In art news this month, a Brazilian artist named Gil Vicente has
rocketed to international fame by exhibiting, as part of the Sao
Paulo Art Biennial, a series of drawings depicting himself in the
act of assassinating various world leaders and ex-world leaders,
including the pope, Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain, and
(inevitably, I suppose) former president George W. Bush. According
to the London Daily Telegraph, “The series, called
Inimigos (Enemies), is meant to highlight alleged crimes
for which the leaders have been directly or indirectly responsible
by imagining that they are being made to pay the price.” Or, as Mr.
Vicente himself puts it, “Because they kill so many other people,
it would be a favor to kill them, understand? Why don’t people in
power and in the elite die?” The answer, if we pretend for a moment
that he really wants an answer, is of course that Mr. Vicente is
not an actual assassin but only an artist, which is to say (these
days) a fantasist whose job it is to produce the sort of fantasy
which will resonate sufficiently with the world’s media culture to
win him fame and fortune. With the carefully calculated shock of
his assassination drawings he has clearly found such a fantasy —
though Nicholson Baker beat him to it by six years in the case of
President Bush, with his novel Checkpoint.
Ho hum. There is a manufactured quality to the “outrage” of such
essentially conceptual art — increasingly the only art we have.
Like Martin Kippenberger’s crucified frog in Zuerst die
Fuesse (Feet First) or Jesus receiving oral sex in
“Misadventures of the Romantic Cannibals” by Enrique Chagoya (no
relation to Francisco Goya) which, together with similar rubbish, I
keep up with through the regular bulletins of Bill Donohue’s
Catholic League — an organization almost Christ-like in its
willingness to take upon itself a perpetual state of outrage on our
behalf — this is so obviously created only to provoke that you’ve
got to wonder at the gullibility (if that’s what it is) of those
who continue to enrich both the provokers and the media’s
messengers of their provocation by insisting on being provoked by
it. It’s almost enough to make you sympathize with the Muslims
whose violent ways — for all the tragic harm they cause to the
innocent and artists like Molly Norris, the cartoonist for the
Seattle Weekly whose bright idea for an “Everybody Draw
Mohammed Day” has ended with her disappearance (she has “gone
ghost”) for security reasons — at least must prevent a great many
talentless and pipsqueak “artists” from making a living out of
becoming professional blasphemers.
One interesting thing about Mr. Vicente’s assassination art is
its residual connection, however tenuous, to reality. It would not
exist at all if the figures of the fantasy assassin’s victims were
not recognizable as real people, and people whose actual
assassination would be even more sensational news than that of an
otherwise obscure Brazilian artist’s simply fantasizing about it.
The recognizable part of the drawings must also stand in for such
reality as their political fantasy can claim. We know that there
are such people as the queen and the pope and President Bush — Mr.
Vicente’s other imaginary victims include President Lula da Silva
of Brazil and former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan — even though
the idea of them as mass murderers is ridiculous to anyone with an
even slightly firmer tether to reality. So to characterize them,
however, identifies the artist as a worker in two different kinds
of fantasy simultaneously: both the artistic kind and the political
kind. The two depend on one another. Without pundits who have
already found their own path to a mostly limited sort of fame
through calling, or coming close to calling, the former president a
murderer, the artist who did so would merely be a lunatic of no
news value to the media.
When Shelley (following Dr. Samuel Johnson) called his fellow
poets “the unacknowledged legislators of the world” he was pointing
to what we would call, in present-day terms, the phenomenon of high
culture leading low culture. It was the poets, artists, and
philosophers of the Enlightenment and the Romantic movement who
were pointing the way — and a narrow and difficult way it often
was — for the progressives of their day engaged in the humbler
arts of journalism and political propaganda. Nowadays, the
relationship between politicians and publicists on the one hand and
the more prestigious kind of arts on the other has been reversed.
It is not the high end of artistic production that gets converted
into politics but the low end of politics that gets converted into
such artistic production as we still have. Crude as the leftism of
the Nation or the New York Review of Books often
is, it has so far stopped short of assassination fantasies and
other such monkeyshines, so far as I know. That kind of thing is
left to the artists, like Mr. Vicente, or novelists, like Nicholson
Baker, or filmmakers like Michael Moore, who have hoovered up the
leavings of their thought along with other pop cultural odds and
ends and so found a great way to recycle them as allegedly artistic
gestures to titillate, frighten, or shock their more sober fellow
citizens.
We must have known this was happening, I guess, when
“outrageous,” “insane,” “sick,” and (of course) “bad” became
synonyms for “good.” But such shocking reversals couldn’t have
happened if art had not already been reduced to gestures that
nobody expected to express anything but raw feeling, if that. A few
spoke out against Mr. Baker’s assassination fantasy back in 2004,
but I doubt that many will bother protesting against Mr. Vicente’s
— except maybe in Brazil, where the outgoing President Lula is
still said to be immensely popular. For the same reason, Tipper
Gore’s now long-ago crusade against raunchy pop and rap lyrics
seems like a quaint relic of the 1980s — even to most
conservatives, I imagine. The lyrics are no less raunchy, but
people have grown used to them and now take them seriously only as
art, insofar as art can be taken seriously anymore, and not as
outrage.
SPEAKING OF TAKING THEM seriously as art, a year or so ago I
wrote — following some protests from readers about my censure of
the New York Times for treating the video game Grand Theft
Auto as a work of art (see “Grand Larceny” in The American
Spectator of June 2008) — asking if anyone could show me a
case for treating rap or hip hop “poetry” on a level with, well,
real poetry. I was reacting to a negative and typically unhelpful
review in the New York Times Book Review of a book by an
English professor called Adam Bradley titled Book of Rhymes:
The Poetics of Hip Hop, and none other than Professor Bradley
himself wrote to me, sending me a copy of his book. As he is
obviously a charming and intelligent as well as a generous man, I
wish I could say I had been persuaded by him that the rappers he
admires — including Rakim, Jay-Z, and Tupac Shakur, for instance,
who (he says) “deserve consideration alongside the giants of
American poetry” — were the unacknowledged legislators of our own
era. Or even that they were as witty, profound, or linguistically
inventive as your average giant of American poetry. But although
the professor makes an interesting if not inarguable case that the
rhythms, rhymes, and other formal features of the hip hoppers’
verse are not utterly discontinuous with the traditions of English
poetry, he has hardly a word to say about its content which,
judging from his own examples, is never anything other than
boastful accounts of the rappers’ own auto-inebriation or
intoxication, their sexual exploits, their (mostly fanciful)
violent acts, their cars, and their jewelry.
That’s good enough for artistic work these days, I guess. Andy
Warhol was in this, as in so many other ways, the pioneer, the
first to see how art could become parasitic on the publicity
industry and the trashiest sort of popular culture to the benefit
of both. Art continued to enjoy the cachet it had retained from the
days when it actually had something of importance to say while
shedding some of its own derivative glory upon the Campbell’s soup
tins and the repeated silk-screen images of Marilyn or Liz. Without
Warhol, there would never have been a Mad Men to enliven
our Sunday evenings with the conceit, which even he might have
found shocking, of advertising (N.B., not rap) as the great
American art form. Now it’s the spin doctors and publicists and
their media offshoots who are the unofficial, though hardly
unacknowledged, legislators of the world. They lead the way that
both the titular legislators — and magistrates — and artists like
Matthew Weiner, inventor of Mad Men, are content to
follow, ever in awe of their monkey-tricks. Well, why not? These
are the nearest things we have to contemporaneously produced
artistic beauty anymore.
