POP GOES THE WEASEL

Abstract art, Camus wrote, is a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered. And even if that’s not true there has been much abuse. So that I would at least add the word ‘sometimes’, as there’s terrible but also much enchanting modern stuff out there.

But if in Montreal, Amsterdam or Paris in contemporary art pantheons, arrogant or intimidated, but either way straight-faced curators, hang huge pitch black ‘toiles’ by some paint trickster, you might wish to call it ‘ils-se-foutent-de-ma-gueule-ou-quoi?’ art (What-do-they-take-me-for Art?). I don’t care who they think they are and the joke respectively but not respectfully very much on each of them. That old Emperor’s-new-clothes yarn, actually, except pictorally. And if in London the English wish to exalt a cow sawed in half, then placed in an aquarium and submerged in formaldehyde, as the mother of all artistic invention, let the poor dears be. But for Henry Moore, they never did know how to shape or paint seductively. (Sorry Freud, sorry Bacon, too much pink cold cuts, while more than pleased to derail that Damien hearse.)

But there are other modern works that have their ‘poids’ even though their simplicity and lack of artistry make one cringe when heralded by some as supreme artistic accomplishment. It is Pop art, more illustrative, more decorative than ‘serious’ art, that I’m aiming for. All that Warhol, Lichtenstein stuff and not scathingly so, except to say it works in combination with its environment only, not, in my opinion, when on its own placed in a gallery. For what I have noticed time and again is the strength of these works, only with people standing around one of them, or partially in front of them, with these very people, in my vision, an integral part of the spectacle, making their presence vital to the aesthetics of the scene. So that the opposite is also true: without the Pop art behind them, these people remain mostly unremarkable and again, as such, only the whole making some sort of combined artistry: great design, great lighting, with human props livening up the show.

And how do I arrive at this bizarre nonsense? It wasn’t the first time I noticed that when people walked away a particular work I was viewing would suddenly lose its luster, unable, always in my eyes, to hold its own. And then I saw an ad by the Maastricht Foire Internationale d’Art et d’Antiquités in the French Le Point magazine, and by Jove, I got it. It was a photograph, with two men wearing Borselino hats standing still between a Calder mobile and what looked like Lichtenstein Comics art to me, at least something very similar, and it became once again abundantly clear: take these two chaps away and you have nothing left, but also, take the art away and you have nothing left, with excuses to all perpetrators. And yet the combination of all elements having an absolutely stunning effect, an overall image which on its own should get painted as an oil, and proof in the pudding I dare say, as far as this particular photographic ad went.

So that this is how now I grade art, in what I see as my personal contemporary reference:

-Indisputable ‘Absolute’ Art, including Art Brut**

-Interesting or not so very ‘Installation’ Art

-‘Design’ Art, best built, only to be photographed & printed up

-Lousy or not ‘Statement’ (Conceptual) Art

-Preposterous ‘Bluff’ Art

leading to

-Depressionism

-And valid ‘Pop’ or ‘Entertainment’, also shown as ‘Graffiti’ Art, on the condition it is surrounded and surrounds, thus perhaps better described as ‘Surround’ Art, situated in what might be seen as an inhabited room or street scape.

The difference being that in some cases I wished other visitors would never leave, in others that they had never come, or on still other occasions that I had stayed home… with my Mom.

(But what does this man like? The answer**: Well, for one, most but by no means every single piece of New York Abstract Expressionism!)