So it’s been a fair old while since I’ve posted anything in these parts. I could bore you with a long and frankly fabricated list of the amazingly interesting things I’ve been doing instead of blogging, but instead suffice to say: yes, electromagnets were involved.
They weren’t. I wish they were though.
In truth nothing’s particularly grabbed my attention for long enough to warrant the keystrokes, which is odd given how many significant/hilarious/rage-inducing events have occurred in the last few weeks. I thought I was becoming desensitised to most things in the world, hence the lack of any ranting.
Until today. Until this. Watch the whole thing.
Whoever doesn’t punch their screen in pure primal rage will win a delicious custard cream biscuit worth up to four pence. But I still wager I won’t be giving away too many delicious biscuits.
I really thought it was a joke at first. It’s not a joke. Oddly but understandably my first thought on realising it isn’t a joke was to wonder where I might purchase a couple of litres of gin and a few packs of aspirin on a Sunday afternoon in Falmouth; a sentiment I’m sure many of you can relate to.
I’m all for kids messing around with paint and drawing pictures and suchlike; my nephew does a mean drawing of a spider which looks only marginally less like an actual spider than my drawings of spiders do, and he’s only two! (My drawings of spiders, I hasten to add, look very little like real spiders either. The whole art thing really passed much of my family by; I tried to draw a portrait of a girlfriend a while back and I’m pretty sure I succeeded only in bringing forward the end of our relationship. It looked like I’d drawn a picture of a terrified 80-year old man with some fairly funky facial orientations who’d had a horrible accident with a chip fryer. The saddest thing is I spent ages on it. Where was I?)
Ah yes. Spiders. Much as my nephew’s squiggles are fun and certainly of fridge door quality, the last thing I’d do with them would be to PUT THEM IN A FUCKING ART GALLERY. For six thousand pounds. Actually no, the last thing I would do would be to put them in a fucking art gallery and then get the clearly deranged curator of said gallery to pontificate about how a little girl sticking paint and toys to pieces of wood constituted ‘abstract expressionism’ and ‘surrealism’ or, in fact, art.
And then have her presumed father spout some jaw-dropping horseshit about how she doesn’t feel like she’s in the shadow of Picasso or Pollock and how this brings an innocence to her work. The brass neck on the man! She almost certainly does not suffer from being in the shadow of Picasso, but I imagine she is beset by a host of limitations on the grounds of being a four year old. These limitations, if other small children are anything to go by, might well include trying not to piss yourself and trying not to fall over every twenty steps. And her innocence might well be admirable in an artistic sense, but one does suspect it might be less approvingly viewed when she decides her new canvas is the kitchen wall. Spider-drawing nephew has also branched out into these brave new worlds of what to draw on next, and has found his calling in doodling, nay, ‘expressing’, all over the square tiles in the bathroom, in what would undoubtedly be called in the art world his ‘minimalist cubism’ phase. Maybe we’ve been wrong in wiping it off and confiscating the highlighters, perhaps we ought instead to frame the ‘pieces’ and flog them to the kind of maladjusted psychopath who gladly pays six grand for children’s drawings.
Mostly I feel sorry for the kid, whose long-term life prospects look somewhat bleak given the band of morons around her, although on the bright side her mother is ‘really scared to influence her in any way.’
Which can only be a good thing.
Rant! Rave! Relax. 
What stresses me out is that in the UK people want the government to fund this shit
More funding seems reasonable. We certainly need more things like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Oak_Tree
Huh. I dunno, Mark, I think I’ll be taking that custard cream. I’m genuinely surprised by the shots of her making the paintings, but she shows a lot of obvious control in the way that she was scattering paint and sticking toys and masks and such onto the canvas with varying degrees of imposed order. The main issue is what she’s been set up with. I guess the average four year old isn’t going to be given a canvas of the size she was getting and thus it won’t occur to them to stick anything larger than macaroni onto it. If all toddlers were given such free range (with such a large variety of things to stick) perhaps the notion of this girl’s status as prodigy would be severely lessened. Maybe not.
The uncomfortable truth is this: art is as valuable as the price people are willing to pay for it.
No biscuit for me, as we’ve already discussed. The screen punch was an instinctive flinch as soon as the girl started speaking in that ridiculous voice, anger instilled before I even knew the context of the video. It seems to me that you could do far worse than spending a fiver in Ryman’s on permanent markers in kick ass colours, stick some bread and water in the bathroom and lock your nephew in there for a few hours. I’ve already drafted a sign for the front garden and I’m close to finishing the admission tickets, but this could turn into a cash-rich walk-in gallery overnight and you’d only have yourself to blame if you stifled the poor man. You could even call yourself his ‘agent’ if you like, and don’t feel too bad about steering him away from the yellow/brown colour family while he’s decorating the bathroom, it just makes sense.