-By Warner Todd Huston
Apparently “art” is just a stain on a bowl when a janitor thinks that a piece of junk that the intelligentsia call “mah-dren arht” needs to be cleaned up a bit. That’s what happened to a piece by “artist” Martin Kippenberger at a museum in Dortmund, England.
A janitor from Germany came across the display built of stained slats of wood featuring a plastic bowl at the bottom painted to look as if it had been stained by water. Apparently the cleaner took the faux stain for a real water stain and decided he’d better clean that thing up so the bowl looked nice and shiny.
Extra points for the cleaner so keen about his job that what looked like a long-time stain was cleaned up. I call that initiative.
I also call it telling. I have to say, if I’d have come across this piece of “art” I’d have thrown the whole thing away because it looks like construction detritus, not art. And that is just the thing. The culture intelligentsia have fooled themselves into believing that the utter junk that passes for “mah-dren arht” is anything but the junk that it is.
Jay Nordlinger recently reminded us of a quote about The Bard that is apropos here. As it happens Robert Graves once said, “The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he really is very good, in spite of all the people who say he is very good.”
The same cannot be said about most of what passes for culture in the west these days. What people “say is very good” is often dreck. It is so in music, in dance, in art, in architecture. What the culture intelligentsia say is great work makes the average man wonder what type of drugs these people are taking.
The sad fact is that there are thousands of pieces of junk pretending at being “art” that I wish this German janitor would clear away for us all. The world would be better off for it.
If the intelligentsia were as smart as they thought they were they’d take this German cleaner cum art critic’s actions to heart and stop fawning over piles of junk masquerading as art and get our culture back to an appreciation of real beauty.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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