Art For Art's Sake

I’m not a big fan of pain so I don’t understand why people volunteer to have someone stick needles in them and squirt ink under their skin. To me tattoos are a bit like big, hairy warts – fine on others but I wouldn’t want one myself, though they make for great reading in T shirt weather when I’ve forgotten my newspaper on the train.

I’m against body art as, apart from the pain, I also worry that I would get the same dyslexic tattooist who did a friend of mine a few years ago. He is a huge fan of Disney, and Simba the lion in particular, and he loves the morality tale of good triumphing over evil, but every summer he is aware of pretty girls avoiding him in the street when they see the tattoo on his bare arm proclaiming him to be The Loin King.

And, as my pal now realises only too well, a tattoo is for life. The BBC recently reported on a girl called Joanne Raine, a teenager who wanted to tattoo her lover’s name on her stomach and paid extra to have it written in Chinese. She had the tattoo for months before learning that her local parlour had mistranslated some symbols when she had the artwork done. Instead of having I Love Roo across her belly button she now has the Chinese word for “supermarket”.

I guess poor Joanne could have got away with it by telling people that it was his nickname but unfortunately Roo binned her soon afterwards and she’s stuck with it. So I’m hoping she’s currently looking for a new boyfriend who is reliable, great sense of humour, own car, and answers to the name of Tesco.

This week I read of a guy in Australia who has devoted the last fifteen years of his life to getting tattooed all over (his body that is, not Australia) and has just written his will leaving his skin to the Australian National Gallery. He’s deadly serious and wants them to flay him after he kicks the bucket and then show his epidermis as a work of art on the gallery wall. I’m not sure which bit of dangly skin they’ll use to hang him on the picture hook but I only hope it’s long enough!

Another American guy this week tried to get in to the Guinness Book of records for having the most body piercings but decided that he would get them all done in one sitting. He managed to have over a thousand holes put in him in five hours before passing out with the pain.

So, what I want to know is, is all this nonsense really art? If it is then I confess I’m just not getting it, but then I can’t tell the difference between a Van Gogh and a Van Halen. If art’s in the eye of the beholder then my eyes have cataracts. But I do wonder if art is all a con anyway. I was once told by an artist I interviewed that she had recently lost her temper and had thrown a wet painting in her bin out of frustration. After calming down she pulled it out and was about to remove the cat hair and baked beans from the canvas when her client turned up early and hailed it as great conceptual artwork.

Two years ago I was in New York filming at MOMA, the Big Apple’s Museum Of Modern Art which is where Madonna chose to wear her bunny ears to a party a couple of weeks ago. The place is magnificent, but my director placed me in front of wall sign that said something like “In Case Of Fire, Panic” in a dozen different languages and prepared to film me. I pointed out that a health and safety notice was perhaps not the best background but our guide told me it was worth several million dollars and was a statement about our frenetic world by some Sixties hippy artist. In the end I did my piece standing under an aeroplane which dangled from the roof and was probably an Airfix model by Hockney and worth more than the whole Boeing Corporation.

These large “installation” pieces really pass me by. I just don’t get how slicing a shark in two and putting it in a case warrants someone paying several million dollars. A gold star maybe, some new crayons and a week off the naughty step perhaps, but that’s all. Now it seems that the guy who bought Damien Hirst’s shark has had it replaced as it keeps decaying and he’s now on the third one. No wonder marine biologists are worried about species disappearing.

Then there was the diamond encrusted skull Hirst made which sold for fifty million dollars. It turns out he didn’t make it at all but told his workforce to weld it together in a loft somewhere. Do you think if I wrote down a few “gems” and handed them to some friends asking them to present my radio show for me while I sat at home I’d still get paid?

I’m not quite saying let’s all put flying ducks and posters of Che Guevara on our walls but I do think it’s all got a bit out of hand. Even if it’s a masterpiece, I am sure that walking in to a gallery and seeing a dead man’s tattooed bottom staring back at me from a wall probably isn’t going to make me want to buy a print of it for my office.

And if Damien Hirst gets anywhere near it I have a feeling I know where he’d place his diamond.