The Bollocks Is Bolted On
Further to this, and also via Charlotte Gill, let’s visit the world of politically radical tableware. Specifically,
Because this is what you need to know when taking a class in ceramics:
We funded this.
But remember, universities need more money 😉 pic.twitter.com/gKEbweQsVG
— Charlotte Gill (@CharlotteCGill) July 29, 2024
For those deeply intrigued:
Well, obviously, you can’t just learn how to make plates.
And hey, who wouldn’t want some of that lovely racial awareness? Or, less coyly, practised question-begging and pretentious racial guilt. Or unearned racial resentment, depending on how brown you happen to be. I mean, you can’t just go through life interacting with people as individuals. You have to cultivate a neurotic habit of seeing people as avatars of some supposedly put-upon racial group. Or conversely, as oppressors, as proven by their pallor, their deplorable whiteness.
And a fragrant utopia will surely follow.
The creative titan behind the project – named, inevitably, Working With Whiteness – is Victoria Burgher, a self-styled “artist from a colonising country,” for whom pretentious, and rather invidious, racial agonising has been a path to many grants and awards. Ms Burgher, we’re told,
You see,
And,
Strained metaphors are very in, it seems. Along with teetering piles of assumptions. Also, Bad Whitey. It’s all terribly original. Very daring. Not at all conformist.
It occurs to me, however, that Ms Burgher’s contrived, modish waffle may make a kind of sense if you think of it as an attempt to add social heft to the otherwise pedestrian art that she actually produces.
For instance:
“From The River To The Sea… #2 (2023). Porcelain, cobalt, gold lustre and glaze, 27cm.”
And,
“White But Working On It (2022). Glazed porcelain ceramic badges, 5-6 cm.”
And,
“Whiteness (2018). Ink on bagasse (sugar cane fibre), fabric, pins, 14 x 14 cm.”
It would, I think, explain a few things. As it often does.
Update, via the comments:
Regarding the unattractive objects shown above, and others very much like them, Martin D adds,
A fair question. One worth pondering.
Ms Burgher approvingly cites Ms Robin DiAngelo, the peddler of neurosis mentioned here, the L Ron Hubbard of wokeness, and whose devotees, as we’ve seen, are often wildly unhinged and nakedly malevolent. Which probably tells us much of what we need to know about Ms Burgher and her racial affectations. The mindset she wishes to inflict on others. And by extension, those who succumb.
And so, Ms Burgher makes her unattractive tat, and calls it art, and treads on ceramic eggshells, and calls it performance art, while listing the hallucinatory evils of having pale skin. And while telling those sufficiently credulous that “whiteness is oppression,” the source of all that is wrong, a basis for eternal shame, and that white people should “not behave white.”
You see, we will purge the world of bigotry by embracing wholesale the mental habits of the bigot.
So, yes. Someone quite fucked up.
Consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.
Some people have never had an original thought.
Every. Single. Time.
Right, so original the vets give them out when pets die, only difference is that these have actual meaning to someone.
In fairness, making an object of uncommon aesthetic value isn’t easy. However, regurgitating fashionable but socially corrosive bollocks… Well, any status-seeking mediocrity can do that.
.
The casual Jew hating is a nice touch. Just the thing when you want to serve Sunday brunch.
Ms Burgher’s output (verbal and physical) is what gives art a bad name.
True enough, but this doesn’t even reach common, let alone any, aesthetic value. Aside from being banal, it is just lazy and sloppy, not exactly what you would call Ming Dynasty level work.
Service for ten, coming right up!
It’s hard to see much aesthetic in Ms Burgher’s, um, output. It’s at best unremarkable, and very often not even that. And if trying to create something that warrants the label art, there’s something to be said for acknowledging when the attempt has failed, perhaps comically.
I believe the term is quality control.
Hunter Biden is an artist too, you know. It’s just money laundering. The ML game doesn’t only happen on a large scale. Who do you suppose buys all this crap? Kamala Harris raised $100 million virtually overnight. That’s an interesting story as well.
Discussing “whiteness” through a material invented by the Chinese?
And for those deeply uninterested?
Or is that no longer allowed?
Definitely bollocks.
Ever notice those who bang on about ‘white fragility’, ‘white defensiveness’, &c. are describing their own reaction to the vicissitudes of life?
They’re the sort who, with more courage in their convictions, would be featured in police body-camera videos.
It does have that whiff about it.
It would have to be much better to rise to the level of ‘pedestrian’.
I was being kind. I don’t like to be mean. As you know.
As usual they completely ignore the Asian physical origins of porcelain and its rich history and cultural meaning in the East.
Doesn’t fit the narrative.
Is that rustling in the bin liner I hear?
[ Drags bin into store room, shuts door. A muffled rustling can still be heard. ]
From the river to the sea, why does it still hurt when I pee.
You know, the other day you were asking what to tell people this blog was about…
[ Ponders emergency room report after last session in Correction Booth. ]
This is my innocent face.
[ Points to face. ]
Innocent of what is the question.
When did Britain become a bad pastiche of a Monty Python skit?
BTW, that table setting linked above is titled “Decolonial Dinner Dreaming”.
However, do pop over and enjoy some of her other “work” which includes such things as “Shower Curtain” and the every so original and edgy “Bloody Fist with Rosary” (not the actual titles, just descriptions).
There is also a photo of her apparently
haranguinglecturing in front of a statue of Churchill, “…using porcelain rice bowls to discuss Churchill’s role in the Bengal Famine of 1943.” I am guessing that minor little WWII thing didn’t get mentioned.Are we sure that the killer is the son of Rwandan immigrants? Last I checked his identity had not been released, and only a few twitter accounts were making claims as to his name or ethnicity.
What’s striking is the mix of contrivance and weird mental uniformity. As if every ideological tic and affectation is delivered in the same box.
From The Management of Murder by Mark Steyn
Thank you!
Note the at best there as it’s of singular importance.
While bad art nourished on half-baked ideas is a commonplace, Burgher’s work is excruciatingly hideous.
And this is not something that can simply be dismissed with an oh-but-it’s-all-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder-all-art-is-subjective handwave. It is objectively shite.
And what’s more, I can prove it.
Look at Cargo (2007) – only a combination of sheer mediocrity and lazy, ill-disciplined thinking could waste that much time and money on such lazy and obvious imagery:
Britain had sugar plantations > Africans were enslaved to work on the plantations > The Atlantic Slave trade was horrific > shackles cast in sugar and melted to look like blood.
That kind of reasoning is recognised as cringe by 16 year-olds when other 16 year-olds do it in their GCSE art portfolios.
Pretty sure they’re not either.
The British justice system, borderline moribund as it already is, will very soon come to rue the day it celebrated the decision of Mrs Justice Yip in February this year.
If you are wondering who Mrs Justice Yip is, this is the woman who lifted restrictions on the naming of the murderers of Brianna Ghey, claiming that there was
Brianna Ghey was a transgender (male-to-female) 16 year-old who was murdered by two classmates, Scarlett Jenkinson and Eddie Ratcliffe, also 16.
If the horrific murder of Ghey was considered so exceptional that the ban on identifying perpetrators under the age of 18 could be lifted, then there is absolutely no grounds for not lifting the ban in this case and revealing the identity of the 17 year-old demon in this case.
None.
But then, this is the British justice system we’re talking about – so no doubt they will find some weak excuse to explain why there was “a strong public interest” in Ghey’s case, but not in this one.
And I’m sure the fact that Ghey was transgender and Ghey’s killers were both ethnically white British played no part in the decision at all. [ Sarcasm ]
Given some of the examples of ‘art’ provided by our kindly host, ‘tediously’ or ‘predictably’ seem more apt than ‘excruciatingly’.
No, don’t thank me. You’re much too kind.
[ Waits for flowers, chocolates, decent-sized trophy. ]
The most common use for white porcelain is toilets. Just sayin’.
I think you’ve mistaken me for someone else.
It’s always pottery, or knitting, or sewing. The kinds of things lower-class homemakers used to do to save money that middle-class working women do as hobbies.
These are bitter childless wine aunts who bought into the notion that traditional family and femininity was an Oppressive Tool of the Patriarchy, but deep down they yearn for it and the resulting cognitive dissonance comes out in work like this. Nature will not be denied.
I’m clearly missing something, so everyone feel free to pile on with opprobrium, but, um, why are they working with white clay? Why are all the pieces basically baked or glazed white? Why not brown clay, Georgia red clay, hey, Black clay? Why the always-offensive White clay in a class designed to denigrate White-ness? Am I not understanding some Deeper Meaning here, or is the class presenter just stupid, or venal, or stupidly venal, or what?
Constant banging on the drum of racial hatred is the first step to actual pogroms. In Rwanda, the gov radio blasted out hatred of a minority until a massacre happened. And not a little one. Her plate is a step to murdering jews. In South Africa I hear that one of the political parties is advocating for elimination of whites. Armenians were massacred in early 20th century. Russia and China murdered millions. Humans are capable of this.
It is starting to look like Kamala is the acting president. She has announced new gov actions unilaterally. A coup seems to have happened.
Any and all would be the safest bet.
New puppet, same puppeteers.
Per the post and several earlier comments, this is all very shallow and very unoriginal.
And (Yes.JPG) she is all of those things crushed, soaked, heated to boil off the self consciousness, and left to cool on the side of the road like a pile of dung or the corpse of a squirrel.
Nikw211: ‘so no doubt they will find some weak excuse to explain why there was “a strong public interest” in Ghey’s case, but not in this one.’
They probably won’t even bother to trot out an excuse, just ignore it the way Starmer ignored the heckling he got from the crowd when he rushed to Southport for his flower-laying photo opportunity
Laughed, not sorry.
The media: it is one thing for media to have commentators who give their opinion Fine. But the actual “reporters” are now busy erasing Kamala’s actual history. “Border czar? No, she was never that.” Just like they covered for Biden for years. They have sunk below used car salesmen in the public’s view as a result.
From Scott Adams: Now please break out “progressive” from “liberal”.
Oh lord. A couple comments down we get Gentle Mommy again.
You don’t hate journalists enough. You try and try, but it is literally impossible.