The Fifth Column

Michael Colhaze

February 4, 2010 

How must it feel to pimp for a slovenly whore, doped and ravaged and destroyed by her abductors, who was once the happiest, most innocent, most beautiful girl in town?

He is Baselitz, a name tuberose, not only acoustically, with dirty connotations. He is Germany’s foremost Modern artist. He is one of those who accepted the thirty pieces of silver and turned them into a heap of gold. He is a well-received guest at the London Royal Academy of Arts, which strikes you as odd since the Brits and the Krauts, never mind what they tell you in Brussels, regard each other warily. He is loved by the country’s foremost gazettes, like the FAZ, or the SZ, or the old pansy ZEIT. He can be found in Tate Modern. He owns a Giant Schnauzer with a degree in psychology who handles his castration complex, the foremost source of his creative inspiration. He produces his masterpieces watching Big Brother on TV while reclining on a sofa next to a canvas previously splattered with an undisclosed amount of colours on which he diverts an occasional glance and then arranges artistically by means of an Italian bread roll using his left hand only. Once dry, he signs it with his illustrious name, waits until that one is dry as well, and hangs it up upside-down.  

This, the upside-down, has made him famous.

Ever repentant Germany, foremost bastion of politically correct forces, where, rather en passant and widely unnoticed, book burnings and show trials have been reintroduced and hefty jail sentences are handed down to those who dare to insist on their constitutional rights and challenge the official credo, is an El Dorado for those in Modern art with the necessary connections. It is less so for the ordinary citizen, because here the crunch has shown its ugly claw as well, particularly since seventy percent of the country’s production is earmarked for export and thus a recipe for disaster once the cash flow begins to stagger. The lawmakers and law enforcers feel uneasy as well, wondering in moments of quiet reflection if the hate laws they have so carelessly set afloat or applied might come back and bite them in the backside, once the hour of reckoning arrives. Like in Nuremberg not long ago. Or in London right now, where the country’s supreme PC warriors, though not their minders, are accused of invading Iraq without the shred of a legal basis, killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people, while the folks from the International Court of Law in The Hague are popping their garters for fear of being saddled with a trove of their own kind.

As for the Baselitz’ meteoric ascent on the murky skies of Modern art, the usual machinations were set in motion. Among thousands of candidates, both academics or naturals, all waiting eagerly for a hint from the established Modern art Mafia, now and then one is chosen. Since he is, just like his many contenders, about as gifted as a bedbug, nobody with a sane mind would assume that considerations of artistic merit ever played a part. What counts is a rigorous talent for self-representation, unfettered by the smallest grain of aesthetics or ethics, an inborn and unlimited vulgarity, and the stated objective to be the most ruthless Judas Iscariot to the Fine Arts that ever set foot on our sacred earth.

As to the operational level, it works more or less in the following way. One of the great Modern art dealers, a highly visible member of the aforementioned Mafia, contacts a few highly invisible godfathers of the same organisation, strikes a deal, and the Baselitz (or anyone like him) is launched. Surprised himself by the sudden onslaught, goes the latter into high gear and produces twenty masterpieces a day, all of which fetch prices that increase breathtakingly fast. The press is informed, the usual queens and ladies from the art section do their job and tell the astonished aficionado in exalted crap-art parlance what it is all about, and a new star is born.

Next he has the so far unheard-of idea to present his work hanging upside-down, a clear sign of sublime genius if there ever was one, and prices go through the roof. Retrospectives in the artist’s honour are arranged, Modern art sanctuaries like the MOMA or Tate Modern buy his crap. Even the occasional sausage-and-ham manufacturer is impressed and lays out a sack of ill-gotten money for one of his things.

Now all this isn’t obviously any news and serves only to cast a quick glance at the antics of Modern-art-Quislings who are either in direct league with the art Mafia or have sold their souls, if not to the Devil, then at least to one of the Mafia’s representatives. Which doesn’t make much of a difference in any case.  

Baselitz is perhaps best known for painting his motifs upside down as a strategy to free the subject matter from its content.

Royal Academy of Arts  

The act of turning his paintings upside down endows them with instant drama.

The Times, London  

His work is painted and displayed upside down to emphasize its surface rather than its subject matter.

Britannica Online Encyclopaedia  

Upside down is his way to liberate representation from content.

Gargosian Gallery  

The butcher-painter’s  upside-down paintings reinvented art.

Royal Academy of Arts  

In his paintings he describes the chaos from which order might, or might not come.

National Galleries of Scotland  

Baselitz’  main interest is the investigation of his emotional and artistic attitude towards his own work.

L. Ferrari 

Baselitz’ new watercolours are the perception of time as a ray stationed on a linear axis supported by the notion of there being a fixed, infinite future.

David Nolan  

Just a few examples of the dumbest, saddest, most hilarious travesty since the invention of letters. How is it humanly possible that an educated and intelligent person can write anything like this and still face him- or herself in a mirror? How must it feel to pimp for a slovenly whore, doped and ravaged and destroyed by her abductors, who was once the happiest, most innocent, most beautiful girl in town?  

If I remember well, it was Germaine Greer in her callous and so revealing clobber of Robert Hughes who is, with some reservations, one of the few vertical men in the art business. Smart money, she called it. New York real estate tycoons who laid out six million greenbacks at a Sotheby’s auction for a rotting old shark. Put there in the first place by that human crablouse Damien Hirst. Well, we know by now how that money was made. In fact, we knew it all along, but until recently did not dare to call a spade a spade for fear of being labelled racists, or downright Nazis at that. As for the poor shark, one can only presume that it was dropped immediately after arrival into the Hudson river where it caused considerable stink before disintegrating completely. Because it is simply inconceivable that someone can be so absolutely barbarous and keep something so absolutely hideous in his living room. Or is it?   

My son is just about to enter one of Europe’s more hallowed Fine Art Academies. To avoid the Installations, Representations, Videolations, Fecalisations, all exhaustively underpinned by Marx, Gramsci, Adorno or Foucault, has he opted for Comics, with the possibility to develop a sound base in realistic drawing that might serve him well in case things get better and he decides one day to take up the torch. Not everybody is that lucky.    

Take a young person who has absolved an academy, or studied History of Arts, or journalism. So many dreams, so many high expectations. Then comes the crude reality, namely the realization that nearly the entire art establishment, including academies, the press, the art councils and what not are controlled by a Mafia with a rigorous codex that allows no dissent. Which leaves only two choices: to be upright and brave and turn the back on the whole pandemonium and face an uncertain future, or to join the Fifth Column, that veritable thorn in our side, and accept Jewish money, billions of it. And become willing helpers for a gang of Mafiosi who seem to have been forever deprived of Beauty’s divine joy, and therefore hate us like hell, and thus try to destroy what they can’t have.

 

If a present-day mammon acrobat can siphon billions from a given economy with impunity, it is an inspired guess that to him the hundred million bucks he lays out for one of Jackson Pollocks’ hogwash canvasses are only peanuts. The transaction, widely disseminated in the Wikipedia and similar agitprop annals as the highest price ever paid for a painting, is of course only another ruse to make us believe that hogwash art must necessarily be the logical continuation of our great Christian-European art, simply in view of the sum involved. A sum so astronomical and obscene that any hardworking citizen would need thousands of years to accumulate it. But it seems the ruse has backfired, even turned into an indictment. Because what once provoked only tired disgust, has now fired a cold and implacable anger.

Michael Colhaze (email him) is a pen name.