My admiration for modern art

Walking around the Tate Modern, it is impossible to avoid overhearing the disparaging comments made by the exhibition hall’s many detractors. It can seem that, other than the parties of art students with their activity sheets, the obligatory oldies and the token bearded woman, everyone is there to mock the works and wish unfriendly things upon the artists.

Well I disagree. I have only two feelings towards the characters responsible for stocking the rooms of the Tate Modern with their challenging and intriguing creations: envy, and admiration.

The talent to sell, often for quite vast sums of money, paintings, sculptures or simply junk that is, quite manifestly, awful, that possesses as much artistic merit as my armpit and that would unquestionably fail GCSE art, even under our current levels of grade inflation, is a special thing indeed.

These ‘artists’ are constantly pushing the boundaries of bad taste—and deceiving many, many misguided luvvies in the process. They are at the forefront of their field.

And for those for whom such a talent is not enough, the quite ridiculous blurbs that accompany each aesthetic monstrosity are nonpareil in their nonsense. For example, Clyfford Still’s 1953 untitled ‘oil on canvas’ (apparently it’s just not cool to have titles), looks like an out-of-focus close-up of a pair of Wimbledon FC football shorts from the mid-1980s. There’s really not a lot to it; it’s a hazy yellow gash on a dirty blue background. So to come up with a blurb as extravagant as “He saw the yellow wedge at the top as a reassertion of the human context – a gesture of rejection of any authoritarian rationale or system of politico-dialectical dogma” requires imagination of the very highest and most respectable order. It’s gibberish of a truly godlike level.

Now that’s art.