I spent the weekend in Paris and got down into some kulcher, as the kidz call it. On Saturday night I went to a show called Kiss & Cry in a small theatre somewhere around the Strasbourg-St. Denis metro. When I sat down I saw eight or nine models of various scenes in miniature – a house, a beach, a railway – several people standing around all in black, some very high-end video cameras on booms and a giant screen hanging above everything. I guessed right away they’d act out scenes with the models, film them, and project it live on the big screen, and this is basically what they did for an hour and fifteen minutes. The two principle actors used their hands and fingers instead of their bodies in wonderfully choreographed movements against a miniature background of considerable complexity. The effect worked very well. A team of about 10 people ran from one “set” to another, filming, mixing, inserting sounds, and creating all sorts of special effects in real time, including floods, blizzards, sandstorms, reverse-gravity, and deaths. For the audience, the most interesting aspect of the show was to watch the technicians at work on the miniature sets and see how it appears simultaneously on the big screen. In terms of technical skill, coordination, and discipline it was highly impressive and showed what can be achieved by simple models, decent cameras, and a lof of imagination.

On Sunday I went to an exhibition of modern art by the Argentine Tomás Saraceno in the Palais de Tokyo. A sign near the entrance let visitors know what they were getting into up-front:

“A planet free of borders and fossil fuels”, eh? Why how original. Because if not from the creations of edgy artistes, where else would we hear debates on environmentalism and open borders? “New ways of thinking”, indeed.

The first exhibit was basically a bunch of cobwebs which, although impressive and expressing undeniable aesthetic beauty, left me wondering why it was the artist and not the spider whose name is on the exhibition:

I spent most of the time looking for an actual spider, and eventually I saw one: it was huge. Sadly, it didn’t leap from its web and sink deadly poisonous fangs into the neck of an annoying child. Now that would have been art. Note also the exhibition is in pitch darkness, as was most of it. This might be my inner Philistine speaking here, but I’m of  the opinion that if your visual masterpieces are best seen in the dark, they’re probably not very good. Much of the exhibition concerned spiders and lots of woolly guff about cosmic particles which I don’t think the artist really understood. One room showed a video of a diving bell spider shot in ill-focused black and white, which made me think I’d be better off simply watching Animal Planet. Or perhaps it was the appallingly crap footage which made it art.

A bit further along the artist’s exhibits started rambling on about thermodynamics, which he didn’t seem to understand much of either. Certainly, there was no mention of steam tables. The best he came up with in relation to the subject was an acknowledgement of the fact that certain particles move upwards through the atmosphere “independently of fossil fuels”. Who knew? To illustrate this he presented a picture of the earth with various particles moving about, a bit like those .gifs you see on Twitter which map plane flights or marine traffic in real time. Only the .gifs are generally more interesting. I got the impression this chap latches himself onto a scientific subject in order to lend his work gravitas, but doesn’t bother to learn the discipline in question. Like Laurie Penny calling herself a nerd, I think a lot of artists pretend they are involved in science and  engineering in order to give the impression they are not empty-headed lightweights who would last about three minutes in a lecture on fluid mechanics. For example, one piece introduced the subject of space elevator – an interesting enough subject for a visual artist to cover – but this was little more than a premise for another sermon from the pulpit of environmentalism. Apparently any such device must be made available to all species, not just humans. How the blue whales will manage is anyone’s guess. Anyway, his depiction of the concept was six helium balloons in the dark. Another exhibit was a room full of string which the artist called Algorithms, perhaps in the hope he’ll be offered a job in Google.

Next we wandered into a room where a bunch of helium-filled balloons with marker pens hanging off them drew random patterns on the floor as they moved in the air. The blurb beside the exhibit talked in lofty terms of natural motion and forces beyond human consciousness (although not the artist’s, obviously) but I noticed the air currents in this exhibition hall were driven solely by a big f*ck-off industrial-sized HVAC unit hanging off the ceiling while guzzling fossil fuels. If it weren’t for this, his stupid balloons wouldn’t have moved and it would have been too cold for anyone to visit them.

The balloons set the scene for more woolly guff about “aerocenes”. Now I don’t know what they are, but it appears they’re against capitalism and fossil fuels and are worried about climate change. So your typically dim lefty, then. Have a read for yourselves, or not.

Finally we saw the artist had enlisted some slave labour volunteers to help him build a  giant balloon made of plastic bags from various countries – including Palestine in case anyone doubted his intersectional wokeness. The idea was it would fill with warm air, ascend, and blow around a bit. The way the artist described what most schoolboys learn from Ladybird books would have you thinking he’d just cracked cold fusion, but I suppose the average lefty who turns up to modern art exhibitions is sufficiently awed. In a room laughably described as a workshop I saw this picture on the wall:

What this shows is distillation columns in a refinery or chemical plant. What it does not show is chimneys. However, in order to make a refinery look more polluting, the artist has photoshopped it to look as though smoke is coming out the top of them. Now unless the plant is undergoing a serious industrial accident, this is impossible. One of the reasons I’m not in a full-blown panic over environmental degradation is those who claim to care the most about it often resort to outright lying over its extent. On the other wall of the workshop was a chalkboard inviting people to leave messages. I drew a methane and an ethane molecule and left, secure in the knowledge that a thousand visitors would pass by before anyone would get the joke. I suppose the irony would be lost on the artist himself, who can while away the hours pontificating over loosely-grasped scientific concepts thanks only to the excess wealth produced by a society built on fossil fuels and capitalism.

So if you’re in Paris next weekend and fancy a spot of culture in between the teargassing of rioters in yellow vests, I can recommend Kiss & Cry at the La Scala theatre. I can’t recommend Tomás Saraceno’s rubbish at the Palais de Tokyo.

Yesterday I got roped into going to a contemporary art exhibition of works by Subodh Gupta, an Indian artist I’d never heard of. Most of it was so-so, although not completely terrible, and this wasn’t bad:

What amused me, though, was the blurb which accompanied it:

I suppose he’s right in one sense: the duality of alluring excess and crippling starvation is a result of capitalism, without which you’d only have the latter. But it amused me that an Indian should complain about capitalist excess in a country which is mired in absolute, grinding poverty because it stupidly embraced socialism and continues to do so. If Gupta wants fewer Indians suffering from crippling starvation it needs more capitalism, not less:

Then again, this was an exhibition held in a gallery on the left bank of the Seine. No doubt the chap who commissioned it spends many an evening harrumphing to the dinner guests gathered on the terrace of his nearby two-million euro apartment about how terrible inequality is. To be honest, I’d have more respect for Gupta if he trotted out a few lines of boilerplate Marxism just to keep his paymasters onside than if he actually believed it. I suspect it’s the latter though; as I said to my companion yesterday, it’s nigh-on impossible to find an artist these days who isn’t some form of demented lefty.

Over the weekend I came across the works of Swedish artist Simon Stålenhag, who depicts a world where technology peaked and then for some reason regressed, leaving behind a society at 1990s levels amid the wreckage of what was achieved before. I’m not really an arts person, but I find this sort of thing very good:

I find myself wondering what these weird machines and artifacts were, what they were used for, and why things went wrong. The pictures remind me of the Fallout series of video games, particularly New Vegas.

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The BBC has put up a wholly uninteresting article about Lily Cole’s role in a Bronte Museum. Every year or so I hear this woman’s name and have to remind myself who she is: a model-turned-businesswoman who studied History of Art at Cambridge. What’s much more interesting is the actual blog post written by one Nick Holland which started the row:

Over the last few years it has become increasingly apparent that something is rotten in the state of Haworth’s Brontë Society. Annual General Meetings have descended into open warfare between modernisers and traditionalists, but it seems now that the council is being run along the lines of BBC farce W1A. For the last two years or so, a consultancy has been advising the Brontë Society on what to do – with pathetic results.

The drive now is for one thing – attracting a young audience. Being trendy is the ultimate aim, with the Brontës themselves relegated to the sidelines. The museum has a wealth of Brontë treasures, but they are now favouring the display of artificial items they feel will appeal to a modern audience.

…

From what I heard at the time, and what I’ve seen shared on social media, many people believed these ridiculous items were authentic, when the fact was the authentic items were locked away in storage. The rot had set in.

The drive to attract younger members to the Brontë Society is a pointless one. We hear people say, echoing the consultants, that the membership is too old – ‘look at the events, look at the meetings, everyone is old!’ In today’s society it has become a crime to be old.

This could have been written about pretty much every major Western organisation or body I can think of. With the long march through the institutions complete, the cultural Marxists are now sweeping up what they didn’t capture first time around.

This is relevant, too:

I am unfortunate enough to have encountered Lily before as a few years ago I had a front row seat of a new play about Helen of Troy at Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre. Lily had the title role, and the play was so bad that it is the only one I have ever walked out of at the interval. If the acting was bad, and believe me it was, the dialogue was even worse – one line in particular was of such clunking ineptitude that it has remained with me forever: ‘women smell my power, men smell like sex’. It was when Lily delivered this line with all the passion of the announcer at Piccadilly station that I began longing for the train home.

Things rarely improve once a dose of modern feminism has been injected, do they?

This was, quite simply, the worst play I have ever seen, and the writer of it? Simon Armitage, the incumbent creative partner at the Brontë Parsonage Museum. So here we see one of the many problems with Lily’s appointment – nepotism. Nepotism is a disease particularly rampant in literature, so that the best way to get a book deal is to be a journalist, a celebrity, or a friend or relative of one. This is particularly evident at this time of year, when newspaper’s lists of the ‘books of the year’ feature writers bigging up those who share the same agent or publisher – an act known as ‘log rolling’. We now have a Brontë log roll, as Simon Armitage passes on the baton to his friend Lily Cole.

This is how #metoo campaigns start.

While I’m on the subject of the entitled middle classes, consider this from Times columnist Oliver Kamm today:

Arts subsidy from tax revenues matters. If it’s up to corporate sponsors, controversial productions won’t get made. https://t.co/VBFA9LEtky

— Oliver Kamm (@OliverKamm) June 12, 2017

There are three points to make here.

Firstly, the prime beneficiaries of state-sponsored art are the metropolitan middle classes. They are the ones who receive the cash, produce the art, work in the galleries, and go and look at it. Nepotism and cronyism is rife in the arts grant world, and the recipients often have close, personal relationships with those awarding the monies and commissioning the projects. And the poor folk being taxed to pay for it don’t watch plays and visit art galleries anyway: the middle classes like to pretend they do to justify raiding their wallets, but they don’t. In other words, when you hear a member of the middle classes – particularly if they are one of the metropolitan elite and a journalist – calling for state-sponsorship of the arts it should be interpreted as a request for the taxpayer to subsidise their own leisure pursuits.

Secondly, the idea that state funding ensures controversial projects get made is laughable. Of course this might not be apparent to somebody who lives in a liberal left bubble in London, but state-sponsored art is subject to similar ideological purity tests in Britain as it was in the Soviet Union: if it offends the sensibilities of the decision makers (who are invariably left wing), or doesn’t align with their politics, it won’t ever get any backing. What we do see, however, is absolute dross which nobody in their right mind would ever look at, let alone pay for; and political protest pieces against capitalism, the Iraq War, Donald Trump, etc. which looks as though they were done by a special needs kid. (If you want examples, spend a day over at David Thompson’s place: he’s built quite the career documenting this crap.)  When left-leaning folk talk about “controversial art” what they mean is “mind-numbingly conformist art”: the subject of Kamm’s comment is a production of Julius Caesar in which the Roman leader is dressed up as Donald Trump – and then stabbed to death, of course. Why, how edgy!

Thirdly, even if we assume controversial art doesn’t get made without state funding (which is demonstrably false: see this, for example, or this) why is that a bad thing? Does humanity need “controversial” art that nobody wants to pay for, akin to deciphering hieroglyphics (say) for the sake of advancing mankind’s knowledge? I doubt it.