The Benefit Worker

I heard the other day that the painting of the Benefit Worker by Lucien Freud is expected to reach 17 million (something) at auction. There was interview with the famous model for this painting. The interviewers on the BBC were saying how much more attractive the real woman was from the model. "You are prettier than the painting". Can we not escape this trite observation? Who cares? The painting is magnificent. She is beautiful in the painting. But, maybe, as Marcel Duchamp once said, she has a beauty that is devoid of the notion of beauty. I feel that we are so bound by conventional notions of beauty that we don`t look any more. The plastic faces of CNN, the plastic people who are striving for beauty are missing something. The Benefit Worker in the painting is as beautiful as the rolling hills of the Dales, the cragginess of a mountain side. What she is not is an airbrushed vacuum.

True of False?

I love Cezanne. For me he is the great father of modern painting (as he is for many artists). The apples of Cezanne are THE apples. By this I mean that they are not real apples they are the essence, the "last" from which all other apples come. They seem to possess a form that is beyond explanation. They hover and wobble, they curve in space and have a weight that seems to pull them into both a metaphysical and quantum place. And then there is colour. Colour that screams at you. "I am an apple but not as you know it. Apples are made from me". But there is one very curious aspect to these apples. I do not know whether this true or false but I have read that due to Cezanne´s painstacking way of working, the fruit that he wanted to paint went rotten before he had finished. He therefore had wax fruit made so that he could spend the hours he needed to finish the work. This raises an interesting question. When I look at this fruit I am looking at a painting of wax fruit transformed into the essential fruit. Strange and wonderful.

Dylan gets Pulitzer

At last. I would like to argue that Bob Dylan is the greatest artist of the twentieth century. I shall try to expand on this claim. I cannot be considered to be a Bob-Cat in the true sense of the term. I do not have every detail of his life etched on my memory, I do not have every version of every song that he has written over the last forty years and I do not sit and try to interpret all of his words. However, I do love his work and what is more I think he has a genuine claim to be the most important artist of the twentieth century. There are many reasons for this. The twentieth century was the period in which popular culture was created (or at least became recognised as being significant). It was also the century of popular revolution and an explosion in methods of reproduction. The century saw art movements such as surrealism, cubism, pop, and minimalism all flourish in the world of the visual arts. In music Stravinsky, Stockhausen and others radically changed the way in which we thought about discord. In poetry and writing James Joyce, TS Eliot, Jack Kerouac and many others changed the way in which the word and the idea of story was presented. In popular music Elvis created the mega-star, in painting Salvador Dali created the character of the artist. And then along came Bob Dylan. A gawky teenager with a mind like a sponge soaking up all of these different influences mixed with a cynical astringency that hit the nerve of many of the youth of his time. But it was more than this that he achieved. He created a bridge between the notion of pop culture (as perhaps defined by Elvis) and high-brow culture. I do not believe that there is anyone else in the twentieth century who can lay claim to this extraordinary achievement. He has continually tried to change, never comfortable with being boxed in by others interpretations. This cannot be said of both Dali and Picasso. Dylan explores the domain of being human. He is neither a prophet nor a saint but if the twentieth century has an artist who embraces the cultural achievements of the century in one body of work, for me this is Dylan.

Flesh in the Age of Plastic Surgery

Lucien Freud paints us as we really are. I do not give any credence to the notion of him as a post-Freudian painter. Indeed, I would say that he is the opposite of this. It seems to me that the importance of Lucien Freud is that he is the painter of flesh as independent of psycho-analysis. These people are mirrors to ourselves. Maybe it is because I am reaching fifty that I see in these bodies what I see in the mirror. Freud has escaped the Greek and Roman notions of perfection in human form. These lumps, creases, bumps are us. Maybe some people feel uneasy in their presence as they all too convincingly portray our frailties and yet I also feel that they pass dignity to us. These are not air-brushed humans but living and breathing people captured on canvas. I once had the pleasure of briefly talking to Lucien Freud. I so wanted to tell him how much I loved his strange paintings. Most of all I wanted to tell him that he made me feel real.

Are the Diamonds Real?

Are the Diamonds Real? This question comes from seeing images of the skull (For the Love of God) by Damien Hirst. It strikes me that the greatest irony of this piece would be for the diamonds to be fake. It is interesting that according to one report I have heard, the sale of this piece for about 50 million (UKS) is "shrouded in mystery". Maybe because the diamonds are fake. Under-pining this is a question about the art within the piece. To my mind it does not really work if the diamonds are real. Why make them real? Art is artifice. The point about art is that it should hit us at an angle. "For the love of God" suggests many things about the time we live and the times before. Money, greed, the inevitability of death, various religious connotations etc. but if the skull is also about the notion of something being fake when it is presented as being real then I think it becomes more interesting. An art critic who shall remain nameless wrote about the experience of seeing and being close to the skull. His words reflected a rather grotesque slavishness, not to the art or the artist but to the money ostensibly built into this piece. For my money, I hope it is a fake.