Annette Messager’s show À mon seul désir has a relaxed, unfussed immediacy that screams veracity.

Yes, we’re visiting the art world, the pages of Hyperallergic – “a forum for serious, playful, and radical thinking about art in the world today.”

The white walls of the space are copiously hung, salon style, with a mélange of disquieting drawings and small, black, figurative sculptures.

Oh dear. Never go full mélange.

[T]he artist really delivered the feminist mayhem she is known for, presenting a series of fresh and topical works that may just as well have come from the mind and hand of an artist half her (73) years.

Or even, as we’ll see, some fraction smaller than that. Readers curious as to what form this “feminist mayhem” takes will be thrilled to hear that Ms Messager has “created an eccentric menagerie of mythologies suggestive of the complexity of the female body, therein exploring concepts of the feminine.” Specifically,

Messager takes as subject free-flowing breasts, uteruses, and menstruation, pushing her ongoing artistic probe of the female body from outside and within… Perhaps the strongest works here are the loosely-drawn, menstruation-based pieces. “Mon Ketchup” (“My Ketchup”) focuses on the red menstrual flow of a seated woman with her panties around her ankles. 

Behold, ye mortals, and tremble.

This, then, is the high point of the exhibition. Or put another way, it’s all downhill from here. And so we arrive at an artistic feat titled “Mon utérus à mon désir” (“My Uterus to My Desire”) and which, we’re told, “depicts an anthropomorphised, left-handed uterus, flipping the bird.”

Again, feast thine eyes. 

The reviewer, an artist and author named Joseph Nechvatal, is rendered breathless by this endeavour. For him, it “sums up the intensity of the show… female flesh enacting insolence.” Well, the disdain is hard to miss. Though, given the hackneyed themes and general incompetence, which we’re expected to find both sufficient and compelling, perhaps while rubbing our chins, I can’t help wondering at whom said disdain is actually being aimed. 

Newcomers and the nostalgic will be thrilled to hear that the greatest hits archive has (finally) been updated. Among the additions are Laurie Penny’s not-at-all-disastrous lifestyle advice, how not being fat makes you an oppressor, why your erotic preferences are in need of egalitarian correction, and the Guardian’s Sarah Marsh on the traumatising horror of being offered free cake. 

So here’s a thing. A leftist anthropology professor named Mark Zajac – noted on the Rate My Professors website for being politically “opinionated” and “often going off on tangents about political topics which have no relation to the course” – discovered the existence of a website that advises parents and alumni of leftist professors whose views and behaviour are somewhat questionable. For instance, educators describing white people as “the face of the oppressor,” or calling conservative students “white supremacists,” or assaulting a student and then blaming their own behaviour on the “cultural legacy of slavery,” or repeatedly using the classroom as a political pulpit. 

Unhappy at this discovery, said professor then proceeded to use his classroom, and class time, to indulge in half an hour of factually dubious leftist sermonising. As the student who recorded Dr Zajac noted, “It’s unacceptable this is happening in a class where I’m supposed to be learning about ancient humans and how they painted caves and used tools.”

From the ‘style’ pages of Mic magazine, where the young and left-leaning can find “news to help you rethink the world”:

On election night, like so many, 26-year-old Nicole Narvaez’s feelings “kind of exploded.” “I went to bed in tears and woke up to the final news hysterical,” Narvaez recalled.

Hysterical. Her words.

“I cried on the train to work, at work, after work and many days since. Following the election I decided I wanted and needed to do something for myself that also meant something bigger.” And how she’d do that, she thought, was with a tattoo. “I needed to remind myself that our new president-elect and all the horrible things he has said and represents isn’t a representation of humanity, and to not let it eat me up entirely,” Narvaez said. “I needed something to remind myself of how strong I can be.”

Because the way to keep things in proportion and not be eaten up entirely by an election result is to have your body marked with a permanent reminder of it. And the strength-asserting tattoo chosen by the not-at-all-unstable Ms Narvaez?  

That night, after doing some research online, she walked into a tattoo parlour and got “GRL PWR” on her wrist and the Venus sign commonly associated with feminism on her pointer finger. “The two tattoos work in tandem when my hand is in a fist straight into the air,” Narvaez explained. “They work off one another.”

Tremble, ye patriarchs. This lady means business. Presumably, that fist-and-index-finger combo will be on display quite a lot in the post-election End Times.

The article, by Rachel Lubitz, goes on to inform its readers that Ms Narvaez is “not alone in feeling an urge to get something permanent on her body after the election,” that “feminist messages have been hugely popular,” and that this constitutes a “true insurgence.” Rather than, say, a display of impulse-control issues and possibly future regret. As illustrated, inadvertently, by a young feminist who wished to tell the world about her “belief in women’s rights” via the subtle medium of a large forearm tattoo. Specifically, one featuring “a coat hanger encircled in flowers with the words ‘We deserve better’ written below it.”

Attention, rubes, dupes and suckers. Do you pretend to experience crippling racial guilt in order to appear pious and fit in? Is “white supremacy,” “white privilege” and all that other pretentious angst weighing on your shoulders, harshing your buzz? Do you want to empower, or at least enrich, some “black femme freedom fighters”? Do you require monthly “tasks” – and a monthly bill of $100 – to atone for your pallor and “pay reparations” – to prove that, despite being white, you’re not a terrible person, unlike all those other awful white people? 

Then this is for you. 

Via dicentra, who reminds us that the above is not a work of satire.