John Fitzpatrick

I’m going to chime in on the conversation about ugliness and degeneracy in art. The relentless nihilism and puerile fascinations in contemporary art keep sending the same message: give up, there’s no beauty, nothing to live for. I find it deeply depressing. We seem to be elevating artists who lack the talent to achieve transcendence. Unable to produce or understand it, their work becomes a resentful rejection: “If I can’t have it, then nobody can.” I’m tired of these mediocre deviants sucking up all the oxygen in our culture. It’s everywhere and utterly mundane. It lacks the excitement of breaking taboos because it doesn’t; it plays to permissible, even approved ideas. None of it is new, and it certainly isn’t dangerous anymore. It pays to be unoriginal and unable to access the talent that comes with ability to focus, critical thinking and sensitivity to beauty. I know this because I lived with Simon Henwood, an artist who doggedly pursued transcendence. Early success with his giant gouache-on-paper pictures of teenagers wasn’t enough, so he taught himself to paint with oils. The painstaking process of building layer upon layer of translucent colour creates pictures of multi-dimensional space and form that simply can’t be reproduced in print, much less with AI. You need to stand in front of the painting; you may not understand why it affects you, but it will. He found such work difficult to push into the art scene because he didn’t have a story, a why, or a cynical bone in his body. He ended up as creative director for Kanye West, then Rihanna and Alicia Keys. He should have been at home in the attic working on his paintings, but he was thrown into a world of bullshit he simply could not handle, and the stress killed him. He was an oddball, and his favourite thing as a kid was his Golliwogs. He collected all the Robertson’s Jam gollies and had a cuddly toy which was his favourite. I still have these objects. I also have a giant and very affectionate portrait of a golly that I have to hang in a shady upstairs landing, lest it be seen by visitors. A glimpse of this oil painting on one of my Instagram reels is regularly brought up as evidence of my “fascist leanings” or whatever. Even if I didn’t like the painting (I do), what am I supposed to do with it? Destroy it? The man is dead and won’t be painting anymore. Of course a naked white woman on her knees with bruises, blood and excrement around her arse is institutionally approved and breaks no boundaries, but Simon’s happy golly with its hand hovering over its crotch is totally taboo. Taboo still exists. It’s taboo to be Christian, to be conservative; contemporary art won’t touch a great many things for fear of cancellation. So no, I don’t buy that this is brave or interesting. I know exactly what’s unacceptable in the arts. I’ve paid my own price for believing in biological reality, another huge taboo. I’m now very much an outsider myself. I think it’s perfectly descriptive to call these people regime artists, and the regime wants degeneracy and hopelessness. Why is another question entirely, but I doubt it has to do with art.