Now I am become Cate Blanchett, Destroyer of Worlds

Cate Blanchett sums up the importance of the arts:

Our job is to change reality, to challenge it, not prove it and explain it.

Change reality. Right. Glad we've got that out of the way. It gets better:

But there is more. We do more than all that. We must remember the arts do more than just that. We process experience and make experience available and understandable. We change people's lives, at the risk of our own. We change countries, governments, history, gravity. After gravity, culture is the thing that holds humanity in place, in an otherwise constantly shifting and, let's face it, tiny outcrop in the middle of an infinity of nowhere.

Change governments? History? Gravity? Reality itself? And all that at the risk of her own life? What does Miss Blanchett do in her spare time?

Frankly, I think she's overreaching herself here. In all my years as an actor and writer my performances, plays, and stories have only resulted in a cabinet reshuffle in the Balkans, the shortening of the Franco-Prussian War by four days, a 0.002 percent increase in the gravitational pull of Sirius, and a slight reorganisation of the space-time continuum resulting in a minor alteration of the strong nuclear force. As to risk, I don't know about my life, but my ulcer has been acting up over the past week.

Maybe Oscars are some sort of force multiplier. But then, Miss Blanchett isn't one of those "unimportant" people eking out their "brief, limited, unimportant lives."

Lord love a duck.

A plan for our times

Tim Blair sets out his manifesto for making the world a better place. I particularly like items four and five.

4: At the conclusion of every financial year, an auction should be held at which are sold all items of taxpayer-funded art (in the case of musical, cinematic or literary artforms, the copyright shall be auctioned). Should the highest bid exceed the amount of funding, the artist pockets the difference. If the highest bid falls short, the artist must repay the difference.

5: By working at McDonald’s.

Coca Cola Santa

Excerpts from the man who formed our modern images of The Man.

Man as Industrial Palace

I tend to feel the way this looks after an evening of oysters washed down with Champagne and Guinness.

All that trouble for nothing

On a happier note, the Greeks have built a new museum to house the Elgin Marbles, which have about as much chance of returning to Athens as I have of taking up break dancing.

Plinth & Paintballs

According to The Times, 11,000 people with way too much spare time on their hands have volunteered to play the part of "living statues" on the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square that was originally left open to leave room to honour future men famous for serving the Empire in deeds of blood and arms and not to indulge the asinine antics of pseudoartistic poseurs who don't give a scrap for tradition, honour, art, or even good taste.

Still, it's an ill wind that blows no one good, and if an enterprising chap can get his hands on one of these paintball sniper rifles and a selection of rooftop locations, it could be a chance to make a few bob by charging so much a shot and provide the public with some harmless amusement while chastising a load of imminently chastisable fools.

Extra points if you can catch them with straddling shots as they try to flee for the Underground.

Fools And Their Money

The modern art bubble has finally burst and the people who paid tens of millions of pounds for loads of meaningless, talentless, craftless, pretentious twaddle have been left with lighter portfolios and egg on their faces.

Let there be dancing in the streets, for somewhere the shade of Michelangelo smiles.

Comic of Babel

Taxpayer-funded logorhea in crap comic book form. Frightening thing is, I had to endure people like this for years.

And they wonder why no one takes the arts seriously anymore

Multiverse

It started out as a track light, but then it got completely out of hand.

Release the Hounds

Belgian "conceptual artist" Wim Delvoy makes a "marble" floor out of salami.

If he got a grant for this, I'm putting in a request that Belgium be expelled from NATO.

Practical Art

If you're going to build a solid gold statue of a supermodel, it's a lot easier on the budget to choose Kate Moss over Sophie Dahl.

Doggy Dialysis

Turnering the Stomach

Time once again for the Turner Prize nominees; proving once again that taking money under false pretenses is not a dead art.

Art-Eggcident

Because nothing says "art" like a cheap to conceive, but expensive to execute and impossible to live with visual pun.

Fat Art

Your moment of culture: Ozzy Osbourne in lard!

I think I'm getting a migraine.

The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics

Ironic how an abstract cartoon can so neatly skewer modern art as the dumb show and pretense that it is.

Context is All

A collection of photographs of gay men? That's truly art and worthy of a major museum exhibit... Unless, that is, the artist is a woman. And the men are Muslims. In Mohammed masks. And the museum is in the Netherlands. In that case, it's one cancelled exhibit and one artist literally on the run for her life.

Welcome to Europe 2008.

Dhimmitude in the Art World

The utter moral fraudulence of modern art revealed:

Britain’s contemporary artists are fêted around the world for their willingness to shock but fear is preventing them from tackling Islamic fundamentalism. Grayson Perry, the cross-dressing potter, Turner Prize winner and former Times columnist, said that he had consciously avoided commenting on radical Islam in his otherwise highly provocative body of work because of the threat of reprisals.

Perry also believes that many of his fellow visual artists have also ducked the issue, and one leading British gallery director told The Times that few major venues would be prepared to show potentially inflammatory works.

“I’ve censored myself,” Perry said at a discussion on art and politics organised by the Art Fund. “The reason I haven’t gone all out attacking Islamism in my art is because I feel real fear that someone will slit my throat.”

Anytime an "artist" starts bleating on about "speaking truth to power", "pushing the envelope", being "transgressive" and how "courageous" they are, feel free to respond with slow, sarcastic clapping.

Action Jackson

Real or robot?

Ladies and gentlemen. For your entertainment and edification, allow us to present robo-Jackson Pollock!

It paints! It hunts for Sarah Connor!

STLToday.com says about the robot artiste,

Action Jackson is a useful example of how the line between man and machine — and between creativity and cookbook automation — can become blurry.

Creativity doesn't come into it. Actually, it's more of a useful example of what a flat-out fraud art has become since it decided to chuck out six thousand years of craft and insight as if it was so much old rope. All that is left is sham, pretence, and dumb-show in the service of fatuous pseudo-theories that hang in the air like the Isle of Laputa.

Put it another way, it's all a huge scam to cover up for talentless "artists" who can't draw fingers.

Not "Seeing is Believing," you ninny, but "Believing is Seeing." For modern art has become completely literary: the paintings and other works exist only to illustrate the text.

Tom Wolfe

Update: And now, you too can be Jackson Pollock. It's easy and it's fun!

And Your Point Is?

Australian aboriginal artists are being lured into producing works with the promise of drink and drugs.

Sounds like a lot of theatres I've worked for.

Warring Camps

As the Netherlands fights for its life against Jihadists who regard Dutch society as morally bankrupt, Amsterdam seems dead-set on proving them right by erecting a statue that will be "a tribute to all prostitutes all over the world"

Dutchmen caught in the middle can only hope both sides can lose.

Turnering the Stomach

Who wins the Turner prize will be announced on Monday.

One of the entries is literally a pile of rubbish, which is remarkably apt.