January 2012
‘I used to want to kill the talentless so-called artists,’ said Baroness Troutbeck, ‘but now I want instead to fill the tumbrils with the critics, the dealers, the curators, and all the rest of the charlatans and dunderheads peddling trash in the name of contemporary art.’
She paused for a moment, tugged absent-mindedly on the massive rope of jet that stood out starkly against her voluminous red kaftan, reached for her glass, and had another sip. ‘Not forgetting, of course, all those who wrecked the art colleges and chucked out into the world generations proud to be untutored and unskilled. The gullible little wretches were convinced that you could be an artist without being able to paint, draw, or sculpt. Or for that matter know anything at all about painting, drawing, or sculpture. Or beauty.’
She took another sip, nodded approvingly, settled herself more comfortably in her vast green leather armchair and beamed at her friends. ‘These martinis really are excellent, don’t you think? Sometimes it’s a bit of a chore being chairman of ffeatherstonehaugh’s,
1
but if it means you have somewhere you can rely on getting decent food and drink it’s worth putting in the effort.’
‘I still prefer vodka martinis, Jack,’ said Mary Lou Denslow.
‘You really must grow out of your filthy American habits, Mary Lou. Vodka is for people without taste buds. Which of course sadly all Americans are. Martinis are to gin as Roman Catholicism is to the pope.’ She frowned. ‘Well, to Roman Catholic popes, that is. These days there’s no guarantee that a pope will necessarily be a Catholic. I expect that in the interests of inclusiveness there will be a call for the next one to be a Wiccan single lesbian mother on benefits. Perhaps I should offer myself as a compromise candidate.’ She took yet another sip, smacked her lips appreciatively, and smiled seraphically. ‘Now apropos the gin, it’s absolutely vital that you chose either….’
‘Oh, shut up, Jack,’ said Mary Lou. ‘Get back to business. Why are you allowing the artists to live? What happened to your plan to have Damien Hirst pickled in formaldehyde and called
The Physical Impossibility of Producing Art if You’ve No Fucking Talent
?’
‘I dithered a bit about this. I was tempted by the alternative of having him cut in half, dangling the bits from a gibbet, and calling the result
Hanged for a Calf?
’
Ellis Pooley raised an enquiring eyebrow. ‘You’re losing me, Jack. I’ve heard of Damien Hirst and know he made money out of a dead shark, but that’s about it. Where does a calf come into it?’
‘What sheltered lives you must lead at Scotland Yard.’
‘For God’s sake, Ellis,’ broke in Robert Amiss. ‘How can you be married to Mary Lou…’
‘The thinking man’s crumpet,’ beamed the baroness.
‘Stop stealing old jokes, Jack,’ said Mary Lou. ‘That one dates from the seventies.’
‘The old ones are the best, Mary Lou. Like Joan Bakewell, the prototype! Dreadful leftie and had an affair with that ghastly pseud Harold Pinter, but so very fanciable. Even now.’
‘As I was saying,’ said Amiss, ‘how, Ellis, can you be married to the culture industry’s iconic broadcaster and not know anything about art?’
‘I know quite a bit about art,’ said Pooley indignantly. ‘Decent art, that is. I just ignore most modern art because I’m too busy to waste my time looking at rubbish.’
‘Can’t argue with that,’ said the baroness. ‘Mary Lou, you’re paid to comment on crap. Explain Hirst to your husband.’
Mary Lou sighed. ‘If I must. Ellis, you know about the YBAs.’
‘No.’
‘Oh, stop it, Ellis,’ said Amiss. ‘I know you’re a fogey but now you’re sounding like an octogenarian judge.’
Mary Lou patted her husband’s hand. ‘The Young British Artists, hon. Hirst and Tracey Emin and so on. The ones who made BritArt big business over the last couple of decades.’
‘Oh, them! Yes, of course. Emin’s that dreadful woman who made a fortune from her filthy bed.’
‘That’s the one, darling. Complete with empty vodka bottles, condoms, tampons, and much else you’d rather not think about before dinner.’
‘Or even afterwards,’ said Pooley.
‘The egregious Tracey specialises in what you might call the cartography of the knicker stain,’ said the baroness grimly. ‘They were presenting that sort of trash as art in a hundred art colleges years ago, but Emin was so noisy and shameless she attracted attention. And, of course, the vandals of the art world took her up. They like them loud and disgusting. It’s
épater les bourgeois
all over again. Only this time it’s the smug, well-heeled, liberal establishment doing the épatering.’
‘Emin’s a fame whore, Ellis,’ said Mary Lou patiently. ‘And very successful at it. She sells her horrid pointless installations and crude drawings by providing a complementary narrative of confessional and self-revelatory bullshit. She’s also been smart about becoming pals with existing celebrities, and aspiring celebrities flock to be photographed with her. She became a Conservative supporter just as it appeared inevitable they’d be getting into government and the prime minister is so keen to seem cool that he declared himself a fan and asked her to provide Number 10, Downing Street, with an artwork to give it a bit of “edge.”’
Pooley groaned.
‘I read about that,’ said Amiss. ‘A neon sign flashing
More Passion
in scruffy handwriting, wasn’t it?’
‘Yep.’
‘I’d have preferred it if it said
Smaller Government
,’ said the baroness gloomily. ‘Or
Lower Taxes
. Or
Fiscal Continence
. Or
Why don’t you meddling little Napoleons just piss off and leave me alone?
’
Mary Lou laughed. ‘You probably have the same politics as she does. These days she seems passionate mostly about tax rates. She threatened to leave the country when the fifty percent higher rate came in.’
There was a long sigh from Pooley. He leaned forward and picked up his glass. ‘It’s enough to drive even me to drink. Don’t tell me
More Passion
was paid for from our taxes?’
‘No, hon. It was a gift that’s been arbitrarily valued by the media at a quarter of a million, thus enabling artistic luvvies to cry that Tracey is a true patriot. Mind you, she produces plenty of neon signs, and having one in a prominent position in Number 10 should at least treble their value. Probably helped her become Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy.’
‘Can she draw?’ asked a depressed Pooley.
‘A bit. Not well. It doesn’t matter. She’s on her way to becoming Dame Tracey. Or even Lady Emin.’
The baroness winced. ‘We’ve already got enough vulgarians in the Lords. Mind you, I suppose she deserves credit for exercising some decorum in her Downing Street choice. I remember two of her earlier neons that asked respectively
Is Anal Sex Legal?
and
Is Legal Sex Anal?
Now those would certainly have been edgy, especially when the PM was entertaining ayatollahs.’
She sighed. ‘Mind you, they didn’t even have the virtue of originality. In the seventies, another pretentious but more talented git called Bruce Nauman produced a neon light that said
Run From Fear/Fun From Rear.
However, I digress. Let’s get back to
Hirst, who was the leader of that particular artistic pack. He knew how to fleece credulous halfwits. He first hit the headlines when his piece involving maggots and flies feeding off the head of a dead cow wowed Charles Saatchi.’
‘I know about Saatchi too,’ said Pooley. ‘A plutocratic adman who made another big fortune out of dreadful art.’
‘He’s married to Nigella Lawson,’ said the baroness. ‘Yum, yum. That’s Nigella. Not her food.’ She paused. ‘Well, the food’s not bad, but compared to Nigella’s sumptuous…’
‘Stop drooling, Jack,’ said Mary Lou. ‘Saatchi offered Hirst a £50,000 commission to do whatever he darned well liked and the result was a shark in formaldehyde in a giant glass tank (or vitrine, as the cognoscenti call it) called
The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living
.’
‘Hence my
The Physical Impossibility of Producing Art if You’ve No Fucking Talent
,’ beamed the baroness. ‘But tell Ellis what happened to the unfortunate shark.’
‘
It rotted, a fin fell off and the liquid went murky. Someone said instead of watching a tiger shark hunting for dinner it was like entering Norman Bates’ fruit cellar and finding Mother embalmed in her chair. Adding bleach made it worse. After cleaning up it was still disgustingly green and wrinkled.’
‘I don’t suppose there’s any chance Saatchi threw it out?’ enquired Pooley.
Amiss and the baroness guffawed in unison.
‘Don’t be daft, hon.’ said Mary Lou. ‘We’re talking about the asylum that’s contemporary art. The Saatchi curators skinned it and stretched the skin over a fibreglass mould. The poor thing sure didn’t look good. But that didn’t stop fuckwits clamouring to possess it. Sir Nicholas Serota…’
‘Who?’
The baroness erupted. ‘You know perfectly well who he is, Ellis. He’s the bloody nincompoop who will be first into my tumbril. He runs an empire of galleries including that storehouse of junk known as Tate Modern. Tat Modern more like.’
Pooley spoke slowly. ‘What…happened…to…the…wretched…shark?’
‘I feel we’re on a postmodern journey,’ said Amiss. ‘We could call it
Cherchez le cadaver.
’ He saw Pooley’s face. ‘Sorry.’
Mary Lou patted Pooley’s hand again. ‘Saatchi enlisted an American international celebrity dealer called Larry Gagosian, hon, and he rang around the usual suspects. Allegedly Serota offered two million bucks…’
‘Of tax-payers’ money,’ snorted the baroness.
‘…but it wasn’t enough.’
‘There are celebrity dealers?’ asked Pooley.
‘There are celebrity hairdressers,’ said Amiss. ‘Celebrity cake-makers. For all I know there are celebrity undertakers. Of course there are celebrity dealers.’
‘The Gagosian dude isn’t known as “Go-Go” for no reason,’ continued Mary Lou. ‘He flogged what remained of the shark to the American billionaire art collector…’
‘…celebrity art collector,’ put in Amiss.
‘…Steve Cohen for somewhere around eight million
bucks.’
Pooley looked stunned. ‘There’s more,’ said Mary Lou. ‘Hirst seems to have suffered from scruples, so he obligingly spent a few thou on a job-lot of sharks and replaced Cohen’s later that year, had another stuffed, gave it some fancy conceptual bullshit name and sold it to a Korean museum for four million.’
‘Scruples my fanny,’ said the baroness. ‘He made Cohen pay the costs of the replacement.’
‘I didn’t know that.’
‘The only surprise is that he didn’t charge the shark.’ She gazed at Pooley’s shocked expression with grim satisfaction. ‘Oh, and incidentally, Charles Saatchi, asked some years later if refurbishing Hirst’s shark robbed it of its meaning as art, replied “Completely.” Needless to say he said that when he no longer owned it.’ She gesticulated at the crystal jug. ‘Pour some more martinis, Robert. Ellis needs sustenance to bolster his strength so as to cope with the calf.’
‘Oh, yep,’ said Mary Lou. ‘The calf. You’d better do this, Jack. You’re more up to speed on this than me.’
The baroness waited until Amiss had refilled her glass. ‘Right. Now pay attention, Ellis. Our hero split a cow and a calf from nose to tail…’ She paused. ‘Silly me. Of course he didn’t. Hirst doesn’t do anything much himself other than marketing. He has an atelier, where his assistants do the actual work. Apparently at one time he had as many as a hundred.’ She snorted. ‘I try to maintain my sense of humour about all this, but when I hear some halfwit explaining that Hirst is merely following in the footsteps of Rembrandt, who had a stable of students and helpers, sometimes I want to explode. Rembrandt was a genius, he taught the gifted young how to emulate him and he would let them paint less important bits of some of his pictures and occasionally their copies of his work got passed off as his. But to mention him in the same breath as bloody Hirst is blasphemy.’
‘True, Jack, but calm down,’ said Mary Lou. ‘Get on with the story.’
‘He had a dead cow and calf split, exhibited each of the four halves in a separate chic vitrine and called the result
Mother and Child, Divided
. It won the Turner Prize, which, as you will know, is named after an innovative painter of genius and is awarded annually to whatever bluffer has caught the eye of the knaves and fools who dominate the contemporary art world.’ She took an invigorating swallow. ‘Particularly the eye of the said Sir Nicholas Serota—or Sclerota, as I prefer to call him—who’s been the prize’s guiding genius.
‘So anyway, my cunning plan was to string up Hirst, split his cadaver and call the result
Hanged for a Calf?
Note the question mark after ‘calf.’ Arguing about the significance of that could keep imbecilic critics happy for years.’ She shook her head. ‘But then I thought leaving his corpse unadorned would represent a lost opportunity. As you know, I am a thorough woman. This would be a perfect opportunity to display a wide range of his …’ As she always did when preparing to favour her listeners with her Churchillian French, the baroness paused, set her lips in an exaggerated moue and enunciated painstakingly, ‘…
oeuvres id-i-o-tique de plagiaire
.’
‘So he’s a plagiarist as well as talentless?’ asked Pooley.