For newcomers, more items from the archives.
A video compendium of conceptual performance and physical theatre. Contains nudity, writhing and vegetable slurry.
Magdalena Chowaniec, Amanda Piña and Daniel Zimmermann perform Neuer Wiener Bioaktionismus: “Three young Viennese artists/dancers from Chile, Poland and Switzerland translate the actionist mystery into a vegetarian orgy in which dead carrots take the place of the massacred lamb. A portrait of our time.”
The Observer’s Elizabeth Day asks, “Should artists have to work?”
Stipends allowed Bettina Camilla Vestergaard to travel to Los Angeles and spend six months sitting in her car at taxpayers’ expense while “exploring collective identity” in ways never quite made clear. Oh, and doing a spot of shopping. For art, of course. After sufficient time had been spent idling and, as she puts it, “slowly but surely reducing my mental activity to a purposeless series of meaningless events,” Ms Vestergaard struck upon a deep and fearsome idea. Specifically, to let strangers deface her car with inane marker pen graffiti. This radical feat allegedly “explored” how “identity and gender is constituted in public space.” Though, again, the details are somewhat sketchy. The freewheeling disposal of other people’s earnings also allowed Ms Vestergaard to film herself and her friends looking bored, tearing up grass and pondering the evils of capitalism. And, in an all too brief moment of awareness, wondering if what they do is actually any good and worth anyone’s attention. The resulting videos, all bankrolled by the Danish taxpayer and showing highlights of four days’ artistic inactivity, have been available online for over a year and have to date attracted zero comments and no discernible traffic except via this blog.
Meet Joan Brady: novelist, umbrage-taker, colossal hypocrite.
Corporations, see, are wicked. They “chew us up and spit us out,” and how could anyone with a soul want to be part of that – especially an artist like Joan Brady, for whom purity is everything? Of course, this being the Guardian, Ms Brady’s display of indignation is just a tad selective. Despite the author’s outrage, I somehow doubt that Whitbread will be getting their prize money back. I think we can also assume that our morally lofty wordsmith won’t be withdrawing her novels from Waterstones and Amazon, both of which have no doubt aroused very similar umbrage from many small booksellers. And it’s perhaps worth noting that Ms Brady’s latest novel, The Blue Death, is published by Simon & Schuster, an imposing division of that even more imposing multinational corporation, CBS.
We’re Compensating You for That Face.
Unattractive people need affirmative action too.
Oh, come on. Who wouldn’t want to be regarded as officially ugly?
As usual, I’ve hidden chocolate and booze in the greatest hits.
Contains nudity, writhing and vegetable slurry.
I don’t know whether to laugh or despair.
You mustn’t laugh. They’re visionaries.
A portrait of our time.
Oh but it is, David. Just not the way they think it is.
Oh but it is, David. Just not the way they think it is.
Well, I suppose you could think of it as an inadvertently satirical comment on what happens when you publicly subsidise and encourage narcissistic tat, and on the people attracted to such things. By that measure, it’s a triumph.
It’s not the art that offends me, it’s the way I’m threatened and extorted from to fund it.
It’s not the art that offends me…
I suspect the assumption is that if one doesn’t pretend to like such things, one must therefore be offended or scandalised in some way. Which I suppose is kind of funny. Offhand, I can’t think of anyone I know who’d be offended by, say, onstage nudity or by watching people smeared with liquidised carrot writhing unconvincingly on a sheet of polythene. That’s just hackneyed and tedious. As you say, what’s objectionable is the presumption, the parasitic funding, and the sense of being palmed off with aesthetically vacuous shite.
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But many art students have been led to believe that their primary function is to be transgressive and political – provided the politics is incoherent and/or leftwing – and thereby to unnerve and correct the rest of us with their “critiques,” “explorations” and radical cleverness. Or, as the anti-capitalist parasite John Jordan put it, the role of the artist is to “show us how to live differently.” Which is of course a lot of self-flattering bollocks. From the customer’s point of view, the function of the artist is quite simple. To make beautiful images, objects and experiences that the rest of us might like and even want to pay for. But if you sneer at the idea that artists should have customers who pay for art directly, and instead insist on state bureaucracies and coercive taxpayer subsidy, then the expectations of the public can be sidestepped and quickly made irrelevant. Inevitably, you’ll get a mountain of naff conceptual noodling that’s contemptuous of aesthetics, and by extension contemptuous of the public, which is still forced to bankroll whatever tat is produced.
I think Ms Vestergaard’s next assignment should be to follow poor people around for the next 3 months, seeing how they work in shit jobs and are taxed money they cannot afford to allow this vacuous waste of breath the opportunity to fuck about doing nothing.
She might even learn some humility.
She might even learn some humility.
I think we both know that’s unlikely to happen. It isn’t who she is.
Though it’s interesting how so many ‘egalitarian’ artists slip into the role of parasite, as if it were their right and destiny. Ms Vestergaard, for instance, longs for a place to escape “the choking effects of the market,” a place where she and her peers can air their “radical and uncompromising thoughts.” Ms Vestergaard and her associates are precious flowers and are choked by the free market, which after all implies a reciprocal arrangement with whoever’s footing the bill. A parasitic relationship, in which the taxpayer has no say, is coerced, and is essentially irrelevant, is much more liberating.
For her, that is. Not the little people.
I enjoyed your verbal beheading of Joan Brady. Nicely done.
stick insect,
Glad you were entertained. Though she did rather put her own head on the block.
To be fair, some of the artists seem a bit wiser:
“”I think it’s amazing there are public subsidies,” says Paterson. “But I think there’s a danger to it as well. Nobody owes me a living and if I’m going to spend someone’s money, I want to be able to give it back to them. Obviously it would be nice to go on holiday a bit more often and not be worrying about money, but I have this whole theory that when people get too comfortable, they become rarefied.
“If you have a computer and a degree, you’re already in the top 1% of the planet, so why should I get to float around without having to earn a living? I want to earn my stripes. I don’t want anyone to say, ‘You don’t deserve to be here.'””
Also depressing, btw, is how the author can’t think of any way of supporting artists other than state subsidies.
“I don’t want anyone to say, ‘You don’t deserve to be here’.”
I suppose the question is whether that’s now the prevailing view among artists, or a minority one. I wouldn’t care to guess, but there are plenty of columnists, artists and students who insist, quite emphatically, that screwing money out of the taxpayer, rather than earning it, maintains their integrity.
Clearly to be forced to produce something of palpable value is demeaning, and dulls the artist’s disruptive transgression of the human soul.
Or some such horse shit.
I don’t blame the parasites who demand we support their con game. I blame us for letting them get away with it much of the time. A truly advanced society would laugh uproariously at their ridiculous pretensions and send them on their way, perhaps with some “Help Wanted” ads in their back pocket.
From the customer’s point of view, the function of the artist is quite simple. To make beautiful images, objects and experiences that the rest of us might like and even want to pay for.
That would be enough. I wish more ‘artists’ would try it.
That would be enough. I wish more ‘artists’ would try it.
Well, it’s not an easy thing to do. Creating something beautiful is hard. Which may explain the extensive public funding of things like this, which has less aesthetic content than my smart phone’s interface. And there’s quite a lot of muddling and inversion going on. Even government ministers now bang on about the need for art to be “challenging” and “iconoclastic.” A development that, as Fabian Tassano noted, suggests no actual challenge or iconoclasm is likely to take place, or indeed be welcome.
The socialist film director Ken Loach has repeatedly told us that creative people – people like him – should be “challenging… rude… disturbing” and of course “critical” (but only of certain things – I doubt he’d welcome a rude and disturbing critique of rent-seeking socialists and Arts Council freeloaders). Creative people, he says, should be “independent” and “not part of the establishment.” And he says all this while demanding even more state subsidy and even more state bureaucracy for people like himself to be cultural supervisors. Because screwing the public with the force of government is apparently what independent, challenging, anti-establishment types do.
It’s all quite peculiar.