IF you don’t ‘get’ an artist, it’s not because they’re too clever for you but because, like these guys, they’re purveyors of pseudo-intellectual bollocks:
Brian Eno
A man who cleverly hides his ineptitude in plain sight by describing himself as a non-musician. Eno nevertheless became one of the world’s most sought-after record producers despite only really being able to add bloops and bleeps to tracks. He also became renowned for his oblique strategies: try ‘getting your neck massaged’ the next time you’re writing a project initiation document and see how well it goes down with your boss.
David Lynch
A body of work full of hidden meaning which rewards repeat viewings? Or a bunch of badly edited films which don’t stand up to serious scrutiny? Lynch’s true genius was in refusing to talk about his work. By cultivating an air of mystery, he could keep pretending he wasn’t just churning out a load of random bollocks.
William Burroughs
Was he challenging traditional narrative structures or did he just not know how to write a decent novel? The Naked Lunch is a nonsensical montage of surrealistic imagery, lapped up by people who think drugs lead to genuine insight. Burroughs’ stream of consciousness brain vomit was not only unreadable, it also inspired the band Steely Dan, making it the most heinous of all books.
Damien Hirst
Hirst claims to walk a tightrope between the profound and the mundane but falls very much into the latter category. Whether he’s cutting animals in half or making giant versions of kids’ toys, his work is always reliably pointless. Incredibly, this so-called artist is now worth hundreds of millions, proving that the one per cent have too much money and not enough brain cells.
Jackson Pollock
You can get away with being abstract. You can get away with being expressionist. However, you don’t need to be a complete philistine to realise that stringing them together as Abstract Expressionist is simply a fancy way of saying ‘crap’. Critics may have praised the immediacy of Pollock’s ‘action painting’ but surely a similar effect could have been achieved by giving two monkeys a tin of paint and some brushes.
John Cage
The art world’s ultimate chancer. Cage probably couldn’t believe it when his piece 4′ 33” became world famous. Consisting of pure silence, supposedly in order to force the audience to listen to the surrounding environment, this ‘composition’ is a phenomenal example of trying your luck and getting away with it.
