Be Excellent To Each Other

...wants rid.

So, after the massive insurance scam tragic warehouse fire destroyed a lot of rubbish, Saatchi wants to give what remains away. Eh?

Why would anyone want that crap, even for free? Is this another classic case of the owner being too cheap to get the council to collect?

I've never been to Tate Modern and I'm never going to go, as it looks right crap if Newsnight Review is to be believed. The last "art" work I saw on that programme (before I gave up watching) was some wax cannon firing wax balls at a wall and some bloke running down a room every minute (or something like) and the assembled guests cooing over the "inspiration".

Utter crap. Saatchi: Be less cheap and either go up the tip with your "art", or pay for the council to come and collect. Either way, fuck off you goon.

I think I saw that thing with the wax cannon as well.

That was not only shit, but literally not art, either - anyone who comes by can add to it, which I'm sure is fun and all, but it's about as much art as leaving a tin of paint by a big wall. It belongs in some sort of fannying about gallery, not an art gallery.

Not a fan of Tracey Ermintrude thing's unmade bed shit then? She's great. She gets drunk and thrusts her underslung jaw at everybody then vomits on the floor.

Hang around a city centre late of a Friday night and you'll see plenty of that happening. And I bet they don't bother making there beds in the morning, either!

Agreed! What it doesn't need is Kirsty bleedin Wark and cohorts going on about how excellent it is, with smug gittish winks that if we don't think it's excellent how we're all a bunch of muppets.

Anyway, some people like Modern Art and I think it's good that they/the nation can enjoy it. I don't see the point in being grumpy over this for the sake of it.

Wax cannon.

LOLZ

RABBIT! RABBIT! RABBIT! RABBIT! RABBIT! RABBIT! RABBIT! RABBIT! THANK YOU FOR COMING! RABBIT! RABBIT! RABBIT! RABBIT! RABBIT! RABBIT! RABBIT! RABBIT!

The wax cannon was awesome. If firing massive gobs of wax out of a cannon isn't art, I don't know what is.

Nearly all art produced is crap - I'm not going to try and substantiate this with actual figures but it's very high in my approximation. I don't think it's fair to single out Modern Art for this. I'm not even sure I could define what Modern Art is anymore, so muddied the waters have become, but it may be fair to say that it is more than driven by the market rather than any noble or high falutin' concept. Pretty much everything new that could be done had been thought of and executed by the end of the 60s and they were running short of ideas back then.

Now? It's about money and speculators, not people interested in "art". If you're very wealthy and want to buy a conversation piece for your wall, you want all of your friends to know the piece you've bought and you also quite like the idea of the £100k object you've purchased being worth £200k in five years time. It's so much to do with what sells that critics have become pretty much redundant in the marketplace as they have in many creative fields. Maybe this is as it should be. That doesn't stop a lot of it being seriously untalented shit. The thing is, the market is so out of control with monied speculators being catered for that people are buying pieces for silly money. Anybody buying anything by a conceptual artist over a certain price (say £250k) that can be reproduced ad nauseum as the "artist" had fuckall to do with manufacturing the thing in the first place, is fucking nuts and being taken for a ride by the artist and his management team. However, show me someone who wouldn't love to drop £1000 on a find and for it to be worth £10k in five years, regardless of whether they actually liked the piece in question and I'll show you a liar. This is the thing that drives the market and what makes people like Saatchi very rich - buy everything up by all the artists you kinda like when they're just starting and you only need one in 50 of them to become big and you make a fucking killing - the thing is, even he doesn't know who's going to make that leap from wannabe to player. However, most of the people he buys increase in value at least by a magnitude of several multiples.

I'm conceptual and modern art agnostic but one of the most depressing experiences I have ever had was the four hours I spent at Frieze last year. Rooms and rooms of crap with production values varying directly in proportion with how big the dealers were and how successful their artists were.

I ain't no expert in art, not even close, but I know what I like[1]. I can appreciate art as long as it obviously has taken some skill to produce. Some of the student work I see every day is utter trash because they've just copied something else and tried to capture someone else's lightning. That's no good, you need to produce your own work, even if it is clumsy and hard to understand. Conversely, any prick can lob a satsuma at a coffee table and call it 'Textural Analysis of Cultural Clash'[2] or some shit, but that isn't art.

Art has to come from inspiration. Not trying to offend anyone, but I wouldn't consider a lovely drawing of a building (or a straight forward photograph for that matter) to be art, simply because it's just a reflection of what's there. Art should be a lens for people to see things in new ways. Not necessarily 'challenging' or confrontational, but intriguing and attention grabbing. The best art is something that can't be ignored, something that people just have to look at (or listen to, or touch, or even taste), whether that's a hyper-realistic painting, a line drawing of Dimrill or the Queen with a drawn on moustache.

The reason most Modern Art is rubbish is because it's fucking meaningless. There's a painting hanging up in this building that is plain white with a dark grey smear across the middle. Its name?

'Untitled'.

Fuck off.

[1] CLICHÉ ALERT!
[2] You now all owe me £10 for reading that, btw

Snappa is correct that most art is crap. That said, most of the stuff that is lauded now from centuries gone past is not the stuff that was popular then. The lesson here is "there's no accounting for taste", I think.

I used to live quite near the Tate Modern so we'd wander round now and then. There's some good stuff in there, but mainly the stuff prior to the second half of the 20th century. Although some of the modern modern stuff, like the giant metal spider and the helter skelters, was good fun.

However, a large amount of the "popular" modern art is like a pseudo intellectual version of Banksy, and is entirely unengaging. Gilbert and George are a particular hate of mine.

One of the things I used to love about walking round Tate Modern was eavesdropping on people having intense and galactically pretentious conversations about the deeper meaning of the work, and what the artist was trying to convey. Said conversations usually taking place in front of a canvas painted a uniform red or a glass of water.

I'll give you £100k for that right now.

That would be the only possible way of you winning the stock market game.

My plan is to hold on to it for a few years, then get Zardoz to have an high publicity, turbulent relationship with a up-and-coming novelist, and then die of a heroin overdose surrounded by his own filth. It'll send the value through the roof!

Just need the novelist and heroin. Plz

That is a great plan, but marred only by the fact you have to condense it down to 80 days.

I remember the Tate had an entire room/floor dedicated to one "piece" that simulated a massive deep crack in the floor. I thought that was quite good.

Anyway, Modern Art could never be as bad as Modern Warfare.

That & nodding sagely at the fire exits were my favourite things in there.

Glasgow GoMA used to have a fair amount of stuff that I liked, but it's mostly turned to shit now.

Yeah, that was ace. Also the big sun on the ceiling. But they're not really art though, to my mind, but I'm strugging to articulate why.


Modern Art 2 is brilliant though.

POTW for me.

Like, cheers for all the fucking tat, Saatchi. Just shove the lot into the green recycling box outside, there's a love.

One of my turds possesses higher artistic value and integrity that your entire "collection", you crass, taste-free mug. LOL.

The Tate Modern is brilliant, and anyone who sayas otherwise is a scoundrel and a charlatan.

The Weather Project was excellent. Creating a massive environment with half a 'sun' in it, but then mirroring the entire ceiling and providing cloud cover... it was awesome. It was also a 'you had to be there' thing. It doesn't work as anything other than an experience, really. But it was brilliant.

Plus, the Tate Modern has stuff by the likes of Salvador Dali and Picasso. If you don't like Dali then you're dead inside.

I also like the Rothko stuff, though not everyone does.

'Modern' Art is an interesting concept. Some of it I think is nonsense (Ms Emin), but others will love that and hate some of the things I like (I loved the person who packed a shed full of old stuff from their childhood, and also explosives. They then blew the shed up, collected the debris, and suspended it all from very thin wires in a massive room, so it looked like a still frame from within the explosion, with everything all broken and charred and stuff. I adored it).

Vive la difference!

FTFY

I used to not "get" Dali. Basically, a lifetime of exposure to melting clocks and lobster telephones combined with a thousand students spouting nonsense (usually involving the word "fish") in the futile aim of being surrealist/eccentric/funny* led me to think "oh for fucks sake, it is just the first thing that comes into your head". Oh, you've got a fish tank on your head, how utterly marvellous.

But I went to the Dali Museum in St Petersburg. Fuck your lobster telephone. Fuck your melting clock. Just go and see one of his wonderful paintings in the flesh (The Hallucinogenic Toreador is a favourite) and understand that the man was a genius.

Eminently quotable and funny too. He was expelled from one of the top art schools in Spain at age 22, for saying no-one there was competent enough to examine him on his work. He was bloody right, too!


*And Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer have made a fucking career out of it.

A further thing to recommend Dali is that Giger liked him, of course.

I don't particularly like the painting, but Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bumble bee around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening has always been an awesome title in my mind, and is part of the inspiration for Dredg's ace El Cielo album. Pity they've gone a bit shit now.

Giger likes him. Giger's not dead y'see. He always admired him as a fellow surrealist.

Max Ernst > René Magritte > Third Rate Reeves and Mortimer > The Mighty Boosh > Salvador Dali > Hitler > Craster

Keep watching.

But Dali's dead though, right?

I meant like in a personal sense not artistic, but that's certainly true too.

This is why you love him.

You dirty boys.

Brian Sewell. He's got a reet ridiculous voice. No art.

Plus if it's Sewell he's right English and would've said foetal.

He said, "Spleeeeuurgh!!! Salvy, I've finished".

See that bloke lying trouserless in a ball on the floor, wanking? That's art, that is.

Art Garfunkle?

Knowing Dali, he did it for a laugh.

That was Matthew Kelly.

I've got Jeffrey Archer's phone number, and three packets of (past sell by date) Beechams Flu Plus if you want them, Squirt! Zardoz will have to supply his own filth.

I went to see that, I'll find some photos. I went with MrsA on one of our first dates together. I didn't let her have ice cream, but I became aware that one can cross the Thames in London.

I'm overjoyed that I got something right for once. I expected all you That London types to go "Nuh uh! That was in the Sate museauma next door you fucking north mong!"

I also went on a date to Frieze, some years back. I quite liked it.

Frigid.

You expect me to know anythng about modern art galleries? Not a chance.

This is one of the reasons I gave up on art before I finished it at GCSE. All the teachers cared about was making everyone imitate other people, and putting out derivative crap in massive volume. The bloke sitting opposite me who drew a terrific picture with chalk over several weeks got criticised because in the same time, a bunch of other people had shat out five tedious paintings or collages that were lauded because they were clearly made in an attempt to be like Monet or Picasso or ... er... El Famoso.

That and I got shit for doing what I was good at and enjoyed, rather than doing things I knew I had no grasp of and didn't like anyway. The time I tried, for the sake of giving it a go, a medium I knew I hated, I got a "That's nice... MAKE A MASK OF IT!!" What? Fuck off, what the hell am I going to do with a mask?

Also I was doing twelve other subjects and really could not be arsed with them all, so.




The difference this makes with pretty much any art can't really be overstated. When I was working for the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, there was a big fuss about the portrait of him that was unearthed, that our bloke was claiming is overwhelmingly likely to be a life portrait of his life, painted when he was alive, in his lifetime. Live.

Have a look in the papers, or in pamphlets or whatever, and you can see some resemblance to later works (which were supposedly copied from copies of this one), and it's interesting and all. But the first I saw of it was when the painting itself came to our archive for safekeeping. Naturally, once it was safe, the first thing I did was go back up for the camera and take pictures of myself posing next to Shakespeare with a thumbs up and a stupid grin, each of which would have got me triple fired if I'd shared them with anyone who I didn't trust.

But anyway, my point. What the pictures couldn't capture was that this thing, whether it's really him or not, was so full of life. It has an expression in the eyes and brow, and the mouth, that you just can't really see except in person. I'm sure it's true of many other works.