But is it Art?

I’ve just read about a couple who paid £4,500 for Jake Chapman (a famous and controversial British ‘artist’) to paint a portrait of them as a wedding gift to themselves. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/6122142.stm As you can see the result was a little less flattering than they had hoped.

Apparently art critics have said that it will be worth a lot of money in a few years. That may be so, but if I commissioned someone to paint a picture of myself and my fiancé I’d expect the portrait to look a little bit like me. After all, it will hang above the fireplace in the dining room. If I had to look at this everyday I think I might develop a complex.

Does anyone else out there find the whole conceptual modern art thing a load of pretentious shite? Is it me or does anyone else walk around the Tate Modern, or any other museum dedicated to ‘modern art’ and snort with derision?

Some people say that they don’t get modern art because they think they could paint a similar picture/stick an animal in a big Perspex tank. But you know what? I wouldn’t want to create a piece of modern art. I’d be embarrassed to say that I erected a tent, crawled inside and wrote all the names of the men I’d slept with in felt tip on the lining.

I’m an educated person but I will never ever understand how you can call a dead animal or some toy soldiers covered in red paint, art. Oh yes, you can give it a poncey name and create some spiel about how it represents the failings of society but at the end of the day its shite.

I know that taste is a very personal thing but surely anyone with a brain can see that modern art is crap. Its pretentious, trite and above all a bloody waste of money.

I blame the fat, rich art collectors. If they didn’t invest in piles of turd (sometimes quite literally) then there wouldn’t be a market for it. Supply and demand and all that. Their mansions must be filled to the brim with useless bits of metal and dead animals. I feel sorry for the cleaners, how would they know what was rubbish and what wasn’t?

I love those stories you sometimes read in the media. You know the ones about cleaners/security guards mistaking a sculpture for rubbish and throwing it out with the rest of the trash. I sometimes wonder whether they really knew what they were throwing away. Hah!

Give me a Degas or a Hockney any day. Now that's real Art.