ANOTHER VOICE
The Great Art Joke of the 20th century
AUBERON WAUGH
Appalled as one constantly is by the leniency of the courts in dealing with crimes against property — our political masters have long since decided that even if property is not theft, everything in fact belongs to the government, private own- ership existing only on a system of revoc- able and discretionary licences from the State — I was glad that Wakefield Crown Court was not too hard on 22-year-old David Mulvenna, who pleaded guilty to stealing six bronze statues by the late Dame Barbara Hepworth from the York- shire Sculpture Park, near Barnsley.
The group of statues is called 'Family of May'. I have seen it only in photographs, but apparently it weighs two and a half tons and is valued by 'art' experts at £115,000. Mr Mulvenna, however, was not interested in its alleged artistic value. As his defend- ing counsel, Mr Peter Benson, pointed out, to a man of Mulvenna's gypsy background the sculptures — 'whatever their merits' would present themselves as lumps of scrap metal.
So he took the two and a half tons of bronze to the Leeds scrapyard of Mr Barry Hammill, saying that they came from a foundry he was dismantling. Mr Hammill gave him £825, but two days later he identified the lumps of metal from press photographs and told the police. The metal has now been reassembled at a cost of £7,425 in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, where it is once again thought to represent the Family of Man. Mr Mulvenna went down for six months, with a further 12 months suspended.
What interests me about this story is the poignancy of the assumption that only an Irish gypsy could possibly mistake these major works of 'art' for scrap metal. One cannot, of course, condone theft, even of municipal property, but there are surely degrees of wickedness involved. Anyone who picks up all the litter on Brighton beach after a bank holiday to sell it for his own profit — even if it technically belongs to Brighton Corporation — is performing a public service, and I would like to think that Mr Mulvenna was inspired by the same or similar motives.
Even so, Mr Mulvenna missed the great Joke, and it is quite right that he should be punished. These shapeless and vaguely unpleasing lumps of metal which litter so many municipal sites and 'prestige' com- mercial developments are the baldest and most unequivocal statement of the Great Art Joke which has been running now for three quarters of a century, but they also show the Joke at its weakest. The essence of the Joke is to find people who are foolish enough to say — and probably believe in all sincerity — that they find these lumps of metal beautiful. Another essential part of it is to find people who will be enraged by them, but the ultimate refinement is to create a climate where sensible, educated, humble people say that of course they may not appreciate the finer points of these works of art, being insuffi- ciently expert, but they confidently expect that future generations will effortlessly do so: Beethoven was much misunderstood in his own lifetime, as were Shakespeare, Dante and Homer; like the great 1982 classified clarets, which taste disgusting now, they must be laid down for posterity to savour. The weakness of the sculptural Joke is that very few people nowadays are prepared to take either of these attitudes.
The reason that jokes about 'modern art' are never funny is not that they reveal a boorish ignorance or philistinism, but that they miss this central Joke which is modern art. In missing the Joke, they also betray one of the great anti-democratic conspir- acies of history. The Joke can be sustained only by the efforts of honest, silly people who take it seriously. To make jokes about the Joke is, in the eyes of those who enjoy it, the ultimate treason: the better the jokes, the less funny they are.
To understand the anti-democratic char- acter of this great Joke one needs to go back to the middle of the last century. Then for the first and last time in at any rate English history, popular enthusiasm for the arts was genuine and intense. Frith's Derby Day had to have crush barriers put in front of it when it was exhibited in the Royal Academy in 1858. The debate over rival designs for the new Palace of Westminster — Barry's Tudor Gothic against the 95 other entries — was something about which every solicitor's clerk felt that he had a right to an opinion. Ruskin, the last of the great populist art critics, opined that Frith's Ramsgate Sands (1854, bought for Buckingham Palace), Derby Day (1858, National Gallery) and The Railway Station (1862, Holloway Col- lege) were the art of the future. Frith, who also sold the copyrights of his pictures, became the richest artist in the history of the world. And people flocked to see his pictures, just as they flocked 25 years after to the Savoy Opera. But the artistic establishment, which then as now was composed as to 90 per cent of charlatans and failures, was appal- led and disgusted by this breath of demo- cracy. The reaction set in first with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood which was formed in 1850 to revive the idealism and purity of the early Renaissance, but soon degenerated into a cliquish conspiracy to epater les bourgeois with garish colours and preposterous themes. Since then, the history of art has been the melancholy struggle of 'artists' — for the most part deeply second-rate people of indifferent attainments and idle habits — to establish their superiority over the com- mon man by producing work which he neither understands nor enjoys. The Joke is that they have succeeded. The only parallel to the 1858 scenes in our own time was the exhibition of Annigoni's moderate- ly successful neo-Renaissance portrait of the Queen in 1950. The English Arts establishment was never so angry. But there is a vast understructure of pseuds and crooks supporting it, selling their wares to American grocers and char- itable foundations, demanding State sub- sidies for 'difficult' artists and endlessly referring to Beethoven, Shakespeare' Dante, Homer . . . My complaint is cer- tainly not that the Joke is a bad one. When one sees decent and reasonably intelligent people like Melvyn Bragg earnestly de- dicating their lives to Bringing Modern Art to the People — 'the arts are about socialism,' he magnificently declared at the time of the last election — in glorious ignorance of that fact that its entire pur- pose is to mock the People, one sees that the Joke is very good indeed. Bragg emerges as a candidate for the title Silliest Man in England previously enjoyed by S0 Peter Parker, the former admirer of Shir- ley Williams. It is all very enjoyable. 1f, like me, you sometimes fall asleep during Spitting Image and wake up in the middle of South Bank Show, you realise that there are still jokes to be had in modern Britain: My only complaint is that the great anti-democratic movement might fin' more useful outlets than mocking the populace in this way. There is serious wort to be done in stopping the advance or democracy. This is just arsing around.
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