news - TL:DR (That's Long, DID Read)

real horrorshow

Then there was the close-up gulliver of this beaten-up starry veck, and the krovvy flowed beautiful red. It’s funny how the colours of the like real world only seem really real when you viddy them on the screen.
Now all the time I was watching this I was beginning to get very aware of like not feeling all that well… But I tried to forget this, concentrating on the next film which came on at once, my brothers, without any break at all. This time the film jumped right away on a young devotchka who was being given the old in-out by first one malchick then another then another then another, she creeching away very gromky through the speakers and very like pathetic and tragic music going on at the same time. This was real, very real…
What it was now was the starry 1939-45 War again and it was a very blobby and liny and crackly film you could viddy had been made by the Germans. It opened with German eagles and the Nazi flag with that like crooked cross that all malchicks at school love to draw… Then you were allowed to viddy lewdies being shot against walls, officers giving the orders, and also horrible nagoy plots left lying in gutters, all like cages of bare ribs and white thin nogas. Then there were lewdies being dragged off creeching… Then I noticed, in all my pain and sickness, what music it was that like crackled and boomed on the sound-track, and it was Ludwig van, the last movement of the Fifth Symphony, and I creeched like bezoomny.” Anthony Burgess – A Clockwork Orange (1962), Penguin Modern Classics, p.70-78

In the twenty or so minutes before I had breakfast this morning, I looked at my phone and saw an armour-wearing police officer in Brussels attempt to assault a peaceful protester who was walking away from him and then saw the officer be knocked out by a less peaceful protester and left lying in the street, I saw a photograph of dozens of dead protesters in Iran in body bags, read a warning (or rumour?) that prisons in Iran are overwhelmed and so the authorities are releasing prisoners after injecting them with some kind of potassium-based agent which causes them to die within 48 hours of their release, I saw a really amazing 1984 live performance by John Cale that I’d never come across before, I saw a moronic incel-type video where a grown man was ‘educating’ young people (you’d assume men, but I think its intended audience was actually young girls) about the “Madonna-Whore complex,” though the presenter either didn’t realise or preferred not to acknowledge that Freud coined the term to describe a psychological disfunction and not to describe the natural state of humankind, I saw a funny old clip of the Young Ones, I saw an artist showing off a powerful and moving new painting, while explaining that their work was being stolen by AI companies, I read horrific details of abuse from the Epstein files, and heard so far unfounded claims about outlandishly horrific things that are imagined to be in the Epstein files, I saw/heard two outstanding actors being subjected to inadvertent racist abuse at the BAFTA awards, I saw old photos of atrocities in the Belgian Congo, a funny clip of Alan Partridge performing Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights”, I saw a short video about how Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights film is not like the book and that’s okay and another video about how Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights whitewashes Heathcliff’s ethnicity and isn’t okay, I saw an alarming report about how AI will soon cause a global water shortage, I saw a great old interview clip with the artist Francis Bacon, an AI video purporting to be the sex-trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell enjoying her freedom, a real video of dead children in Gaza, I read details from the Epstein files of a successful plot to replace the British Prime Minister Theresa May, I saw old (but less old than you’d hope) postcards showing lynchings in the Southern United States with onlookers smiling at the camera while a corpse hangs in front of them, I saw a nice old clip of Slowdive performing “Catch the Breeze” in the early 90s, saw horrendous photos of a dead Iranian child killed by the regime there, read an explanation for the slow-of-thinking of why carpet bombing Iran wouldn’t actually help the Iranian people, saw a video of the latest Russian assault on Ukraine on the fourth anniversary of Russia’s invasion of that country, read an ‘explanation’ of why the whole Ukraine war is Fake News, saw a video about how the whole Royal Family is culpable for Prince Andrew’s predatory behaviour, another video about how Andrew’s arrest is an overreaction, footage from this year of a peaceful protester being shot by ICE agents in the USA, a German metal musician telling the crowd at Wacken that his band opposes racism, homophobia and right-wing extremism, heard a prominent extreme right wing politician in the UK stating that only his party can protect the UK from right-wing extremists, saw someone suggest that AI videos of fake sexual abuse might actually be helpful in reducing real sexual abuse, read an explanation of why AI altered videos of women and children is obviously harmful, saw some incredible art by artists who were complaining about censorship on social media sites, saw but didn’t take in lots of stuff about sports, watched a great old clip of Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band, scrolled past what seemed to be disinterested videos about how great AI is, but which were actually advertisements for AI. All of this was of all of course punctuated by many, many commercials that I didn’t take in enough to remember. It was real horrorshow.

One of artist Philip Castle’s promotional paintings for Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1970)

Unlike Anthony Burgess’s Alex, who is being subjected to the fictional Ludovico Technique, a kind of aversion therapy, I was voluntarily exposing myself to this barrage of beauty and horror, and also unlike him I was free to stop it whenever I wanted to, which doesn’t of course prevent one’s brain from processing it – you can’t unsee a picture any more than you can un-ring a bell. A Clockwork Orange was written at the beginning of the 1960s, at the tail end of the 1950s paranoia about the way the media – meaning in those days mostly cinema, magazines and pop music – were fuelling juvenile delinquency. That paranoia exacerbated the generation gap which had already been made more prominent by the dividing line of World War Two. A reading of something like Hamlet suggests that there’s always been a generation gap, but it was in the 50s and 60s that it became a permanent, deliberate and indeed lucrative feature of western consumer culture.

In 1970, the year that Stanley Kubrick’s film of A Clockwork Orange was released, one of Burgess’s peers, JG Ballard wrote The Atrocity Exhibition. Nothing about social media in 2026 would have surprised Ballard. If A Clockwork Orange was partly the product of society’s fears about rock ‘n’ roll, beatnik culture youth violence and communism, The Atrocity Exhibition was incubating during a period of widespread concern that a generation of young people was growing up seeing unfiltered images of the horrific events of the Vietnam War, intercut with commercials and entertainment features as they ate their breakfast every morning.

JG Ballard’s experimental novel The Atrocity Exhibition

That was unprecedented – nearly everything is generally unprecedented it seems – and the fear was that, on the one hand these children would grow up inured to violence and horror and unable to differentiate between reality and entertainment, and on the other that their daily intake of atrocities was unconsciously being absorbed in a way that would eventually manifest itself as generational trauma. That was a natural concern at a time when it had only recently become acknowledged that World War One had left scars not just on those who survived it, but the whole of culture, and when the unprocessed horrors and consequences of World War Two were leading to a rise in neo-Nazism alongside a trivialisation of actual 1930s Nazism. Trauma begets trauma and trauma never ends, it seems, and that Vietnam experience has become the normal way of things in the social media age. The fact that some of the most powerful men in the world belong to that war-and-breakfast generation may or may not be relevant to where we are now.

So is my pre-breakfast bombardment a bad thing? Who knows, but it doesn’t seem like it could be a good thing. As Martin Amis wrote, when the (really quite tame) schlock horror movie Child’s Play 3 was being implicated in two different murder cases, “It’s nothing to boast about, but there is too much going on in my head for Chucky to gain much sway in there. Probably the worst that Chucky could do to me is to create an appetite to see more Chucky, or more things like Chucky.” He goes on to say that in the case of people already predisposed for whatever variety of reasons, to commit murder, “Chucky is unlikely to affect anything but the style of your subsequent atrocities.”* That seems right; the problem with seeing atrocities day in, day out isn’t that it wants to make normal people commit them. It is very depressing though. And the thought that my wearying daily experience might be – probably is – mirrored in the life of a deprived or abused child with nothing to look forward to but more deprivation and abuse is deeply unsettling.

*Martin Amis – The War Against Cliché (2001), p.17.

The Atrocity Exhibition contents page, the experience of scrolling through social media embodied in satirical poetry

So why do it? Partly conditioning I suppose; in my case my morning look at social media not doom-scrolling, though I’m as guilty as anyone of periods of that. In A Clockwork Orange, the presence of Beethoven’s music – the only thing that Alex uncomplicatedly loves – appearing in the films that make up his therapy is an unfortunate coincidence, but in my case the nice things – the songs, the interview and comedy clips are there because they are the kind of things I consciously search for and the algorithm that wants to keep me there therefore supplies more of them. And it fills the gaps with whatever people I follow are talking about – Iran, Gaza, copyright infringement – and whatever its owners want to push at any given moment. Which right now, seems to be right-wing politics, salacious conspiracy theories and AI.

It feels like there should be some conclusions to be drawn from all this, but I don’t know what they are; maybe it’s too soon. But it seems deeply ironic that something very close to what was envisioned sixty years ago as an extreme and inhumane form of aversion therapy should be willingly engaged in by millions of people as part of their daily routine. When Anthony Burgess gave his sociopathic but jovial teenage narrator the slang term real horrorshow to denote enthusiastic approval he knew what he was doing.

ghost cities of cyberspace

Tell me now, I beg you, where
Flora is, that fair Roman;
Archippa, and Thaïs rare,
Who the fairer of the twain?
Echo too, whose voice each plain,
River, lake and valley bore;
Lovely these as springtime lane,
But where are they, the snows of yore?¹

François Villon, Ballade des dames du temps jadis(1461)¹

My uncle died two years ago now, but his Instagram account is still there. How many dead people live on in their abandoned social media accounts? The future never seems to arrive, never really exists, but history never ends. For over a quarter of a century, social media has mirrored and shaped lives, always evolving, but leaving behind its detritus just like every other phase of civilisation. Where are the people we were sociable with on the forgotten single-community (bands, hobbies, comedy, whatever) forums and message boards of the 90s and 2000s², or the friends we made on MySpace in 2005? Some live on, ageing at an only slightly faster rate than their profile pictures (Dorian Gray would now age privately at home, his picture migrating untouched from MySpace to Facebook to Twitter to Instagram to TikTok etc), but others seem lost, vanished, dead? But still partially living on in archaic digital forms, like those sunlit American families in the home movies of the 50s and 60s.

*Club Kids 1992 – Keda, Kabuki Starshine, and Sacred Boy, Copyright Michael Fazakerley*

Twenty-five years is a long, generation-spanning time, but, just as abstract expressionist art essentially still lives on, in almost unaltered forms but no longer radical – long past the lifetimes of Rothko, Jackson Pollock and de Kooning, so the (just) pre-internet countercultural modernity of the late 80s and early 90s survives. The shock-monster-gender-fluid-glam-trash of Michael Alig and the Club Kids (captured brilliantly in the 1998 ‘shockumentary’ Party Monster and in James St James’s luridly fantastic memoir Disco Bloodbath and, less brilliantly, in the somewhat unsatisfactory 2003 movie Party Monster) was still prevalent back in the Myspace era³ and lives on and still feels current on Instagram and Tiktok and reality TV and in whatever is left of the top 40. Increasingly bulimic pop culture eats reconstituted chunks of itself and just as the 60s haunted the early 90s, bringing genuine creativity (Andrew Weatherall, to pick a name at random) and feeble dayglo pastiche (Candy Flip, to deliberately target a heinous offender), a weird and distorted (if you were there) amalgam of the 1980s and 90s haunts the 2020s, informing both the shallow dreck that proliferates everywhere and some of the genuine creativity of today.

‘I’m ready now,’ Piper Hill said, eyes closed, seated on the carpet in a loose approximation of the lotus position. ‘Touch the spread with your left hand.’ Eight slender leads trailed from the sockets behind Piper’s ears to the instrument that lay across her tanned thighs.

entering cyberspace in William Gibson’s Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988) Grafton Books, p.105.

Cyberspace, like any landscape which people have inhabited, has its lost cultures and ruins, which become ever more remote and unknowable with the passing of the years. But like Macchu Picchu or the Broch of Gurness, they retain a sense that it all meant something significant once. The not-quite barren wastelands of Geocities and Xanga, the ruined palace of MySpace – a Rosetta stone partly effaced with dead links and half forgotten languages; photobucket, imageshack, tripod, what do these mean if you’re 15? Would the old, useable interface of MySpace seem as charmingly quaint and remote to the “youth of today” as the penpal columns in the pages of ’80s music magazines do?

Looking for friends all over the world, Metal Forces magazine, 1987

Funny to think, but there was a time when Lycos, Alta Vista and Ask Jeeves were peers of Google, and when Bebo rivalled Facebook and Twitter, both now seemingly in senile phases of their development. Until very recently Facebook (Meta) and Twitter were brands that were seemingly unassailable, but empires do fall, albeit more slowly than bubbles burst.⁴And meanwhile, the users of social networks age and die and give way to generations who don’t remember them, but look on their works, just as the Incas and the Iron Age Orcadians are remembered for their monuments, if nothing else. Depressing, when you think about it; probably won’t write about history next time.

It’s funny. Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody. JD Salinger, The Catcher In The Rye, Penguin, 1958, p.220

Geocities; this is what the future used to look like

¹ translated by Lewis Wharton in The Poems of François Villon, JM Dent & Sons, 1935, p54. Not reading French – I seem to go on about that a lot – this is my favourite translation I’ve come across, although apparently it’s a pretty free one, judging by the literal – but still quite nice – one here

² the continuing success of Reddit suggests that people never really grew discontented with the interface of the Kiss online fanclub c. 2005 (etc etc)

³It’s weird to note that the Club Kids would be considered – even without the murder etc – just as outrageous today as in the late 80s, even though their aesthetic was itself put together from a mix of Bowie, gore movies, Japanese pop culture etc etc. But then – as I think I recently noted somewhere – there are people who still find the word fuck outrageous, after something like a millennium.

⁴Online and mainstream culture, even after this quarter century, remain mysteriously separate. Online news unfolds as it happens, but meanwhile in the daytime world, mainstream culture hangs on to husks even older than Geocities; publicly owned TV news shows don’t look to what’s happening now, but pore over the front pages of newspapers – yesterday’s news… today! – simultaneously being redundant and ensuring that newspaper owners’ views get publicity beyond their dwindling readership and therefore giving them an artificial sense of relevance. Which is really just about money, just as Google and Facebook are; the crumbling aristocracy of print media, its tendrils still entwined with the establishment, versus the new money, steadily buying its way in.

7.6 billion mirrors – the value of art

Aged 20/1586
James 6/By Grace of God King of Scotland

Was it a cold morning in Edinburgh in 1586 when James VI, only twenty years old, very aware of his status as a divinely-appointed monarch, but with already a lifetime’s experience of human nature and earthly politics, sat in front of Adrian Vanson to be painted? Was he nervous? His watchful eyes suggest not, but his position, though finally secure, probably didn’t feel very stable; just three years earlier he had been imprisoned by those ruling in his name, and this year, although he signed a treaty of mutual defence with England against the possibility of a Catholic invasion, his mother who he had succeeded, remained in England, alive and imprisoned. Was Vanson nervous? Or was it just another job? The King wasn’t always noted for his good temper, but the artist, who had come to Scotland from the Netherlands via London (where he had an uncle) already knew James, and had first painted some pictures for the young King in 1581, before his imprisonment and, in happier circumstances, the year before this portrait, had painted a more glamorous and light-hearted portrait of the King to be taken abroad and shown to prospective suitors. But this picture, sombre, stern even, is about power; James 6th by the grace of God King of Scotland. When we look at this painting, at this sulky looking young man, we are making some kind of connection, looking through the eyes, albeit via the hand, of a Dutch man who died around 420 years ago. The painting – even if by the standards by which art is usually judged, it’s ‘not great’ – has a personal value, one human being, recorded by another, as well as a cultural one. It tells us something about fashions, lifestyles, the way a king could be depicted in that country, in that period (for all his divinity he is not an iconic figure), class structures, religion – but what is it “worth”? What is any work of art worth?

James again, when both he and the artist were a long 9 years older

Leaving aside metaphorical, metaphysical or aphoristic answers, or going into a much more long winded but possibly worthwhile conversation about what art is (I’m going to say it’s a deliberate act of creation, but even that is arguable), let’s assume we know what art is. Googling ‘art definition’ initially brings up five presumably definitive and certainly iconic pictures, the Mona Lisa, The Starry Night (both as famous as their creators, pretty much), Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (whose creator – Picasso – is more famous than the painting), The (or rather Leonardo’s) Last Supper and A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte, which I think is probably more famous as an image than a title, and the image is more famous than its creator Seurat.
What are these paintings worth? I’m sure facts and figures are available, but this is not – despite the age of some of the paintings, about intrinsic worth; I imagine there is a basic going rate for an early 16th century Italian renaissance portrait on panel (and so forth), but that has little to do at this point with the price of the Mona Lisa. The painting would be just as good (or just as whatever you think it is) if the artist was unknown, but the value has – and always has had – a lot to do with Leonardo da Vinci and the perception of him as more than just someone who painted good portraits.

a (but not “the”) Mona Lisa, an early copy probably by one of Leonardo’s apprentices

Separating the art from the artist is always a difficult and controversial subject, but should really be easier in the visual arts that almost any other field. Yes, artists have their own ‘voice’ or visual language, but that is not the same as reading their actual words, or hearing their actual voice; and yet – because, I guess, of market forces, artists are routinely known and valued above and beyond their works and those works – even their doodles and fragments – are valued accordingly. A scrawled caricature in a margin by Leonardo (or Picasso) can be “worth” many times what a highly finished, technically brilliant oil painting by an unknown artist is. This disconnect happens because although art history is human history, “the art world” as it has existed since at least the 19th century is more like horse racing – take away the money and what you have is a far smaller number of people who are genuinely interested in how fast a horse can run.
Which is fine – but the question of what a painting (for instance) is “worth” has become the way art is engaged with popularly; somehow art, unlike sport, has never earned its own daily segment on the news and really it only appears there when the sums it raises are enormous (Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi), the sums lost are enormous (theft, fires, vandalism), or it’s part of a story that’s interesting in itself (Nazi art hoards, previously undiscovered ‘masterpieces’ etc). But the veneration of artists above art – now at the very peculiar stage at which a painting “after” (that is, not by, and possibly not even from the same era as) a famous ‘old master’ can be worth a far higher sum than a genuine painting by a lesser known ‘old master’ – masks the true value of art, which may be cultural, but is ultimately always personal.
Even without any knowledge of the King James or his life, we are able, if we can see – just by being human – to make certain assumptions about the kind of person he was, and what he may have been thinking or feeling on that day in 1586. This kind of empathy is an act of the imagination; if we are mind-reading it is ultimately our own mind we are reading – but no more so than when we meet eyes with a stranger on the street or on a train. And if looking at Vanson’s King James is – because we can find out these facts – a connection with both an immigrant living in what must have in many ways been an unfamiliar country, and with a young man who had recently attained some kind of power, not only over his own life, but over a country, at the cost of his mother, then what of a painting like the Mona Lisa? It is, regardless of how compromised it has become by fame, monetary value and endless theorising, a link with the mind and ideas – and hand – of Leonardo and a kind of communication with the sitter herself. She was probably Lisa Gioconda, she may have already been dead, but although I stand by all of the above, what I seem to have suggested is that a painting is a kind of code to be broken or a museum to be explored and unpacked. These things enrich our understanding of or connection with a painting, but they don’t make it. What makes art so fascinating – but also why it doesn’t have five minutes on the news every night – is because it’s so individual. It’s (VERY) possible to not care in the slightest about the outcome of, say a rugby or football match, but the final score is the final score, regardless of how anyone feels about the quality of the game or the skill of the players. It would not be satisfactory somehow to have a football match where no points were awarded and the outcome of the game depended on how you feel about it. But in art it is completely respectable – and I don’t think wrong – to say, (To paraphrase the great surrealist painter Leonora Carrington); if you really want to know what the Mona Lisa’s smile means, think about how it makes you feel.

Composition in White, Black, Red and Grey (1932) by Marlow Moss

This might seem like reducing art to the level of ‘human interest’, but what else is there? The choice of figurative paintings with a possible narrative element is a matter of taste and makes the human element unavoidable. But if we feel intense emotion when looking at a Mark Rothko painting, a sense of peace and calm from a Mondrian, Marlow Moss or Hans Arp picture, or exhilaration in front of a Peter Lanyon work, the fact remains that ‘we feel’ (or ‘we don’t feel’) is the common denominator. Viewers through the ages who have detected echoes of divine order and harmony in the works of Piero Della Francesa or Fra Angelico have only definitely detected them with any certainty within their own perceptions, which is not to say that they aren’t feeling something the artist himself felt. There’s a philosophical, ‘tree falling in the woods’ point here; is Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’ a work of emotional and artistic intensity after the gallery lights go out? Or is it more like a kind of magic spell or booby trap, triggered only when a spectator is there to observe it?

That said, figurative art, especially portraiture, is – however many layers of information are contained in it – relatively easy to ‘understand’ on a basic level; ie if we can see, we can see what it is. It is the understanding and appreciation that remains entirely individual and subjective. Conceptual art – shockingly still around in much the same forms as it has been since the 60s – is, despite its apparently interpretation-inviting name, less transparent. This means that, unlike something we instantly recognise, it’s – initially at least – only as powerful as its visual impact. And in fact, whereas familiarity invites interpretation in traditional art, it tends to – on a popular level at least – repel it in conceptual art. The controversy surrounding classic media frenzy conceptual pieces like Carl Andre’s pile of bricks, or Tracy Emin’s unmade bed is because everyone knows exactly what a pile of bricks, or a sleeping bag or a bed is, and they don’t feel the need or desire to think further about it and if they do they feel – no doubt wrongly – that they are putting more thought into it than the artist did.

That is the ‘philistine’ response and it’s easy to have sympathy with; personally, I don’t mind wondering what a conceptual work means, but if I get no kind of emotional or cerebral response from looking at it in the first place then I’d rather the artist had just written their ideas down. This is me and my deficiency though – if Maurizio Cattelan put his heart and soul into taping that banana to the wall – or even if he just enjoyed doing it – who am I or anyone else to devalue that? And if whoever paid that much money for it is getting some similar experience, or just the satisfaction of being the owner of the most expensive banana in the world – then that’s hard to argue with too.

Portrait of an unknown woman by an unknown artist c.1725

I don’t think it devalues art – quite the opposite – to think of it as a form of communication between individuals, even if as mentioned above, it is really communication with the one person you will ever know with any certainty – yourself. What I seem to be saying (which I may not entirely agree with) is that art is a mirror. Take this beautiful painting from around 1725 by an unknown artist of an unknown lady. To me, this is a real connection with this unknowable person – but again, only as unknowable as any face that passes you in the street never to be seen again – she was a real person, sitting in a room, around 300 years ago, probably wearing something she liked or that told the world how she wanted to be seen, being painted by someone – and by 1725 it could have been a man or a woman – with whom they may have been engaging, impatient, chatty… We can only guess and extrapolate from the picture. That extrapolation will be different every time depending on the viewer and their own knowledge, not just of history, but of people and experience. If 7.6 billion people look at the picture it becomes in essence 7.6 billion pictures, 7.6 billion mirrors.

That is not to say that the picture is ‘better’ than Cattelan’s banana. If I came across the banana taped to a wall anywhere except an art fair would I see it as art? In a way yes, in the sense that it is literally artificial – not the fruit itself, but its location would clearly be a deliberate, human act and not – as a nail in a wall might be – something that could feasibly have a purely utilitarian meaning. It would be puzzling – far more so in fact that in an art fair where the (surely expected by the artist) first reaction of most non-art world people would surely be the eye-rolling ‘so this is ‘art’ is it?’ Whether it would be intriguing, or thought-provoking seems less likely, except insofar as provoking thoughts like ‘who put that banana there and why?’ Which I guess is perfectly valid – and in its own way a genuine connection of the viewer and artists’ minds, though not something that would probably take up much brain space after the initial wondering. But then, many – even most, people (whether or not they would approve of it as art vs the banana) might just as well look at the woman in her fine dress 300 years ago, or the young King James, and pass on without even wondering anything at all.