ANOTHER VOICE

Is my loved and respected brother-in-law determined to make a fool of himself?

AUBERON WAUGH

How tetchy our art experts become when those who have no qualifications to discuss the matter — those from outside what Simon Wilson (`curator of interpreta- tion' at the Tate) calls the 'art community' — express an opinion on the contemporary art scene.

The art community, Mr Wilson explains, embraces artists, dealers, curators, collec- tors, art historians and the interested pub- lic. 'Good art is ground-breaking, not to say subversive, but in the end the validation process is by the whole art community,' he concludes.

Trevor McDonald of ITN does not belong to the art community. When he turned up at the Serpentine gallery to mar- vel at the actress, Tilda Swinton, pretend- ing to be asleep in a glass case, he received very short shrift: ' "Is this art?" was the tone of ITN's cov- erage, mouthed by the odiously smug Trevor McDonald,' wrote our own Johnnie McEwen in the Sunday Telegraph, record- ing with satisfaction that 'righteous indigna- tion has been widespread'. The indignation of the Sunday Times's Waldemar Januszczak was even more righteous:

And finally ... the art expert Trevor McDonald had a little chuckle about modern art in the News at Ten report on this intrigu- ing show by that other art expert Joan Thir- kettle. The job of News at Ten is to report events impartially, not to play to the preju- dices of the audience with dismissive chuck- les about art.

Oops, sorry, sir. Obviously the McDon- alds and Thirkettles of this world have no right to an opinion on the subject until it has been validated by the Januszczaks. Nei- ther ITN nor Waldemar Januszczak visited another exhibition, at the South London Gallery in Peckham, to see Gilbert & George: The Naked Shit Pictures (until 15 October) where the artists show themselves in various poses, clothed and unclothed with, and without magnified representations of their own turds.

`They're rubbish,' says Waldemar. `They're the worst side of it all, sensational- ist attention-seekers.'

The Observer critic, William Feaver, was similarly dismissive, but our John McEwen, in the Sunday Telegraph, wrote of a 'higher cause which is purposely moral and indeed Christian . . . The evangelical point is con- firmed by reference to the Crucifixion and the Garden of Eden where the seed of shame was sown. That these cruciforms are composed of photographs of the artists' shit, literally, their own faeces, is their ulti- mate assault on conformity.'

Richard Dorment in the Daily Telegraph put it even more strongly. Although unhap- py with the sight of giant brown turds, he wrote: 'Gilbert and George will be seen as the most important artists of their genera- tion.' He believes that these pictures 'pro- claim a messianic, visionary message: noth- ing human is disgusting. We are all the same.'

If there is any such message contained in these pictures of enlarged stools, we should resist it violently. We are not all the same, we are all different both physically and in our characters; many human things are dis- gusting, including shit, which is one of the lowest of our common denominators. There is nothing remotely messianic or visionary in the message. It is socialist, dis- credited and wrong.

Why, then, do we suppose that both McEwen and Dorment feel disposed to approve Gilbert and George? McEwen writes about the 'ultimate assault on con- formity' and Dorment writes of 'pictures which alienate . . . the entire British mid- dle class'. Has Dorment tried them on a taxi-driver, or on his daily cleaner? Only some six-month-old babies like the stuff. For years I struggled to teach my children that nothing is funny which makes a loud noise: a fortiori nothing is funny which makes a bad smell, and shit stinks.

Why then do these two highly intelligent people seem so determined to make fools of themselves, why do the two Telegraphs fly in the face of common sense where even the Observer and Sunday Times hold back?

One sidelight on the matter may be that whereas I have obviously never met Walde- mar Januszczak and have no memory of meeting Mr Feaver, McEwen and Dorment are both people one is liable to meet at din- ner on any night of the week. Not to put too fine a point on it, I have known `This year is our plutonium wedding.' McEwen since we were at prep school together over 40 years ago, and Dorment is my loved and respected brother-in-law.

Like the advertising industry, built on the obvious fallacy that all advertising should be addressed to the young to establish brand loyalty against the day they have money to spend, the whole 'art community' may seem to be kept together by a desper- ate pretence. One does not expect to have friends in advertising or in second-hand cars; why should one have them in the 'art community'?

The answer, I think, is that there is some- thing heroic in the posture of its champi- ons. Vulgarians see all motives as commer- cial, a scrabbling after state subsidy and gullible American buyers. That is part of the joke, of course, but the joke is no longer against the middle class. The ques- tion 'Is it art?' must be answered: 'Only if art has become something very silly indeed,' and the truth is that the reputation of contemporary art has fallen much too low among intelligent, educated members of the middle class for anyone to be shocked by anything done in its name.

The joke is not against the middle class nor against bourgeois conceptions of mod- eration or common sense. It is against the popular culture of our times. It celebrates the divorce of the intelligentsia from the moronic masses, newly enriched, opinionat- ed and empowered. McEwen writes of Gilbert and George: 'The reality is they are far and away the most popular artists of their generation with the young.' Possibly he was repeating the great advertising falla- cy, but I would like to think he was inviting us to laugh up his sleeve at the joke, shared among many people of our age, about the inadequacy of the young.

Perhaps it is quite funny for an actress to lie still for eight hours; perhaps she was a pretty sight, but shit is the extreme expres- sion of this particular joke. Now we have understood the joke for the most part, even if Mr Januszczak has not, I feel we should encourage the Government to give Mr Serota the £60 million he needs to turn Bankside power station into a 'cathedral of contemporary art'. Once we have filled it with as much rubbish as it can hold, we may open it as a national teenage centre. There young people can go and goof as they pick their noses, feeling flattered and grateful that so much effort has gone into keeping them entertained and out of trouble.