes a happy emotion it could conceivable been seen as decorative, and that of course will never do. Personally give me happy and joyous any day and if the piece makes the room look pretty (I can just see the critics wincing at that word) so much the better. The Dumas works are relentlessly ugly and evoke only the feeling that the artist must be very sad or very bored .The accidental in her art seems to me to be reactive in that she splots paint about and then looks back and says; ooh that looks sort of like a Man Ray eye I’ll put that in my next exhibition. Compare this to Rubens who set out with a brilliant concept in mind and then was able to consciously sketch and compose and finally through the expert application of paint to imbue the concept with vigour and life. I am sure that within this process there were fortuitous moments when a small quirk of paint on canvas suddenly created the magic that makes a masterpiece. These moments are a gift; not the whole basis of an art form and in the case of Dumas they don’t bring magic but disaster. Dumas’s works inspire only irritation that I again took the time to come downtown to view them. To all the Dumas fans, you go roll about in the sludgy browns and blues of Dumas despair but spare me the eulogies; the woman needs help.

 

I try to imagine what Rubens would have made of the Dumas exhibition. It is a difficult task, especially if one were to try to explain to him that for the sake of the advancement of art we have dismissed his style in favour of that of Ms Dumas. I think the man would have me committed. I wonder also what he would have made of the constant comparisons that are made between him and the other superstar of the contemporary art world. Damien Hirst. Critics try to justify the fact that Mr Hirst never actually paints the paintings he puts his name to by comparing him to Rubens. Rubens was known to also use assistants in producing his works. But when one digs further and finds that Hirst uses assistants to glue dead butterflies onto boards painted in flat enamel colours, or to paint dots on boards ; producing an endless repetition of the same but slightly different thing, as compared to Rubens using highly skilled artists - masters in their own right - to help with specific areas of vast works, that took years to complete; and if one then stood in front of the original works of both artists one would surely have to be completely blind or somewhat addled not to find any comparison between the two men totally inappropriate.

 

But the comparison serves to underline how far we have regressed in thinking and craft .Today using assistants to produce endless coloured dots on board with the exulted claim that the same colour is never used twice, is presented as great art. To make the achievement of not using the same colour twice a measure of great artistic talent neatly illustrates the state of contemporary art. An act of insignificance that deserves the insult of; I can do that.  But of course Mr Hirst has a point when he says ; perhaps you can do that but only mine - even if I don’t paint them myself - are worth 600 000 pnds. The blame for this state of affairs has got to rest squarely on the shoulders of the rich. How stupid are these people . I can only imagine it is because today the rich are the Paris Hiltons of the world, these are the light brained twits who fall for the Damien Hirst scam and drag the whole concept of art into the worst neighbourhood of the capitalist state.

 

What Damien Hirst is, is glittering mirror ball  of everything that art has become in the last few decades, the making of money in which- lets give credit where credit is due - he does indeed stand at the pinnacle of the contemporary art world. A world where beauty and intellect have been disregarded in favour of the art of selling the emperors cloths at great price. But in order to justify this state of affairs there is a great wringing of hands and deep anguished discussion of whether Mr Hirst is an artist and whether ‘his’ creations will be considered great art tomorrow or the next day.

 

To my mind this addresses the wrong thing. Damien Hirst is the artwork, but not one of his own creation. He is the pinnacle of the creative abilities of the salesmen and woman who control the world of contemporary art. To end the discussion of where the art of Damien Hirst lies I would suggest that he be carefully preserved and floated precisely at the centre of a giant tank of acid green formaldehyde as a symbol of the perversity of the art world today. And hey Damien, as we all know you are not so good at thinking up your own ideas have this one, it’s on me.

 

 

Frieze Art Fair

My brain is melting;I thought I published this months ago. Ah well

London October 2008

 

The importance of the Frieze art fair was made quite clear to me while buying an online ticket to the event. Peevish instructions accompanied every step of the process. Do this, do that, under no circumstances may you do the following. I realise that art is important, but was all this schoolmarmish instruction giving really necessary. Fortunately, having bought the ticket online, I could skip the queue in Regents Park. Not really a huge advantage as, although signs were placed at carefully measured intervals giving waiting times , these were never in any danger of being used and the one stating ‘two hours wait from this point’ seemed a touch optimistic. The small group of art enthusiasts was considerably fleshed out with people in black suits employed to herd unruly art viewers. Walk here, keep left, stay right; I had unpleasant flash-backs to the people-herding one endures at Heathrow - but without the crowds - perhaps they would arrive later.

 

The people who were there were giving the art a good run for its money. Green haired Goths - with more buckles on their boots that the entire mounted brigade- rubbed shoulders with elderly ladies in exotic purple gear ,who peered at artworks through bejeweled wingtip spectacles. The serious buyer was the one who actually bothered asking after the prices. ‘Oh anywhere up from 11000euros’ the airy reply of a young sales lady wafted into the ears of less courageous onlookers.

 

The sales ladies were a revelation; who knew that so many gorgeous young ladies were simply passionate about art. Black seemed to be the only clothing colour option. Much like ramp models that may not smile lest they distract from the clothing they are wearing ,these young ladies were obviously under instruction not to distract from the art works with outlandish clothing. What to do then about the glut of all-black paintings. It must be the gloom of global economic meltdown influencing the art world. I confess to being in an all black mood myself.

 

Interestingly, despite the constant harping that painting as an art form is dead, the overwhelming majority of works were in fact paintings. Probably a bit of strategic thinking on the part of the dealers - in a down market - to put up art that can in fact hang behind the coach. It must make the sale a bit easier if the buyer does not have to consider remodeling the house to accommodate the new art acquisition. There were however two sculpted pieces that caught my eye. Both in clear substance, one a cubic meter of clear resin(perhaps) in the centre of which floated a galaxy shaped air bubble, ‘the laboratory of a new universe’ I think it was called. It certainly drew the crowds and the craft of the thing alone was worth applauding. The other piece was ‘a continual vortex’. A large sphere of glass with a whirlpool of water dancing in its centre, this was mounted on a plinth at eye level, so the hilariously distorted faces of other viewers were visible behind the vortex. An interesting, possibly meditative piece, or a gym for the Koi.

 

On the painting side what stood out were very graphic, very large pieces consisting of thin sinuous green and brown acrylic lines racing and swirling over snow white canvas. These paintings were presented by several galleries. Must have upset the galleries but great exposure for the artist. However -as with most abstract art- the artist had found a groove and kept repeating himself. The paintings were admittedly intriguing from the - how did he do it point of view- the problem with this sort of art is once the how’s it done is discovered what is left? There is nothing there except a computer playing with lines that have been enlarged to impressive size. Fun, but telling art, that will have weight in five years time let alone 500? I doubt it.

 

While I enjoyed the visual spectacle of realistic paintings of mini cars and trucks all balancing on top of one another or arranged in compartments that reminded me of keyboard tabs, all this in various shades of yellow, the possible deeper meaning of it all was - as is normal in the art world of today -  on a strictly need to know basis so who knows and frankly who’s got the time to try and find out? Nobody really, perhaps not even the artist. I caught another snippet of information from an oriental buyer interested in a medium sized framed photograph of a wave. 35 000 USD was the quoted price. The oriental chap did not seem fazed at all, and he and the sales lady withdrew to the small private room all the stalls had in place to conclude the business end of the deal.  Other than that there were the usual comers of inexplicable art, ugly art, badly executed art and odd photographs that on the whole reminded me of the first year efforts we all produced in art school. Goodness knows, perhaps that is where the galleries are finding their great artists.

 

Is it possible that only the worst of creatives stay in the fine arts, the rest being snapped up by the design and commercial art studios of the world? I think it must be so if one considers the woeful state of the art market or rather more precisely the horrible stuff that is for sale. The shape of the art market itself depends on whom you are speaking to. The Frieze organisers have pegged this fair as their best fair yet, but the critics say the sales tanked and the auctions were dismal. But then the modern art market is all about spin isn’t it?  A market in which clever sales men and women control all things ART, perhaps that’s the problem.

 

Eaves dropping once again I overheard an elderly couple discussing a fabulous piece with a sales lady. Deciding that surely I must be missing something, I took time out to stand and concentrate on the offering in question, a series of sloppy lines in various shades of purple and green mud. What was the point? Was it in the colours or in the line or was it possibly a representation of a three day old bruise? What did the couple find fabulous about this piece?  All I could see was inexplicable ugliness.

 

Perhaps that is what art has become? A fairly ugly, meaningless and completely uninspiring object that is sold for more money than can possibly be justified? I have this old fashioned idea that art should have a function.  I believe the function of art is to ‘kick against society’, or to communicate to society that which it lacks ,or to communicate a higher ideal ,to provide some inspiration, and I further believe that art should be executed with great attention to craft. But even craft it seems is now no longer a desirable part of art. It is as if the artists revel in the slovenliness of their creations.

 

Contemporary art perhaps shows a mirror to our faces and says – to paraphrase Picasso- the world is ugly and incomprehensible why should art be otherwise. This is just a slippery escape route. Society has always been brutal and the world inhabited by millions who cannot see other than to prevent themselves from walking into a pole.

For art to emulate life is to degrade us all. Art should be an act of intellect that should attempt to be arresting enough to issue an invitation to deeper thought. And the invitation should have sufficient clarity to allow the recipient to at least to arrive at the right time and place, if they then don’t enjoy the occasion when they get there, well that’s up to each individual.

 

I think the true art lover - that person who does not need a middleman to tell him that the thing he is looking at is beautiful or has value beyond money - must despair at the things that pass as art today. I wonder how our descendants will view this era of art. Will there ever be a museum 600 years from now to which people will flock to marvel at our creations. I think our descendants will not marvel at our art but will shake their heads at the sad folly of it all or worse, fall about laughing.