Wot is modern art?
Arguably the first act of Modern Art, or ‘getting away with murder’, was committed circa 1840 by William Mallard ‘Slasher’ Turner (details are hazy, like much of Slashers’ work) but Modern Art has been going on ever since.
As first most acts of Modern Art were fairly innocuous and some were even good – put your hands together for the ‘Impressionists’. But things got ugly in the 1920’s when a international gang calling themselves the ‘Dadaists’ started hitting galleries throughout Europe. Perhaps the most infamous act of Modern Art ever, was committed by the leader of the ‘Dada’ gang Marcel ‘Pisser’ Duchamp, in a small Parisian gallery. Heavily disguised and going under an alias, ‘Pisser’ Duchamp exploded a urinal in the Art World and threatened to do big jobs if his demands weren’t meet.
Now you may ask why the Art World didn’t just ignore him, and it’s a good question. If no one took any notice, he’d have soon got bored and gone back to knicking ladies handbags and scrawling rude crude drawings in pissoirs. But that’s not what happened. Instead of telling ‘Pisser’ not to grow up and kicking him and his urinal out of the gallery, the Art World sucumbed to his threats and submitted to his demands; eventually giving ‘Pisser’ all the attention and money he so desparately craved.
‘Never negotiate with terrorists’ is the first rule of callous, power crazed governments the world over. This is only resonable as extortion is their job and they don’t want petty amateurs muscling in. If only the Art World had taken such a tough line with ‘Pisser’ Duchamp, millions of gulible Art buyers might still have their money. Flushed by Pisser’s success other, copy-cat Dadaists, relieved themselves in galleries all over the world with a stream of easy to come by ‘Readymades’. And by so doing, they took the piss out of Modern Art.
By the 1990’s the Dadaist’s seventy year reign of sewage was still going strong. Any blockage of Modern Art had been ‘Drain-O-ed’ long ago and the Art World was so used to the stench, that anything that could be, would be, sneaked passed security and into an Art gallery: bricks, vacuum cleaners, dog turds, pipes (cunningly labled ‘not a pipe’) sheep, sharks, blank canvases – even whole houses!
Dadaist gangs tried to out-outrage each other’s ‘Readymade’ atrocities. The turf war between two East London Dadaist gangs ‘The Emiens’ and ‘The Hursts’, being especially bloody. The vicious Hurst gang finally winning with a Readymade of montorous gall entitled ‘Two-Half-Sheep-in–Pickledcow-with Rotten Parrot-Head-handsewn-on-Buttocks’. This notorious Art Crime Caper hit both rich and poor art buyers alike, and summed up the Hurst’s – and the Dadaist’s – attitude to buyers: ‘not only can you not afford it, but you can’t hang it over your mantelpiece if you could’.
It seemed no where and no thing was safe. The more the Art World failed to tackle the problem, the higher the Dadaist’s demands for money and attention became – eventually Dadaist gangs even demanded to be taken seriously.
So the answer to the question ‘Wot is Modern Art’ is: any old tat that anybody will pay enough attention to, and take seriously enough – to pay money for. Which makes eBay the world’s largest art gallery.
As a postscript I must confess that I too once subcumed to pressure and produced a Readymade ( I was young, I needed the money, and everyone else was doing it). Sadly, my ‘Rabbit Cow-with Pidgeon Feet-Knicking-Fish-from Chip Pan’ just didn’t have what it took, to get taken seriously.
Classix Board Games 