On 5 April, The Bolton News carried a headline that for once was inaccurate in a wholly informative way: "Fake Art by Banksy and Tracey Emin on display at museum."
The headline was inaccurate in the sense that the fakes were not by Banksy and Emin at all: they were fakes of Banksy and Emin by people with an ability to copy. It is notable, however, that Emin herself has not the ability to copy, or even, seemingly, trace, as her portrait of William and Kate's balcony kiss rather demonstrates.
"What's this, Sordel?" I hear you demand: "are you really going to devote an entire nutshell to championing outmoded bourgeois theories of art?"
Well, yes, actually.
The Independent, one must admit, has scored another hit. It is comparatively rare for a newspaper's front page to become a genuine subject of discussion, and only The Sun has been better at it than the UK's foremost contrarian chip-wrapping. On a day when every other paper was running colour pictures of the prince in his red tunic, it is perhaps unsurprising that The Independent would go with sober black & white.
What is less to be expected is that they would have selected (perhaps even commissioned) a work that falls so short of any minimal standard. There is a taste test to art. First we must recognise it: as something meriting attention as a piece of art. Hard though it may be to judge art, I wouldn't recommend any aspiring 15-year-olds to supply work of Emin's standard as part of their G.C.S.E coursework.
In Emin's "The Kiss" (to dignify it with a title) the most persuasive piece of draughtsmanship is the actual words "THE KISS" printed in block-capitals (though admittedly on a slant) beneath Kate's veil. Were one required to defend it, one could applaud the focus on the military trappings of the jacket, the baldness of William's head and the emptiness of his face, as pointed statements by a master portraitist, but this would be playing along too much. It would be to supply as the viewer an effort of creation that is missing in the artist.
Go peruse Google images for Tracey Emin and be amazed by the paucity of her oeuvre. What, to rephrase the old drummer joke, do you call someone who hangs around with artists?
3 comments:
Sordel - Tough on Margate, tough on the daughters of Margate
I've long held that Emin's much vaunted "draughtsmanship", cited by her supporters when attention is drawn to her woeful installations, doesn't stand up to much scrutiny. Making a few scratches on high quality cartridge paper, then paying someone with real skill to frame it, does not a worthwhile drawing make. When her "doodle" (apologies to genuine doodlers everywhere) is shown in its unadorned nakedness, the paucity of skill, imagination and execution are all too painfully obvious. Still, it gave me a good laugh.
Ye Gods, "unadorned nakedness" is right ... there are some of those meritless scribbles that could have been drawn by the less artistically talented of my schoolmates had they only had the gynaecological familiarity to do so.
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