“Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.”
Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History, Virago Press, 1979, P.13.
“The Decadent is usually male, since decadence, literally a “falling off,” requires renunciation of a cultural burden, abandonment of a public persona or duty.”
Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, London: Penguin Books 1990, P. 437.
"When I have inspired universal horror and disgust, I shall have conquered solitude.”
Charles Baudelaire, Journals.
I am an extremely psychologically disturbed man. I suffer from a borderline personality disorder. But as insane as I am, through decades studying art history, and interacting with the art world, I have come to realise I am the sanest man in the insane asylum of the art world. Because, unlike so many that populate the art world, I know I am unwell!
Panic is only a heartbeat away from chaos and anarchy, it is a condition feared in crowds and the individual. However, I have repeatedly experienced this state. Most of my life I have suffered a low-level anxiety that pervades everything I do. Occasionally that anxiety has erupted into full-blown panic – brought on by my mother’s demented behaviour, my own insane actions, or the behaviour of others towards me. Shell-shocked from my childhood, my art was a response to panic and fear – an art based on emotion not reason, the unspeakable not the theoretical.
Sometimes I wonder if my one and only fate as an artist and human being is to be recorded as a case study, to entertain the prurient and those fascinated by the psychology of man. I have been diagnosed with a borderline personality disorder. BPD, an incurable personality disorder, is characterized by; unstable relationships, fear of abandonment, identity issues accompanied by a chronic sense of emptiness, self-harm, suicidal mood swings lasting from several hours to a maximum of a few days, intense anger, and a tendency to think in black and white terms, rendering the patient unable to avoid conflicts. Sufferers often have histories of trauma and abuse. They are said to love beyond measure on Monday and then hate beyond reason on Tuesday. They have a disordered sense of self and are said to be bad as well as mad. They are regarded as troublesome patients, always looking for attention, watching for signs of rejection, and are highly manipulative. It is said that a suffer of a borderline personality disorder can talk with a psychiatrist for over five hours about themselves, and the psychiatrist is still left feeling they do not know the true personality of the patient. My first psychiatrist Dr Anne McDonald, in her notes remarked that I had a "very unusual personality", and that it "was difficult to have empathy" with me.
Much later, I realised that I mostly suffered from a quite borderline personality disorder in which I turned all my shame, anger, and sadness on myself, isolated myself from others, and laser focussed all my rage and mortification into my art. Because of my childhood, I also suffer from an avoidant personality disorder, narcissism, and an acute obsessive-compulsive disorder. My OCD resulted in my obsession with artistic productivity, and vain attempts to beat Picasso; my Sexual OCD and constant self-comforting masturbation followed by intense shame and guilt, and which was triggered by my mother’s flirting with me, sexual exposure, sexual punishment, and physical abuse; and my confessional obsession which was a result of my Moral Scrupulosity OCD. I also suffered from social anxiety, gynophobia, toxic shame, chronically low self-esteem, and masochism most of my life. Because of my chaotic and traumatic childhood, and my subsequent quite borderline personality disorder, I had no fixed emotional, intellectual, sexual, or artistic identity. I was irritable, impulsive, had difficulty forming relationships and getting on with people or enjoying social situations. I was in a state of permanent identity crisis and perpetual artistic stylistic crisis. Moreover, I was constantly subjecting myself to examination, making judgements on my past styles and on the ultimate value of my artistic trajectory.
Whether dressed in women's clothes at eleven, getting into a physical fight with another student in Art College, being kicked out of Art College for indolence, bleeding from the wrists in a para-suicide attempt at twenty-one, wandering from one prostitute to another in Amsterdam at twenty-two, taking copious amounts of drugs in my late twenties, or being angrily rejected by 99 arts bodies, and my art being attacked as adolescent filth, my life was as far from the professional life of a contemporary artist as one could imagine. You don’t have to be in the business of understanding the human mind - to realize that my deranged young life, shaped the nature of my art.
When I was young, I did not think I was insane. From the age of seven and a half, I did everything in my power not to let my mother’s insanity infect me - nor let her crazed abuse break me. My inner art world - became my escape route from pain. I still do not think I was ever truly ‘mad’, since I was reacting to circumstances largely beyond my control, always retained a certain moral compass and most of my crimes were aesthetic ones. I just did not know how to cope with life - since no one had ever really taught me. Nevertheless, my nine attempted suicides, three psychiatric incarnations, six electro-convulsive treatments, sexual perversions, and drug abuse in my twenties, would certainly have deemed me a lunatic in the eyes of many who knew me at the time.
Since the age of twenty-one, I have taken anti-depressants like Prozac and Seroxate and anti-psychotics like Melleril and Olanzapine and these drugs have taken the suicidal edge off my depression and borderline personality disorder. However, what has helped me even more has been the love and acceptance of my girlfriends and the support of my many good friends and family. I feel very ashamed of my past behaviour - and hope that I will never return to those bad old days. Part of that process for me is texts like this, in which I try to come to an understanding of my life.
From the age of sixteen, I opted for an inhumanly exiled position from society, one that was heartbreakingly lonely, economically penurious, devoid of power, and creatively silenced. However, it was a position, which shielded me from the judgements, rules, and herd beliefs of my fellow man. As Jean Dubuffet wrote: "For me, insanity is super sanity. The normal is psychotic. Normal means lack of imagination, lack of creativity.” However, mental illness carries a great social stigma impossible to underestimate. As Peter Schjeldahl has pointed out: “The judgment of insanity is sometimes one with which we evade seeing into ourselves too deeply, an inner hygiene projected outward. No judgment is trickier, or more apt to boomerang.” (Peter Schjeldahl, The Hydrogen Jukebox, Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1991, P. 32.) The commuter on Dublin’s DART, is fearful of people with mental illness and avoids those thought to be mentally deranged. Even I have at times avoided certain friends I know who suffer from schizophrenia, not out of fear, but out of a desire for self-preservation. Befriending a mentally deranged person, can result in hours spent dealing with their delusions and trying to persuade them to seek help. Frequently, one’s efforts are greeted, with nothing but hostility, denial, and bitterness. However, I have found that they can also be some of the most meaningful and real friendships in life.
My estranged existence with my insane mother made me ‘a stranger on the earth’ dimly trying to understand my existence, the mysteries of love and lust, and the nature of society through culture and culture alone. Somewhat like a modern day des Esseintes, the anti-hero in Joris-Karl Huysmans’ decadent and Symbolist novel A’rebours (Against Nature, 1893), I watched in silence the TV in my living room, read books, looked in awe at paintings in museums, and furtively glanced at women in the streets. Put in the position of a voyeur of the world and of women, I feared real human contact and social situations, which I felt hopelessly out of my depth in. Women petrified me, and even the most banal conversations with them sent me into a panic. Yet I wanted to understand them, so that I could reduce some of the terror, they provoked in me. Therefore, television, art, literature, cinema, and porn were the only ways I could enter any kind of fearless understanding or enjoyment of women. The unusual, perverted and compulsive demands I made on culture to teach me what life could not, led me to the observation that culture was a hopeless, deceitful, and unhealthy medium of education. Later, life taught me that an hour in the arms of a woman after a night of courtship, instructed me more than a year’s worth of reading books, looking at films, masturbating to porn or digesting philosophical or Feminist texts. The real texture of courtship, love, and lust I discovered, was impossible to truly convey in art. I still believe that art can hint at the depths of human experience, but one must have had a life to fill in the blanks.
The German Neo-Classical sculptor Johann Gottfried Schadow, accused Rembrandt in writing of being possibly the greatest liar in art history, but Rembrandt never contradicted himself and maintained a consistent story. And it is true that even (maybe especially) the greatest artists present a vision of the world that is unique but also a lie. Artists like Picasso would say that they use lies to point out greater truths and it is up to the viewer to decide whether to accept their version of reality as more truthful that truth itself. Personally, I have never possessed one singular truth, rather, my art has expressed only what I have felt and believed at different stages of my life. For example, I truly believed in the self-pitying adolescent angst of my youthful paintings - but I was also honest enough to move on from it when it no longer represented my maturing truth.
Nietzsche famously wrote that: “We have art to save ourselves from the truth.” Like many of Nietzsche's provocative pronouncements, it says a great deal, about how many people treat art - namely - as an escape from the drudgery, horror, and ugliness of life. Art as such is a form of grand distraction, from the intractable religious, political, and sexual injustices of existence. However, while I respect Nietzsche, my own attitude to art could not be more different. To me art is the expression of a search for the truth of my existence and the existence of others. And this search for truth conditions many of my responses to art. For while there are many forms of art that I can admire and enjoy - the art I truly adore and turn to in times of real depression is realist and expressionistic in nature. For in the pits of melancholy, when the media world appears to be nothing more than a ridiculous circus populated by stupid, attention-grabbing buffoons, I seek the gravitates of artists of real integrity, intelligence, sensitivity, and originality.
It is said that if someone were given the right to speak freely for ten minutes, people would be horrified by what goes on in their mind - much of which would be classified as anti-social, violent, sexually deviant, blasphemous, or criminal. Today, we have the internet to thank for revealing just how spiteful and evil people can be. In art, the cliché of the 'mad artist' is widely popular and strongly believed by the average person. What is it like to be mad? Would you know you were crazed, without being told by others that you were? In today's modern politically correct world, labels like 'mad', 'deranged' or 'lunatic' are not to be uttered. However, they remain in use in private, against those we dislike and if they are not used in the media, it does not mean that they are not still felt and acted upon by both the man in the street and those in positions of social authority. There is still a culture of blaming the victim in mental health. Yet in some ways, madness is empowering. It is a position I am quite willing to fall back on in times of isolation and stress. As R D Laing wrote in The Politics of Experience: “If the human race survives, future men will, I suspect, look back on our enlightened epoch as a veritable age of Darkness. They will presumably be able to savour the irony of this situation with more amusement than we can extract from it. The laugh is on us. They will see that what we all ‘schizophrenia’ was one of the forms in which, often through quiet ordinary people, the light began to break through the cracks in our all-too-closed minds... Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be breakthrough... The person going through ego-loss or transcendental experiences may or may not become in different ways confused. Then he might legitimately be regarded as mad. But to be mad is not necessarily to be ill, notwithstanding that in our culture the two categories have become confused... From the alienated starting point of our pseudo-sanity, everything is equivocal. Our sanity is not ‘true’ sanity. Their madness is not ‘true’ madness. The madness of our patients is an artefact of the destruction wreaked on them by us and by them on themselves. Let no one suppose that we meet ‘true’ madness any more than that we are truly sane. The madness that we encounter in ‘patients’ is a gross travesty, a mockery, a grotesque caricature of what the natural healing of that estranged integration we call sanity might be. True sanity entails in one way or another the dissolution of the normal ego.” (R D Laing, The Politics of Experience, P.129-144.)
People, who have never known madness or who are looking back on it wistfully, usually Romanticize it. Nevertheless, madness as lived through - is a hellish form of mental self-torture - that can come to define and even destroy your life. For the public, stories about mad artists are comforting and amusing. It confirms their suspicion that talent comes with suffering, and reassures them that even if they do not have any talent, their life is not spiralling out of control. Madness allows society to classify oddballs like Blake, van Gogh or Dalí. The myth of the mad genius locates intellectual projects - which are undeniably brilliant, but devoid of common sense – on the margins.
For centuries everything has been tried by doctors and quacks to cure madness and nothing has succeeded. Many philosophers like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and writers like John Dryden and Edgar Alan Poe have insisted upon the link between irrationality and creativity. John Dryden wrote: “Great wits are sure to madness near allied/And thin partitions do their bounds divide.” Poets like Blake and Holderlin and musicians like Schumann and Beethoven have all suffered bouts of depression or mental illness.
One of my favourite philosophers, the great pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer observed in The World As Will and Representation that: “It is often remarked that genius and madness have a side where they touch and even pass over into each other, and even poetic inspiration has been called a kind of madness.” (Arthur Schopenhauer, The World As Will and Representation, Trans. E.F.J.Payne, Dover Publications Inc, 1969, P190.) He went on to site many examples of philosophers like Aristotle who wrote: “There has been no great mind without an admixture of madness.” And the biographies of great men of genius, such as Rousseau, Byron, and Alfieri further suggest a link with madness. However, Schopenhauer he went on to make the distinction between the mental cripple, trapped in his own circular thoughts and the healthy genius making an objective art of wisdom. Schopenhauer warned that: “…it has been observed that a poet may know man profoundly and througherly, but men very badly; he is easily duped, and is a plaything in the hands of the cunning and crafty.” (Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Trans. E.F.J. Payne, Dover Publications Inc, 1969, P194.) In literature, the indecisive angst of Hamlet and nihilistic grief of King Leer, have long been the sources of debate on the nature of sanity.
Madness exposes the artist to intense and uncontrollable emotions, thoughts, and ways of viewing the world. They might suffer, but they also see deeper into the depths of existence than normal healthy people, who can repress the painful thoughts of being. Like a livewire, the artist suffering from a mental illness can become a seismograph of being. Having met many ordinary mentally healthy people who live drama free lives, I have often noted how intellectually and creatively barren they are. On the other hand, I have met many mentally ill people who although not creative, have obvious creative insights. The list of suicidal, tormented or sacrificed modernists is a long one; the Marquis de Sade, Goya, Holderlin, Blake, Friedrich, Kleist, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, van Gogh, Edvard Munch, Strindberg, Ensor, Kirchner, Dalí, Artaud, Pollock, all suffered from mental illness, or depression. The fate of the modern artist has been to record the fall of man in all its torture. The sacrificial artist has his cousins in the suffering of Christ and the evolutionary theories of Darwin where the fate of the individual is at the expense of the greater survival of the species. Indeed, one of the most cogent analyses of van Gogh came from the equally tortured Antonin Artaud, who in his essay The Artist Suicided by Society, made clear that van Gogh's suicide was in fact nothing of the sort - it was a murder! Van Gogh who could not fit into a society who had no use for a man of his virtues and deemed that his death was a necessary sacrifice for the greater good of the society at large.
As Holland Cotter has pointed out, artists throughout history have been noted for their neurotic, morose and eccentric behaviour: “A detail-freak streak in Leonardo da Vinci’s personality led him to leave many projects unfinished. The 16th-century painter Federico Barocci was plagued by a psychosomatic malaise so crippling that for 50 years he worked only two hours a day and spent the rest of the time, in agony, in bed. (He must have worked extra-hard in those hours because he turned out a lot of product.)... The Mannerist painter Francesco Bassano, in a frenzy of paranoia (he thought the police were after him), jumped out a window and died. The Dutch artist Emanuel de Witte, best known for his immaculate church interiors, is thought to have drowned himself. The architect Francesco Borromini, damned by a critic as “a complete ignoramus, a corrupter of architecture, and the shame of our century,” ended it all with a sword.” (Holland Cotter, Odd Faces, Strange in Their Day, but Familiar in Our Time, The New York Times, 16th September 2010.)
Pierre Cabanne, in his monograph on van Gogh, excellently summed up the modern alienation of artists like van Gogh and pointed out its sociological rather than pathological nature when he wrote: “The inevitable breach which exists between genius and society existed in the case of van Gogh in its most dramatic but also its most impassioned form. People often fail to realize at what cost in suffering a work of art is born. By admiring it, praising its merits (having during his lifetime despised, insulted and cast out its creator), by granting him a place of honour in their museums, they think they are ‘rehabilitating’ their victim, whereas all they are doing is condemning his executioners all the more. Society was responsible for van Gogh’s ‘madness’ just as society was responsible for the fall of Rembrandt, discredited and abandoned by all, for the morbid obsessions of Goya, for Delacroix’s deliria, for Lautrec’s moral decay, for the cursed life of Pascin, for the martyrdom of Utrillo, for the ‘mysterious’ death of Nicolas de Staël. The cry from the cross – ‘Why hast thou forsaken me?’ – echoes through the ages, finding its most tragic expression in the spiritual night of the man who tried to impose his private universe on the society which gave him birth.” He went on, “Thus the problem of van Gogh cannot be discussed from the pathological point of view – although it will no doubt be discussed as such for years to come – but, as is seen from the study of his life and his work, the problem is a sociological one.” (Pierre Cabanne, Van Gogh, London, Thames and Hudson, 1963, P.237.)
Van Gogh himself adored the minor, heavily impastoed canvases of Monticelli who had drank himself insane. In his last month’s, van Gogh wrote of himself as mad as Hugo van der Goes – the Gothic painter of genius who had a nervous breakdown and entered a monastery never to paint again. “Once again I am close to Hugo van der Goes’s madness in the picture by Emile Wauters. If I did not have kind of dual nature, a monk’s and a painter’s, I should long since have been quite totally in the aforesaid condition.” (Vincent van Gogh, Letter to Theo van Gogh.)
Personally, I do not consider every lunatic a genius. Sometimes geniuses emerge who draw strength in the short term from their madness like van Gogh, Nietzsche, or Artaud, but many like Richard Gerstl were broken by it long before they matured. I try to make my madness a strength and accept that certain kinds of rational or classical modes will never suit my temperament.
Leo Tolstoy said that: "Art is a human activity, consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them…. It is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress towards well-being of individuals and of humanity.” (Leo Tolstoy, What is Art?, 1898.) While I admire the moral integrity and power of Tolstoy’s prose, and while I agree with this quote, I know that my form of communication - is not what Tolstoy meant. Tolstoy in fact would have loathed my art, especially my pornographic art - which he would have attacked as evil and depraved. Yet I would have been in good company. Tolstoy in a fit of religious and idealistic piety, attacked Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, Michelangelo, Raphael, Bach, and Beethoven, not to mention his own books. My art would have been too perverted, too aggressive, and too raw for his pious mind to take. Attacking the sexual explicitness of French painting, writing and popular song, Tolstoy wrote: “These are all works by people suffering from erotic mania. These people are apparently convinced that, since their entire life, as a result of their morbid condition, is concentrated on the smearing about of sexual abominations, it must mean that the entire life of the world is concentrated on the same thing.” (Leo Tolstoy, What is Art?, London: Penguin Classics, 1995 P. 62-3.) The poor man would have had a fit if he had seen my art.
Indeed, the great problem with Tolstoy is the narrowness of his taste and his narrow limitation of communication to that which can be proved to be good (again, a highly subjective thing, what can uplift and cure some, can alienate, madden, and lead to the death of others who cannot live up to false ideals.) Overall, I find much to admire in Tolstoy's definition of art. I too have hoped to communicate my feelings of alienation, pain, thwarted lust, and love for women in my art, as Kleist said: “…to be understood, if only on occasion, by one other human soul.” (Quoted in ‘Van Gogh: The Complete Paintings’, Ingo F. Walther, & Rainer Metzger, P.29, Taschen 1997.)
Herbert Read, who was also an admirer of Tolstoy also had problems with Tolstoy’s definition of art: “Tolstoy demands that the artist should not only succeed in expressing his feeling, but also in transmitting it. That I think, was the mistake which landed him into such difficulties. Because, if you put the artist and his feeling on one side, to whom, on the other side, must he convey his feeling?... I would say that the function of art is not to transmit feeling so that others may experience the same feeling. That is only the function of the crudest forms of art – ‘programme music’, melodrama, sentimental fiction and the like. The real function of art is to express feeling and transmit understanding… We come to the work of art already charged with emotional complexes; we find in the genuine work of art, not an excitation of these emotions, but peace, repose, equanimity.” (Herbert Read, The Meaning of Art, London: Faber & Faber, First Published 1931, Reprinted 2017, P. 222.) As with Tolstoy, my problem with Read is the desire to use art to create a better society rather than reflect the true fallen nature of our existence, and by doing so then perhaps change things. People may abhor the nature of pornography, but for me as a student of human existence in all its forms, pornography is part of the vast dark matter of existence that Civilization does everything it its powers to hide and deny - but which tells us unpleasant truths about existence.
I view art therapeutically, and anyone who goes to a therapist and refuses to be honest is wasting both their own time but also the therapists. I am also reluctant to subscribe to Read’s snobbish attitude to culture. As I noted in my autobiography The Panic Artist, I learned more about women watching Big Brother and other reality TV shows than in all the novels, art books, films even porn I studied. So, I do not think you can ever tell what any form of culture can teach you.
To me the antithesis of great truthful art is Kitsch. Kitsch is typified by lowbrow skills, faked sensations, trite analogies, and sentimental themes. The most important thing about kitsch is that is like a cheap postcard presenting a grossly simplified candy coloured and idealistic version of life devoid of complexity, ambiguity, contradiction, or paradox. For me the greatest art takes on emotions, desires, ideas and realities that are inexplicable and have no easy answers. They are frankly difficult not just to comprehend but also difficult to draw easy moral lessons from. Kitsch is also inherently extrovert and I loathe most extrovert art. The extrovert artist is so indulged because their work is inherently complicit with their society. They are in fact mascots for their society. Their artistic work is flattered and praised because it fulfils the prejudices of its audience. So, there is often a buffoonish quality to extrovert artists and their art. Because they work so hard psychologically and artistically to please and thrill their audience their works achieves success out of all proportion to its actual merit. Moreover, the extrovert artist is forgiven his or her poncing around, pompous ideas and egotistical posturing because he or she is fulfilling the subconscious fantasies of their audience.
However, kitsch is not in my opinion a matter of medium. Greenberg broadly defined Kitsch to include Jazz, Hollywood movies, advertising, commercial illustration and ‘Tin-Pan-Ally’ songs. Personally, I loathe advertising but not because I dismiss it as crass, pointless, and kitsch (it is of course all those things), but rather because it is so skilfully manipulative of the human mind and subconscious. In my view, there have been amazingly authentic musicians (Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Bob Dylan, Nick Drake, Leonard Cohen, Morrissey, Kurt Cobain, and Lana Del Rey) and filmmakers (Alfred Hitchcock, Ingmar Bergman, Francois Truffaut, Woody Allen, Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, David Lynch, Wes Anderson, and Noah Baumbach) who have made a high art of their usually debased mediums. But whatever the medium the problem remains, 99% of all culture is inherently Kitsch, namely formulaic, dishonest, academic, plagiaristic, shallow, and hypnotically manipulative.
Today there is expressionist kitsch, gothic kitsch, horror kitsch, adolescent kitsch, heavy metal kitsch, porn kitsch even Nazi kitsch, in fact it pervades and pollutes everything in this age of commercialization, which sucks the soul out of everything and turns the husk into product. Kitsch is a formulaic approach to production, in which the various real discoveries of the genre and medium are raided for the most successful and pleasing forms, content and narrative. For me there are only two ways Kitsch can be seriously enjoyed, firstly in a knowing and ironic way, and secondly as willing form of escapism from more serious study.
For me, from the position of 'madness', the art student, academic, art professional with his MFA, arts-grants and collector friendly art works are objects of utter contempt and ridicule. The glorification of art as a new kind of religion, has spawned millions of artists and countless, dealers, curators, gallery attendants, museum heads, art teachers, academics, photographers, critics, and journalists, who live off the myth of arts importance. Not only is the art world full of completely talentless people who cannot draw, paint, sculpt or manipulate and fire a pot, so many of them are also masters of excuses and projection, bitterly lambasting anyone with skills, as narcissistically self-satisfied or insecure and desperate for approval or some other such rubbish. I have seen these wastes of space everywhere in the art world, and their only talent is for bitching and only skill is for stoned philosophizing and their nature is totally unoriginal in its uselessness. These abject failures, only admire artists even more abjectly talentless than themselves.
I once criticized the film Mr Turner on Facebook because I thought it was boring, made by a Socialist director with no love for the heroic individual, and I thought that the film exaggerated the proto-Abstract-Expressionist nature of Turner’s work and failed to understand his immense classical training, Romantic talent, and detailed skill. I was attacked by an angry painter. “You call yourself an artist! But you cannot appreciate seeing a Master at work!” I had never thought much of this man’s art, and I quickly saw no point in arguing with a moron who could not tell the difference between a movie made about Turner played by Timothy Spall and the real artist Willian Turner - dead in the ground for centuries! But I think that the angry talentless painter was typical of many in the art world who were rationally challenged and living in cloud-cuckoo-land!
The modern-day Art College is a kindergarten with alcohol, mostly used as a party zone, for rich kids who want to avoid real life for as long as possible. Students in Art College assume the institution exists to make them into geniuses, yet, it exists to eviscerate any passion, desire or ambition in 99% of its pupils, and ease the path to success for the 1% who possess both the right kind of talent, character and ideological stance deemed worthy of glory. Like in the rest of the art world, the sorting process is as much about official honours as nods and winks. Ah, but here is the rub, you can never tell the content of a pupil’s heart by the quality of their efforts. Sadly, many pupils with phenomenal gifts choose to do absolutely nothing with them and give up art because they have nothing to say. While some students with the least gifts but a burning passion to create, keep doggedly working year after year until they achieve mastery.
About twenty percent of students in art colleges have parents who are either high school or art college teachers, or who are curators and collectors. Taught from day one, all the “correct” ways to draw, paint and make art, their work is always technically faultless, never gauche, impolite or politically incorrect and never controversial. In Art Colleges, first you are told you can do anything you like, but then you realise you can only do what your tutor wants you to do. Or they see what you are making and then suggest you do the exact opposite. In contemporary Art Colleges, there is no rules, yet at the same time there is nothing but rules. Such a process is ideal for creating creatively flexible artists but detrimental to any student with a true vision or expressive tendency since it robs the student of their self-belief. They seem to be more interested in making more art teachers than artists.
I have seen pupils in Art College who are utterly hopeless at drawing and painting even after years of trying to master them, who then within the space of two years produce acclaimed installations, photography, video, and assemblages. Why run up Mount Olympus when you can hop in a helicopter? Many idealistic students go to Art College, thinking it will free them from the restraints of normal society. What they learn is that they simply exchange one set of restraints for another. Your art is no longer your own, it is part of a dialogue. Your views are only OK, if you can defend them constantly to your peers and tutors.
I have seen art teachers who are only in it for the money and others for whom it was an ego trip and way of declaring their authority, and worse still others who used their position to get laid. What naïve and trusting art students don’t realise - is that when their tutors go back to their staffroom - they spend most of their time gossiping and bitching about them!
It is quite a funny sight to see the library in Art College packed and the shelves half-empty at thesis time but knowing it almost deserted the rest of the time. In Art College, they write thesis on films they have never watched and about paintings they have only seen in reproduction. Culture is skimmed without any sense of history or aesthetic, ethical or cognitive understanding, things are liked or disliked, but rarely understood for good or ill.
In Art Colleges (the home of the public sector artist), left-wing politics is de rigueur, and the making of unsalable art is logical when you do not need to make a living on sales because you are paid $60,000 a year for a three-day workweek and have a guaranteed pension, the likes of which most public sector artists could only dream of possessing. Bedsides there are few big art collectors from the political left and thus less buyers for left-wing art. So, they loath anyone who is a commercial success in the art world, unless their work is so obscure it is only liked by insiders. In fact, obscure art is the security blanket of upper-class intellectuals marginalized by a rampant popular culture.
Yet, looking for an unworldly artist uninterested in commercial success in the art world, is like looking for a virgin in a whorehouse. You will be presented with one, but she has lost her virginity countless times before. In fact, most so-called artistic rebels are merely art world puppets and posers. You will accept the farce because you find the fantasy delicious just as the art world loves to pretend it is all art and not about money and power.
Growing, up I idolised supposed artistic ‘recluses’ like the elderly Edvard Munch, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí , Balthus and Lucian Freud. The idea of a great artist who refused to compromise or sully his vision with contact with the world enthralled me. It was only much later when I researched their lives, that I discovered that they had spent most of their early life socialising, being attention whores, and arse-licking the rich, powerful, and well-connected, and they only became ‘recluses’ late in life when they could not handle the fame. I had to learn, that you had to achieve fame, success, and importance, and be in constant public demand – so that turning your back on the world and becoming a recluse to have any meaning.
The self-delusion of the MFA graduate must be seen to be believed! Having graduated they feel entitled to call themselves artists, and develop a professional sense of entitlement, even if they have nothing to say, or no discernible talent, and are only parroting the clichés of contemporary art. Having gone to Art College, they think they are the fount of all knowledge, and only have to repeat their degree show for the next sixty years. Moreover, they club together to support each other and further marginalize outsiders who do not belong to their club. Yet, worse still is the shockingly few who continue to make art. These hipster artists are so desperate to be seen as cool and interesting and to cast themselves as romantic and glorious stars in the Hollywood movie that runs in their own mind, that they would never dare to make anything foolish, controversial, or abject.
Pop musicians endless declare their love for others in their songs and visual artists endless portray their concern for humanity. But I am reminded that in The Usual Suspects Kevin Spacey’s character Roger “Verbal” Kint said: "The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist." Well maybe he is hiding out as an artist! Because many of the artists I have known, for all their professed love of humanity, are the worst human beings I have ever known. People foolishly think art makes us better people. Nothing could be further from the truth, and the lives of artists are not the place to go to find upstanding members of the community. Countless artists have lived blameless professional lives, but others have been murderers, sexual deviants, alcoholics, and drug addicts. Leonardo da Vinci was an alleged sodomite; Benvenuto Cellini loved bloody brawls and killed four men as well as sodomised both men and women; Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was convicted of murder after killing a man in a fight at a tennis match; William Turner frequented brothels and even made erotic drawings and watercolours of the prostitutes; Claude Monet allegedly slept with the woman who would be his second wife - as his first wife died of cancer; Edgar Degas was a xenophobe and anti-Semite and frequently visited brothels; Vincent van Gogh collected pornography and slept with prostitutes; Auguste Rodin drew his models masturbating; Gustav Klimt had a harem of models who he liked to draw as they masturbated; Paul Gauguin made love with young teenage Tahitian girls knowing that he was infecting them with syphilis; Augustus John was an alcoholic and was rumoured to have fathered a hundred children; Eric Gill had sex with two of his sisters, two of his daughters, and a dog; Pablo Picasso lost his virginity to a prostitute in Barcelona and continued to visit brothels throughout his young adult life, was arrested for possession of stolen artworks, womanised and was a notorious misogynist with a dismissive view of female painters; Egon Schiele made sexually explicit drawings of child prostitutes; Ernst Ludwig Kirchner painted young teenage girls; Emil Nolde was a Nazi sympathiser and fan of Adolf Hitler; Wyndham Lewis attempted to kill the critic and poet T E Hulme and Lewis was a Nazi sympathiser; Modigliani was a hashish addict, alcoholic and woman beater, Maurice de Vlaminck and André Derain collaborated with the Nazi’s; Balthus made paedophilic paintings of teenage girls; Edward Hopper frequently beat his wife; Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning were raging alcoholics; Jean Michel Basquiat was heroin addict; Jeff Koons made pornographic artworks with his porn star wife Ilona Staller AKA Cicciolina. However, the epidemics that really inflict the artist community are aggressive pride, narcissism, egotism, selfishness, and snobbery. Though I shamefully suffer from them all myself. Perversely in an art world that often appears to be the outpatients’ department of a psychiatric hospital, every artist in the art world thinks they are sane and everyone else are lunatics. For all its claims of communal cooperation the real art world, works on the principles of the game theory “Fuck You Buddy!”
Many artists (male and female) are only able to indulge their pretentious hobby through the support of partners with real careers who can give them pocket money for their art, some like Cy Twombly, are even lucky enough to marry heiresses. Others rely on an inheritance, the dole, or the kindness of girlfriends.
In the art world, one often meets the bizarre man of uncertain sexuality. They are neither flaming queens nor shamefaced closet homosexuals if anything they are asexual. On the other hand, one often meets morose beauties with perplexing self-loathing personalities and even stranger older single women who have given up entirely on personal grooming.
Over 80% of artists come from middleclass backgrounds yet most of their political allegiances are hypocritically left-wing. So, the dominant politics of the art world is socialist and Liberal even though an artist is more of a self-employed entrepreneur than a working-class labourer. Of course, the actual making of art involves a degree of manual labour, but that is only a small part of the process of building an artistic career which depends as much on self-promotion, building your brand, courting the rich and playing the arts system. Moreover, art is still the most expensive commodity in the world and part of a largely unregulated market.
The Janus-faced modern artist turns from middle class child to socialist cant spouting user through absorption of the left-wing ethos of Art Colleges which usually only exist because of government funding. Of course, if you are lucky enough to have a teaching job in a university, receive arts council grants, and get exhibition grants to exhibit in publicly funded museums, you can afford to thumb your nose at the capitalists, but you better not criticize the politics that supports you!
Other artists, who have no wish or are unable to play the publicly funded sector for all its worth and have the audacity to still think they have a right to make art and receive recognition, must succeed in the private art sector, and rely on buyers for their work. Some have the consistency of belief to not deal in left-wing politics in this situation, yet other’s skilled at using others without guilt, try to play both games at once, painting left wing paintings, and decrying the elites, while happily accepting the checks of bankers.
How they can live with such political hypocrisy is beyond me. Personally, my early politics leaned towards the left but today I am a Libertarian. Since I am the son of a self-made businessman, and most of my artistic heroes were successful using their talents, I have never been a socialist. Besides, because of my mental illness the only chance I have ever had to better my life has been through art sales.
Successful artists are not only those with talent (many art students have talent), but they also have the ability to build a career in art. I have met artists of amazing talent, yet they are so obnoxiously arrogant, no one is bothered working with them. Thus, successful artists are those who are both talented and charming, transgressive, and accommodating, wild and tame. 80% of art world success is just about showing up at the right parties and meeting and seducing the right people. Moreover, people prefer an exhibitionist buffoon to a silent introvert.
Artists are thought of as speakers of truth, yet in fact, they are as practiced liars as anyone else. Artists learn quickly to mention only those artists who really did little to influence their style. Countless times I have seen an exhibition of a young artist and been bowled over by the quality and originality of their work - only to discover years later the artist they stole from wholesale, the artist who was never mentioned in any of their extensive catalogue blather.
The coolest artists are often those most dilettantish, for whom creating is not an obsessive torment or trial, rather a pastime amongst other things like playing in a band, skateboarding and screwing around. They dabble at art as an escape from the real world and a justification for their fantasy life. The pathetic need for constant affirmation of so many tenth-rate artists online is amazing. They must show every unfinished canvas for support and like all dilettantes their art vaporizes without the oxygen of publicity.
Art for many inadequate people is nothing more than a grand pretentious fantasy about themselves and their supposed intellectual genius. Their art is like the plastered makeup of an ugly woman trying to look like a super model or the useless muscle-bound body of a weightlifter that would not last five minutes in a real fight.
The art world works through a system of grooming and bullying one only must scan an artist’s Facebook page to see the process of flattery of one’s harmless peers and condemnation of one’s genuine rivals. In the art world, you can never win, if you don’t know enough about the art on display you are a philistine but if you know too much, you are an embittered troublemaker. In boxing they say, “may the best man win”, however in art there is no such thing as an objective win only a certain popularity with the public or cognoscenti that may be an indication of universal genius or just a symptom of fad and fashion.
I have seen artists who paint twisted and warped paintings I thought was part of a style yet discovered they had a lazy eye, or their paintings were bizarrely coloured and learned they were colour blind or had cataracts, and that was how they ‘saw’ the world.
Far too often the personality of artists isn’t discussed in serious art criticism. But very often I am put off artists I admit have talent, because I find their personalities so obnoxious, and everything they produce is such a dickhead insult to the intelligence and humanity of the viewer.
All my life, I had presumed that I was a narcissist. And I am. But once I entered the art world, I realised that there were far more extreme narcissists than me. Even though I am a narcissist, I have always had some interest in other people and their art. But in the art world, I met both men and women, incapable of any interest in anyone but themselves, except perhaps for the misfortune of others that delighted them and made them feel good about themselves.
I have met male artists with no discernible talent, yet who are possessed by a self-belief and sense of purpose that is both obnoxious and ludicrous. Likewise, I have meet male and female artists who appear for years to be so meek and mild, yet once they have a whiff of success, they reveal the dark side of their ambition and pride.
The egotism of the artist experiencing, what is often only a brief moment of fame and success, has to be seen to be believed. Suddenly they hold discourses on aesthetics, politics, metaphysics, and God knows what else as though they were artistic Napoleons bestriding the earth, rather than the mediocre nobodies they were just a few months before, and will return to being just as soon.
Yet the egotism of the self-involved artist is nothing compared to the ones who not only think they are geniuses but think that they are speaking for women, or oppressed. Or they are political citizen artists and activists. Or worse still they think God has called on them to make art!
The art of a great artist is like the sun radiating truth, beauty, wisdom and transcendence, yet the personalities of most ‘artists’ are black holes sucking attention, admiration, praise, money and time out of prospective victims to their self-involvement. For every artist messiah, there are countless charlatans and posers. Given that artists are some of the most self-centred and mercenary people on the planet, it is ironic that they talk so much about socialism and charity work. Most artists I have met would do nothing to help another artist, and only form groups to advance their own agenda. They are worse than sharks - they are sharks that frolic like friendly dolphins around you, before tearing you to shreds - and leaving you for dead!
Few of the artists populating the bloated international art world feel any real compulsion to make art, and if deprived of their comfortable life of well-paid lecturing, socially secured exhibitions, arts grants and commercial sell-outs, they would stop making art all together. What use are any of them to the world? 99% of the art they make, curate, buy, auction, and write about are just a pastiche of a handful of truly original creators fashionable with artists, critics, historians, or the public. To me they are mere technicians and bureaucrats of art. True artists, workaholics, obsessives and mavericks, pay for their brilliance by being snipped at by all these little bitches, having their life's work parodied by students, and exploited by cynical operators and crass gallery dealers. Their only true desire is for money, fame, power, and sex, not the pursuit of the ultimate in creative expression and idealism.
People think art stars are creative free spirits but usually they are nothing but manufacturers, forced to repeat themselves repeatedly. Art making becomes a form of printing money and few have the courage or intellectual waywardness to break up the printing press. Given the choice of repeating themselves and making money and fooling people into thinking they are aesthetic fanatics or risking everything by making creative choices and alienating their previous collectors, most chose the former. Most artists are confidence tricksters, and their style is their con trick. Plausible consistency is everything in a lie. Therefore, the worst thing they can do is undermine the integrity of their signature style. Most of even the greatest artists in the world have often stopped thinking creatively at the age of thirty and spend the rest of their lives refining the style that brought them acclaim. So no wonder they increasingly use assistants when what is required is product not transcendent epiphanies
Looking around an art library, it slowly dawns on you that the so-called greatest artists are the most commercial. People do not make big books on artists whose work does not sell. The problem with this is that so much of what sells is asexual, abstract, and politically correct, or is made with an impersonal workshop, studio, or factory like production line approach. Thus, most art is just about art, and has very little to do with real life in all its fallen tragedy. When you really think about it, you realize just how little painting, drawing, writing, music, or film is really about specific life events. And those artists who really do expose something truthful about their life are crucified by the press and society, and they are even taken to court for libel, slander or such like.
I cannot understand why grown men and women who produce the kind of Zombie Formalist abstract canvases of today. How can they spend their life making coloured abstract paintings in minor variations until their dying days. For what? For money? For fame? For sex? Or just as a kind of escapist childish distraction? If my art is embarrassingly adolescent, theirs is firmly stuck in a pretentious arch-kindergarten, that is only valued so highly because it is so communally unthreatening, and guaranteed not to affect any socio-political change. These Zombie Formalists might think they are the new heirs of Jackson Pollock, but in fact, they are more like the heirs of Tony Hancock in The Rebel, in which Tony made paintings on his floor, by pouring paint on the canvas and then messing it around under his Wellington boots, the tires of his bicycle, and the with the help of his pet cow! Except that these great formalists use fire extinguishers and other implements to create their masterpieces, but their ‘innovations’ are equally absurd and pointless!
I am not against all abstract art, but mostly I feel it is the cynically commercial product of artists aware that no other style is more bank and home décor friendly. To spend my whole life painting this kind of pleasantly inoffensive, abstract messing with colour - I would have to have a lobotomy. This art is an escape from life - not an engagement with it – a prolonged childhood refusal not to grow up, or commit to anything real.
I started making art because it was something I could do it independently of others. The isolated sovereignty of painting infatuated me, and it compensated for all the other deficiencies in my life. When I was young, I thought all I needed to do was making paintings of quality, and that others would give me exhibitions, and allow me to stay at home painting in splendid isolation. I did not realize that art was a social activity, and that if I did not push myself in the art world, my work would pile up unseen and unwanted at home just gathering dust. Moreover, I did not realize that every statement of personal expression would be met with a blizzard of criticism, jibes, put downs, gross misreading, and my honesty used to crucify me.
So I hate virtually the whole of the art world; the complacent and idiotic art students who live seven years of their life in the safe and supportive confines of academia enjoying its “great social life”; the feckless con-artists who spend their arts grants on drink and then present the photos of their boozy sessions as ‘art’; the chancers who avoid the life long struggle of honing their craft and take up those mediums that any sixteen year old can master in a few weeks; the pretentious ‘intellectuals’ whose work is supposed to be ultra-smart, yet when caught in conversation are less knowing than a Taxi driver; those who have formed their art into styles they think will bring them in money, crass gallery owners with not one onze of aesthetic passion (who might as well be selling used cars); the slimy alcoholic operators who attend every opening, not to look and learn from the art, but to arse lick those in power; the spinless critics incapable of speaking an honest word for fear it will affect their friendships and pay-packet; the poseur ‘artists’ who fitfully make art every other Sunday, because they have never had the courage to ditch the day job and really commit to their art. Together they make up about 99.999% of the art world. Success in the art world (at least in the short term) is as much to do with charm, diplomacy and salesmanship, as talent and vision. So, many artists treat art like a game. They have no integrity as artists and manipulate their art towards what they think will succeed. These artists play at art because they think it has no rules, no standards, and anything goes.
I became an artist to rebel against the bourgeois life I had imposed upon me. However, what I did not realize was that the art world is even worse. Going to openings and socializing in the art world is like going to the most snobby, pretentious, and neurotic party imaginable, populated by touchy people who schizophrenically kick those below them and lick up to those above them. These people are playing a game I want no part of! In 2009, I knew a working-class girl, who had worked as a shop worker, beautician, and waitress. One night she worked as a waitress at a private dinner party. The hosts were rich, and the guests were all arty people leaching off the rich, and she was disgusted at them. She could not believe how entitled, snobby, pretentious, and greedy for free food and drink these art people were, and how contemptuous they were of the staff. I could not deny that she was right.
It disgusts me that, while I have given my heart and soul to everything I have made, while I have sacrificed my sanity and life for my art, for many others, art is just a trendy lifestyle of drinking, fucking, and avoiding work. Seeing artists today, spending more time photographing themselves posing as artists disgusts me. The shameless begging and borrowing of artists also disgust me, and life has taught me that artists are only around when they want something from you. Life has taught me that other artist’s feel free to criticize me, but if I so much as make a one criticism of them, their hackles raise, and they disappear from my life. At art openings, it is a rarity to see anyone looking at the art on the walls, or talking about art history. Art insiders have too much at stake to be honest in their opinions. Artists on the make wander around galleries, barely looking at the art on the walls, lest they miss the chance to catch the eye of the gallery owner or someone famous. Art’s main function is social and commercial. Most art is just currency in the stock market of art, or a talking point for dead weightless theorising in the university. As Peter Schjeldahl put it: “... The art world’s only two ways of dealing with success are celebrity and politics. Either the successful artist’s personality, money, connections, and so on become the hot issue or the artist’s supposed ideological agenda becomes the hot issue. What the artist actually does, by way of generating revelatory experience for individuals and a working challenge to other art, is not the hot issue, and if you think it is you end up taking to the wall.” (Peter Schjeldahl, Salle Days: `80s Something, Artforum, May 1999, P. 154.) The art world seen from the point of view of madness is just a waste of time, money, and human energy. You may think that my art and life has been a waste too, but I have paid for it myself. I have met art dealers and curators who thought themselves more important that the artists they represented, a notion I found utterly absurd and deluded by a life of commerce and bureaucracy. I have seen billionaire art collectors with the taste of brothel and disco owners. I have seen art buyers with the greedy look of shoppers at Christmas, buying anything and everything with a name or a brand style without a second thought or even looking very hard at what they are buying. I have seen men and women with real intelligence, knowledge, and expertise ignored, marginalized, or quoted but never referenced because their work is not media-friendly or disrupts the market. I have seen so-called critics betray their stupidity with erratic and utterly subjective interpretations of art without any philosophical or ethical foundation. I have watched as idiot critics with no expertise in anything give forceful opinions on cinema, pop music, design, architecture, fashion, novels, politics, painting, sculpture, drawings, prints, installations, and God knows what else, their comments no more illuminating than those of a random person picked off the street.
I have seen frantic people at openings, but they were usually elderly women chasing the waiter for hor d’oeuvres or drunks running to the free bar, not passionate artists engaged in debate. I have seen deluded gigolo painters, who live the high life playing the part of the sensitive artist around rich, influential, and desperate middle-aged women. I have seen small petty tyrants thrust their way through the art world armed with nothing but criminal arrogance and egotism. I have seen artist’s (male and female) sleep their way up the academic and curatorial ladder, skilled in nothing but oral sex and flattery. I have seen talentless artists lauded in the short term merely because they are handsome, beautiful, or charismatic. Finally, some young artists never even have to work their way up the greasy-pole and kiss ass, because as the privileged children of famous artists, critics, or collectors, they are given a free run in the art world and are only finally dismissed if they blow their chances. Yet, in this world, I am the lunatic!