Category: Current Affairs

Art Is Dead

Last week the American artist Cy Twombly passed away aged 83.  Upon hearing the news of his passing I like many others uttered the words “Who?”.  As is the way of the 21st century, I switched on my laptop and immediately googled him.  Unsurprisingly, as befitting all acclaimed talents of whichever field they happen to inhabit, he was rather popular.  Reading through news headlines he was lauded as

‘a key figure in modern art’

‘one of the most significant artists of the last 50 years’

‘a fraud’

Yet still I had no idea who he was, and what kind of artist he was, so my next port of call was Wikipedia where I discovered that he freely scribbled many of his paintings.  About closer scrutiny I can say that much of his artwork, to my untrained eye looked not dissimilar to the scrawling of a three year old child.  However I am in no way an expert on art, therefore I shall close this paragraph by merely stating that to be a successful artist, someone has to want to buy your work.

One of the most amazing phenomena in the cycle of life is observing how in death, people become much greater than they were when they lived.  Whether it be an uncle, a statesman or a musician.  Why as people we feel the need to dishonestly elevate people to greatness I don’t know but we do need it, as if it’s an almost integral part of our grieving process.  It’s amazing that people have been dying for thousands of years and all we have is around 20 unoriginal epitaphs to describe them with.

The last 100 years have seen two major changes in all artistic pursuits.  The first is that we have seen the introduction of marketing into art.  Whereas 300 years ago a true artist would sell one piece in his lifetime and live his whole life in poverty and only be acknowledged a long time after he passed now the game is different.  A musician dying is a wonderful opportunity to release a best of album, a painter dying is a wonderful opportunity to encourage the national museum to finally hold that retrospective they have been promising and a writer dying can create a buzz which can make their last novel a bestseller.  Death is fantastic for the arts.

In the meantime we have witnessed the death of experimental art.  Nowadays the only art we see is Generic.  Whether its the next big modern artist embalming his dead grandmother up a whale’s arsehole and hanging it from a glass tank in the middle of the Tate, or the next great self help millionaire who is going to help you be sexier than anyone in 60 days or the next big singer who has spent eleven times the GDP of Indonesia on cosmetic surgery in order to have the look.  Due to the blatant lack of new, no one even tries to produce new, instead they produce the new old rather than the old new.  Whether it be contemporary abstract futuristic cubism, or the how to quit smoking, lose 55 kilos and get a man or the next new rock indie folk punk funk hop sensation.  Very little of it is actually new.  That’s not to say that there is nothing new.  It’s just harder to see.

Life has changed, the world has moved on.  The Bohemian in me is saddened by the death of artistic pursuits.  We have replaced the romantic notion of the world with a practical one which involves texting and blogging and facebooking and twittering.  There are so many modern distractions that fewer people visit galleries, or read books or buy Cd’s.  Eventually newness is going to come to an end entirely and then the world will implode on itself and all which will be left will be a large rock and a cockroach called Brian.

Doctors Appointments And Other Excuses

This week has been interrupted by doctor’s appointments and other work so progress is slowing.  A couple of months ago I had an operation and now it seems it wasn’t an overwhelming success so there is a chance I will have to go back to hospital.  It will be a massive kick in the teeth and will most certainly disrupt my progress.  I mention it although I do not wish to focus on that, instead I want to focus on the experience instead.

Ending up in a hospital bed as I neared the conclusion of my novel was wonderfully ironic.  The reason being that the hero of my story, Norman, ends up in hospital in the penultimate section of the book.  It was almost direct research.  My stay enabled me to check out how my protagonist’s feelings matched my own.  In hindsight I believe my feelings and Norman’s were not entirely dissimilar.  Although our circumstances were completely different.  I now find it hard to separate my opinion’s from Norman’s.  To some degree it makes me proud.

When I re-read the fore mentioned scenes in my very own hospital bed I was taken by one line in particular

For most people lying in a hospital bed, comfort is the thing they both need and lack the most.

It’s peculiar, as now it seems almost like I saw the future.  For example, one day I was scheduled to have a test under local anaesthetic.  Due to an administrative error I was starved before the test as they thought I was due to have an operation.  In preparation for the test they actually shaved the wrong part of my body.  These were not massive mistakes, none the less they hardly served to make me feel better.  Thankfully there were some staff members who went above and beyond the call of duty to try and make me smile.  One nurse who had previously worked in England would not let the orderlies serve me tea without running to the staff room to fetch me milk.

Fact.  Psychologically hospitals are dreary places which each and everyone of acknowledges as a place where people go to get fixed or die.  That pessimistic thought remains with us whether we are a visitor or a patient.  Fact.  Spending the vast majority of one’s time in bed is psychologically tiring.  Essentially the doctors and nurses force you to impersonate the behavioral patterns of a chronically depressed individual.  Fact.  Starvation, even in the form of a dieticians advice does little to lift the mood.  Fact.  Grapes, flowers and balloons do not make everything better.

It’s obvious that there are reasons why hospitals are ran this way and I am no one to advise them how to take care of business.  I am not advocating that all doctors should dress up like clowns, or that all flowers should squirt water or vodka nor and I am suggesting that you give loved ones explosive grapes.  The one suggestion I can prescribe is smiles and silliness.  That if you visit a loved one in hospital do your level best to listen carefully,  lift their mood, and do cartwheels down the corridor as you leave.