Bullshit for art's sake

As many Torontonians spent Sunday recovering from the all-night abomination that was Nuit Blanche, newspapers devoted themselves to reviews of said event, dissecting the good and bad and lauding the city for becoming more cosmopolitan and cultural by hosting such an event.

Perhaps I'm going overboard in calling it an abomination, but it's pretty much a no-brainer that anything labeled "a contemporary art thing" should be avoided at all costs.

Here's why: contemporary art is possibly the most deranged cultural disaster since the dark ages. Calling it a "thing" is also just going for the wacky, unclassifiable nature of the art. So the phrase "a contemporary art thing" ought to set off some alarm bells. Well, at least 75 per cent of it. The "a" is okay.

Perhaps you're wondering what's wrong with contemporary art. Isn't it just art that people are making now? That seems like the obvious answer, but what you may not know is that the art people are making now is mostly bullshit and should not be called art.

Art as we know it died a horrible and undignified death in 1917 at the hands of an actual artist, ironically enough. Marcel Duchamp, a man with legitimate talent, totally upended the art world, started the insufferable debate over what "art" means and opened the door for a million untalented and pretentious twats to become "artists."

Duchamp did it when he unleashed his Fountain, arguably his most famous sculpture and one that was later voted the "most influential artwork of the 20th century" by 500 British critics. Keep in mind that "influential" does not mean "best." Despite the fact that Duchamp's fountain is the worst thing to ever happen to any cultural medium, I agree with those Brits. It's influential because it started the graceless collapse of a once-fine pursuit.

Although I despise the Fountain with every fibre of my being, I've included a picture of it here. As you can see, the Fountain is a urinal with the name "R. Mutt" signed on one side. That's all. It's not a great painting of a urinal, or even a sculpture of one. Duchamp found a urinal, wrote a pseudonym on it and ruined art forever.

Sound familiar? You've probably seen it before, but maybe you didn't know what it was, which should tell you something. There was a once a time when there was no debate over whether you were looking at art or not. It was pretty clear. Now you can never be sure.

In fact, someone has been arrested for pissing in Duchamp's urinal. Frenchman Pierre Pinoncelli took a leak on the thing in 1993, then attacked it with a hammer. This alone would make the man my hero if he wasn't a "conceptual artist," which is pretty much the lowest form of life on earth.

Why? Conceptual art isn't art. It's just scattered, pointless bullshit. You want a definition? Try "weird for the sake of weird."

Pinoncelli is a perfect example. In 1967, he sprayed the French novelist, and then culture minister, André Malraux with red paint. In 1975, he robbed a bank in Nice with a sawn-off shotgun and escaped with 10 francs. He also cut off his finger in Colombia, calling the act itself an artwork. His worthless digit is on display in a museum there.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. What was wrong with Duchamp's fountain? It drove home the point that "art" is pretty damn difficult to define, and that you could get away with labeling anything art.

And where does this lead us? It gives us morons like Piero Manzoni, an Italian who shit in cans and called it art. It gives us twits like Christo, who's made a career out of wrapping stuff. Yes, wrapping. Christo wrapped an island, the Reichstag and other buildings in various materials. Hell, exterminators do that. He also set up the creatively titled Umbrellas, a collection of several thousand umbrellas. That's it. The project cost over $26 million US and eventually killed two people due to shoddy installation.

How about the National Gallery in Ottawa spending $1.76 million on Voice of Fire, a huge blue canvas with a reddish-orange stripe, a soulless, brainless and worthless thing that anyone with a ruler could paint. Brydon Smith, the gallery's assistant director at the time, called the painting "a timely reminder for each of us what it is to be independent and free of oppression." No explanation of how it does that, but I guess it sounds more inspiring than, "It's a minor alteration to the Costa Rican flag."

Duchamp showed us that art can be pretty much anything. It probably wasn't his intention, but he basically ruined art forever, since it showed so many no-talents with weird ideas that they could make a career out of shitting in cans or setting up umbrellas.

Worse still, the art world has become aesthetically bankrupt by encouraging this kind of crap. Example: in 2001, idiot Martin Creed won the Turner Prize (a £40,000 prize named for an English painter who had actual talent) for The Lights Going On and Off, which is an empty room where the lights flicked on and off. Yes, someone got £40,000 for that.

It's been all downhill since Duchamp, with middling hacks like Andy Warhol and entirely worthless and pretentious wastes like Yoko Ono or Pierre Pinoncelli.

And it ain't gonna get any better. If you were anywhere near Ryerson on Nuit Blanche, you may have seen Porcelain Gods, a display of various-sized toilets. Not only is that pointless and empty-headed, it's not even original. Someone posed a toilet as art 90 years ago, moron!

I have a suggestion for all the conceptual artists, all the Martin Creeds and Pinoncellis out there: next Nuit Blanche, set up a giant canvas in the SkyDome, then throw yourselves off the CN Tower onto the canvas. You'll die, but what a conceptual statement! Wow! It'll satisfy the middling abilities of so many lazy wannabe artists out there and maybe it'll leave us with people who have, ya know, talent.