Call this modern art, you limp dicks? You’re years behind the times


The Tate Modern is decades behind the times, dithering weakly as they skirt the shores of true modernity. It is time they dived in.

My dismay is provoked by learning that the top prize – The Turner – at the Tate’s latest annual exercise in the ludicrous is some sounds played in an empty room by Susan Philipsz. (Lurv the “z”, Sue. So creative.)


This is conceptual art, invented as far as I can see by Marcel Duchamp who stuck – allegedly as a joke – the urinal illustrated as “ready-made art” in an exhibition back in 1917 just to show you could find anything you like, sign it and claim it was art, and idiots would agree.

Sure enough an idiot critic called Tomkins said “It does not take much stretching of the imagination to see in the upside-down urinal’s gently flowing curves the veiled head of a classic Renaissance Madonna or a seated Buddha”.

The original urinal has been lost – what a tragedy – but a number of replicas have been “created.” A couple of years back two Chinese artists entered into the spirit of the concept by trying to piss all over one of them on the entirely reasonable grounds that it constituted “an invitation.”

I’m sorry, but the room with sounds bespeaks a lamentable lack of imagination. Last week, 40 musicians with fuck all to do went to a London studio and did not play their instruments in a performance of John Cage’s famous silent composition, “4’33’’” – which he came up with in 1952. (How sad that “troubled” – i.e. witless – Babyshambles “star” Pete Doherty didn’t turn up.)

It is high time The Tate Modern got minimal, emptied their galley and had a show of nothing. You can be sure some pretentious twat would acclaim it as a great exhibition. I would be happy to be paid a few grand to “curate” it. My brilliant new career beckons.


By the way, the best and funniest writing on this subject is an essay by Tom Wolfe called “The Painted Word”.

About the Author

In 2003, the Chartered Institute of Marketing named Drayton one of 50 living individuals who have shaped today’s marketing.

He has worked in 55 countries with many of the world’s greatest brands. These include American Express, Audi, Bentley, British Airways, Cisco, Columbia Business School, Deutsche Post, Ford, IBM, McKinsey, Mercedes, Microsoft, Nestle, Philips, Procter & Gamble, Toyota, Unilever, Visa and Volkswagen.

Drayton has helped sell everything from Airbus planes to Peppa Pig. His book, Commonsense Direct and Digital Marketing, out in 17 languages, has been the UK’s best seller on the subject every year since 1982. He has also run his own businesses in the U.K., Portugal and Malaysia.

He was a main board member of the Ogilvy Group, a founding member of the Superbrands Organisation, one of the first eight Honorary Fellows of the Institute of Direct Marketing and one of the first three people named to the Hall of Fame of the Direct Marketing Association of India. He has also been given Lifetime Achievement Awards by the Caples Organisation in New York and Early To Rise in Florida.

3 Comments

  1. Glyn

    Some years ago, a new John Lennon album was nearing release and the time came to send early 'white label' copies to the music journalists (sic). Due to a problem at the pressing plant (sorry kids this anectdote revolves around vinyl) the single album couldn't be pressed onto two sides of a disk so was sent out on two separate discs with a blank side on each disk.
    One of the newspaper reviews remarked that sides one and three were full of the usual old John Lennon rubbish that was becoming so out-dated and predictable – but that sides two and four were incredibly exciting.

  2. I believe that art is about what you like. And yet as you point out there are a number of so called artists who I think are secretly having a laugh at the art establishment by “creating” complete rubbish and labelling it as art. And everyone gets the “emperor's new clothes” syndrome and daren't ask why everyone is raving about a particular piece.

    Jim

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