Art's Army of Naked Emperors

Look here. I am angry and I will share with you why I am angry. And before I start, please forgive some obvious hypocrisies...

There is a thing called First Thursdays, which in art circles means basically you may go and see a preview of some perversion or another, and drink wine that is meant to be free, but where they insist on you coughing up the overpriced "recommended donation" anyway. And that is the embodiment of exactly what's wrong with art today- not that there hasn't been a reckoning overdue for the best part of half a Century, mind.

Sorry I started at the end, as usual. BASICALLY what I have seen at these exhibitions is laughable and yet very, very sad. It's not the Shoreditch whores who amble around hoping someone will notice how desperately irreplaceable they are in their individuality, nor the garish creature that stalked attention dressed up as a Lichtenstein painting at one preview (I'm ashamed that I actually RAN FROM IT. But it was terrifying and I am very easily unsettled).
It's what's displayed and lauded there, mainly the work of young art "students"- self indulgent tripe they manage to evacuate from themselves. I also had a walk around Teal's uni and was a bit taken aback at the fact that the entire building sacrificed to their "creativity" was littered with scrawled drawings of vaginas and crap made out of corks. I had a particularly tepid exchange with some inadequate, who told me that her "piece" (scribbles on the wall of a real life office, complete with post-its and magazines hung up for no reason whatsoever) was all about "making something out of nothing". Erm...well done there. You successfully managed to give a rudimentary description of every piece of art ever made, and tar it with your own particular brand of MORON. When I drew attention to the fact that it was a bit sub par, really, she answered "it's not about being good or bad". What a way to take criticism. Instead of trying to face up to failure she just goes on and undermines an entire institution of evaluation necessary to make her choice of metier even possible. I told her this, but I think she was too baffled by the fact that someone had actually told her the thing she made was shit to even defend herself properly. It may eveb have been a joke. Yes! It was all a lovely joke and I can now move on and be happy and ignore the whole debate it sparked in my mind about modern art and the damned naked Emperor.

It is such people with not even the hope of a grasp about what they are doing who make up the "art" that's floating about these days. Every time I hear of some new contraption I hang my head in despair. Why, in the name of Duchamp (pun intended), are these people allowed the arrogance to assume that whatever thought they dress up in ridiculous deserves the title of art? If Moliere was right and the "gentleman should beware of the itch to write" then those disillusioned children definitely need to beware the itch to make just to avoid certain templates society has laid out for them. Responsibility can kill, or rather the means you choose to avoid it. Just ask Lautrec! They turn themselves into a stereotype just to fuel their own narcissism. Really it's a wider problem in our society, like Twitter it is a manifestation of the self-obsession that doesn't let us concentrate and engage with anything properly any more.

There have been interesting concepts and ideas recently perhaps, and some are intelligent I'm sure, but what do they have to add to the symptoms of value in the human condition? The humanity, creativity and slow progress to something that could eventually evolve to be perfection? Why have we stopped looking for that and now serve up period blood stained bedsheets in place of some kind of thing that we could find solace and hope in? Why are they all so focused on their would-be disestablishmentarianist (ha!four more letters and that would have been the longest word in the dictionary! WOO!) banality that they don't realise they have stuck themselves in a rut in one niche of one genre of art that every other medium of communication got out of already! But even if you ignore all my sentimental babble and brush it off with "o but you don't understand it..." (I could murder at the arrogance in that line) you still can't explain away the fact that all the things I see/hear of/google in the way of modern art, apart from the ones that are a direct pastiche from the great masters perhaps, are UGLY. And worse than that, UGLY ON PURPOSE.

I'm not saying that the pursuit of ideal aesthetics should be the only thing one considers when on the art quest- rather it should maybe be the incarceration of a zeitgeist in one medium or another. Or even better, a zeitgeist yet to come.

For example; I'm sure it is no coincidence that landscape painting hit it's climax in the 17th Century (in Europe, I mean) just before the general opinion turned against the pomp of the ruling classes and there began to be a serious clamouring for change and equality ie going back to rural basics. Or maybe how art was involved in bringing about the Russian revolution. See the Black Square by Kazimir Malevich. It's something I find personally to be stunning even though I think Rothko is a DOUCHE AND SHOULD DIE AGAIN, and some of his work appears to be practically identical to Malevich's. But the Black Square is so compelling because it was painted to pin down a feeling- one of apocalyptic hurricanes of change approaching. And now after all the slaughter and many more noteworthy historical happenings I can still look at that and be spooked by it. Though even through the terror of his dark prophecy, you can see the lighter cracks of a promising future in the oil. Goes without saying he was endlessly mocked for it, as the vogue at the time was brainlessly copying European portraiture and Baroque/Rococo styles apparently. But he said this "None of you will ever wander as far and as deep into the wilderness as I have, and there only can transformation take place. Rise up fools, and liberate yourself from the tyranny of objects!" Great man indeed.

I can't tell you what art is exactly, but I can tell you that it becomes it. Either when someone sees it for the first time or hundreds of years later with the educated eye of an art historian cast over it or something, but it does not start out that way. This is why artists should be rare and the making of true art should be a sacred kind of pursuit, because art colours our history and civilisation all kinds of shades, and it takes a heroic person to plod off into that wilderness. So artists, please! Make something valuable, touching and worth remembering, something that is POETRY to the current pretentious masturbations of art that are at best only witticisms to be spouted at some would-be intellectual dinner party. STEP UP TO THE MARK. If for nothing else, just to prove Wilde wrong: art IS useful.