Bonfire of the inanities



A huge fire has consumed a building where Tory lickspittle Charles Saatchi was storing a large amount of his modern, so-called ‘Brit-Art’ collection, including works by Hirst, Emin and Turk. Tracey Emin’s beach hut and the tent listing the names of her former shags are gone as is ‘floater’, an empty Perspex box with chewing gum wads stuck to the top. Dear Lord, how will the art world ever recover????



At the risk of sounding like a philistine I can’t help but think this is no loss whatsoever to the world of art and is a disaster only to those blatant charlatans like Damien Hirst who have no artistic ability whatsoever but do have a prodigious flair for self promotion and pure bullshit. Turk on Channel 4 News bemoaned the fact that some of these artists may have been the Turners of the future generations, which strikes me as both ridiculous and utterly immodest in a breath-taking way. In fact it sums up much of modern Brit-Art for me - pure arrogance and little talent.



And before anyone has a go at me for attacking modern art, I am not - I’m attacking a bunch of self-obsessed wankers. Let’s face it - most of those gits may as well wank off over some fabric then nail it up in an installation piece. Come to think of it (no pun intended) Tracey Emin is probably considering mounting an exhibition of a new tent created from squares of fabric over which each of her former lovers has ejaculated.



Now if the fire had been in the Dean Gallery, across the road from the Scottish Gallery of Modern Art in gorgeous Dean Village it would have been a disaster. Especially since they are now running a special exhibition taking a retrospective of the work of the excellent Italian-Scots artist Eduardo Paolozzi. The Dean already features his massive metal man sculpture and a wonderful re-creation of his studio (which is full of interesting toys he liked the colour or shape of, including a Millennium Falcon if you look closely). His work is irreplaceable whereas much of the art destroyed in the fire is symptomatic of the modern culture which produced it - hollow, meaningless, disposable and easily replaceable. Indeed some are already talking about recreating the same items again.