We have, I fear, been neglecting the arts and their uplifting tendency. Let’s correct that immediately and thereby better ourselves:

How kind.

Now feast thine eyes upon it:

I know. You’re positively trembling with aesthetic rapture.

According to the artist, and the Turner Prize judges, what we, the public, need, and indeed deserve, is a seemingly random arrangement of tape, net curtains, and metal crash barriers, thereby conveying “a familiar yet delirious world,” and an allegedly “hostile” immigration policy, while “invoking societal breakdown,” and “unsettling perceived notions of labour, class, Britishness and power.” It’s “bold” and “engaging,” you see. The Telegraph’s art critic, Alastair Sooke, preferred the term “sculpturally compelling.”

And clearly, the stuff of a good day out. Definitely worth the bus fare.

Sharp-eyed readers may notice another possible reason for the artist’s gushing reception among our betters. The artist’s identity, or pretend-identity, being so terribly in right now, and by default deserving.

Update, via the comments:

Regarding that allegedly “hostile” immigration policy, the number of net legal migrants for the past year has been the highest recorded, several times the level of three years ago, and is somewhere around 700,000. This figure is likely to be revised upwards, of course, as with previous years’ figures on immigration.

700,000 is equivalent to the entire population of Sheffield, by the way.

But hey, let’s ignore such minor details and defer instead to our artistic Brahmin, all busy telling us how it is.

We’re told by Katie Razzall, the BBC’s culture editor, that the prize-winning art, or pretend-art, “tackles nationhood and British identity,” and that the offering is “a cut above” the other entries. It is, says the BBC’s arts reporter Ian Youngs, “making a comment on modern British life.”

Well, it seems to me that if we are in “times of crisis” and civilisational decline – and civilisational dismay – then much of that may be a consequence of the politics and mentality of those who applaud piles of tat as the best that can be done, the peak of human creativity. And who expect the rest of us to pretend along with them.

And because I like to spoil you, here’s another colossal work by the same dysmorphic individual:

What’s wearying is that these things are so numerous and predictable, so uniform, as if the mentally interchangeable peddlers of such things were following the same ideologically acceptable template. The end result being dutifully banal and artless, devoid of any obvious aesthetic, or any discernible skill with tools and materials, and then justified with some equally hackneyed and preposterous political blather.

It is, as they say, all so tiresome.

Oh, it’s a “critique of consumerism,” before you ask.

Currently doing the rounds, The late Norman Rockwell depicts Modern America:

Oh, there’s more. Not all of it savoury.

Update, via the comments:

There’s some discussion below about the aforementioned unsavoury content – the anti-Semitism and so forth. I did wonder about whether or not to link to the full selection, or what I assume is the full selection. But on balance, better to have the wider context, I think. Regulars of this site are, after all, grown-ups and can make up their own minds without my hand-holding.

And in case it needs pointing out, the basic juxtaposition that runs throughout the series – those jarring ideals – does rather throw into relief some fashionable assumptions of our time. The Forties’ suits with pronoun pins, the applauded looting, classroom violence, transgender sports, the Pride-obsessed educators with big, phallic balloons, etc. There is, I think, a certain… resonance.

The Rockwell aesthetic and period setting invites the viewer to imagine how one’s grandparents or great-grandparents might have reacted if faced with our time’s more modish pieties. A borderless, degenerate, bug-eating dystopia in which childhood is bureaucratically sexualised, and in which sporting unfairness and feral selfishness are met, by our betters, with pretentious approval. It’s very now.

Also, open thread.

Readers may recall this item from four months ago:

I was of course referring to Ms Shellyne Rodriguez, an art teacher at Hunter College, New York, and whose activities include menacing students whose views diverge from her own, shouting profanities at said students, vandalising their property, and chasing people down the street armed with a machete.

A liveliness subsequently blamed on “racists, white nationalists, and misogynists.”

In a turn of events unlikely to surprise regulars of this parish, it seems that Ms Rodriguez, our self-styled “black Marxist” and “public intellectual,” has a new position, this time at the Cooper Union School of Art in Manhattan. Where students will apparently be treated to our gentle maiden’s insights on,

Oh, and,

A coexistence achieved, one assumes, via screamed profanities, fits of physical intimidation, and holding machetes to people’s necks.

Readers are invited to speculate as to what it might take for a progressive educator to become unemployable.

Update, via the comments:

Our art instructor’s list of professed woes – supposedly mitigating circumstances – is of course extensive, and the relevance of many items escapes me, even allowing for the usual contrivance. Apparently, if you think a professional educator should behave like an adult, and not, say, threaten to decapitate people who ask questions about her childish and aggressive behaviour, then this is part of an “attack” on “women, trans people, black people, Latinx people, migrants, and beyond.”

A boldness that suggests Ms Rodriguez is very much accustomed to indulgence and being exempt from normal academic proprieties, and indeed civilisational basics. Rather than, as she pretends, being downtrodden at every turn.

Rafi adds, drily,

Indeed. What catches the eye isn’t Ms Rodriguez’s meagre scholarship – in which “critical studies,” i.e., Marxoid question-begging, seems more prominent than any aesthetic discernment – or even her equally meagre artistic abilities, which call to mind the daubing of a B-minus student, aged maybe 15:

Given the progressive chokehold on academia, and the neurotic racial imperatives consequently in play, corruption and rotting standards are to be expected. It’s the standard trajectory of ideological capture. This is the utopian path chosen by our self-imagined betters.

But it is, I think, interesting just how unhinged – and threatening – a progressive educator can be without having to consider an entirely different line of work.

Update 2:

Being a supposedly “marginalised” individual, maybe Ms Rodriguez was merely heeding the deep, deep wisdom of fellow “educator” Ms Shellene Drakes-Tull, mentioned here previously, and who informs us that expectations of workplace professionalism are scandalously racist, and that brown-skinned employees must be allowed to “bring their whole selves to work.” A wholeness of self that includes behaving in ways likely to be “interpreted as violent or aggressive.”

It turns out that a dislike of being bullied by the childish and emotionally incontinent is merely evidence of “deep, inherent bias and deeply inherent systemic racism.”

How terribly convenient.

Should further examples of suboptimal educators be required, see also this and this, and, well, any number of posts here tagged academia. The political leanings of the individuals in question will not be entirely surprising.

Also, open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

The Observer reports on London’s struggling artists:

We’ll get to that creative critical faculty in a second.

We’ll get to that too.

The cost of renting a studio in which to be abuzz with creativity is, we’re told, a major issue:

Ah yes, the engine room. Powering the city of London with their ceaseless shovelling.

The indignity.

Indeed, of those surveyed, only 12% “can support themselves solely through art.” Given such difficulties, the words supply and demand spring to mind, and readers may wonder whether a different, more viable line of work may be in order. Or at least some relocation – say, to a place where studio rents and general living expenses are much more affordable. However, Ms Kwan, our successful artist, is having none of that:

At which point, readers may suspect that the imperative is not so much being creative, but being creative in London, a notoriously expensive city, but in which one can draw attention to the fact that one lives and works in London, a notoriously expensive city. Thereby glowing with a kind of location status.

That bottom of the pile business must really chafe.

Readers may also note the article’s, shall we say, coyness regarding the art on offer – all that cruelly underfunded creativity. None of which is displayed to sway readers of the Observer. The nearest we get is a photo of Ms Kwan standing next to a creation that we cannot actually see, and a photo of Grayson Perry in a hideous frock.

Poking about elsewhere reveals that Ms Kwan’s area of expertise is “political and ecological positioning through fine art practice,” as seen so boldly here:

It’s a “sensory banquet,” the creation of which “had a profound emotional and conceptual effect on my sense of the relationships between objects, personhood, and ancestral and collective meaning.”

As you can imagine.

Other dizzying creations can be seen – nay, beheld – here and here.

Given the aesthetic uplift conjured into being via piles of plastic milk cartons, it is of course astounding that Ms Kwan and her equally high-minded peers, all doubtless schooled in political “positioning,” aren’t feeling sufficiently rewarded.

“It is like a hostile environment now,” says Ms Kwan. A sentiment that may conceivably be shared by those members of the general public who venture to art venues in search of aesthetics and objects of wonderment, but who find only unattractive tat, ponderous press releases, and piles of plastic milk cartons.

If the basic thrust of the Observer article sounds familiar – the need to be seen being creative in a suitably happening city, while living above one’s means – you may be thinking of this Guardian article. In which, a self-exalting novelist named Brigid Delaney tells us that creative people, people much like herself, must live in locales befitting their potential and importance, not their budget. And hence the imperative for public subsidy.

You, taxpayer, come hither. And bring your wallet.

Because you’ll only complain otherwise, I bring you performance art:

I’m reading the catalogue and press release. Bear with me. Send sandwiches.

Needless to say, the accompanying prose is quite extensive. The words “sustainable heterotopic space of discourse” crop up, obviously, and which, as you can imagine, is an enormous help. Quite how one might “exchange ideas” with a plant is, alas, not divulged.

We are, however, offered a tantalising preview of a “sensitive, sensual performance” by Lisa Hinterreithner and her associates, in which the four ladies “lead us into a world of living vegetatability.” It is, as will become clear, a “human-plant utopia.”

Should you be tempted by the prospect of watching four women being intimate with nature, fondling straw, and tonguing moss, you can behold the full 100-minute performance at the Künstlerhaus Factory, Vienna, July 20-23, where other, equally stunning works can doubtless be savoured.

Visitors are advised to “if possible, bring socks.”