Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets

Portrait of the Artist as a Scalawag

One corner full of them is the art world. Take Heatwave.

Heatwave is a Barbie doll inside a rotisserie oven, lit with an orange glow, so that Barbie is basking and baking. Another favorite is Sunbeams, where the doll is draped over a Sunbeam mixer with her posterior jutting into the air and the whisks of the Sunbeam whirring closely.

Defending his art in the The Telegraph,⁹ Forsythe reminded us of another thing that grubbing for money is better than. Gimmicky and foolish, Heatwave is the sort of thing you would expect from today's culture today.

“When I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun,” said Hermann Göring once.¹⁰ The German aviator was roasting in hell before Forsythe was even born, so he never had a chance to see Heatwave. But had he seen it—and had you been present at the show—you probably would have wanted to duck.

The artist in Europe today has a special status, somewhere between a Grand Dragon in the Ku Klux Klan and a carny for Barnum and Bailey. The artist is a rebel who gets invited to all the best parties. He is a bit actor on the margins, taken seriously by the rich and the powerful. He is an icon buster, peddling his own shoddy image for worship and glorification. And he is a born genius, with no visible talent, except for self‐promotion.

In short, the artist is a humbug.

Artists have always been critics of the conventions of the day. When Dante drew his picture of Hell, he made sure to put into it the leading citizens ...