Friday 29th of March 2024

arts under attack from the rats...

art under attack...

This morning, there was a bad smell in the kitchen. I guessed that one of the rats that lodge in the vicinity had died under the floorboards. Despite having a firm rule and tons of rat poison in the roof of the house, as decreed by the Lordess of the Mannor, THEY still venture up there when it rains. There is even a sign: ”No rats allowed”, but they are illiterate, like terrorists. From time to time one dies of old age. The funny thing is that rats is an anagram of arts. So who can blame the blithers for roaming through the unsold canvas storage area in the attic? Art, like being a rat, is a hard business. Survival is dependant of doing other things, like being a head-washer of pot and pans in a Newtown restaurant kitchen and eating scraps. I’m too old for this caper. I do cartoons instead and live on the smell of an oil rag with a cask of red ned on the side.

So this morning, there was a bemoan from the Gadfly about the arts being infected by the corportates controlling the boards of art galleries and museums. The Gadfly, aka Richard Ackland, had a coffee (I guess) with Judith White at the Potts Point Bookshop. Judith White is one of Australia’s seriously renowned artist who has written a book: Culture Heist: Art versus Money. She had also been the executive director of the Gallery Society of New South Wales, until recently (booted out?).

Here one has to state, from my personal experience and invalid opinion, that art has always been the decision of who has money to buy. The decision of what art means has been left to the king rats. Art for the “modern” artist is in the stylistic expression of delusion, while art for the rich man is what another rich else’s want. So the clever idea for a sell is to pit two business persons or more to acquire something the value of which can only go up. But they are more cunning than rats and will collude. Arts and “culture”? In the west, especially Europe, art has always been the investment of the rich, especially the nobility and kings, and of the religious manipulators with funny hats. The Western “culture” is based on depicting “kings on horses”, glorious battles of whatever and Jesus Christ pinned to a cross. Go to Europe and all the museums are full of the stuff. The “new art” like Picasso and Dali have only become mainstream because there was cash to be made in conjunctions with the new architecture which decreed that houses should look like flat white and glass boxes. 

Private gallery owners could make some cash by selling Andy Warhol’s cans of soup you could buy at the super market for 20 cents, but for a zillion bux on canvas. It’s all in the manipulation of the psyche and extrapolated acceptance of what the rats want us to have -- I mean to pay for. I’ve heard that Andy himself was not a barrel of laugh. That’s my problem. I tend to see art from a satirical point of view: mercenary and facile in the stylistic copied repeats. If I paint something for myself, I really need to invest in an enormous amount of energy to limit the funny bone damage and extract a unique intellectual universal message.

There is a social price to pay with errant art. This is why the masters of public office try as hard as they can to control the value and what is acceptable as arts. They send their captains of industry to control the direction of art illusions that should not stray from the masters profits and purposes. This is why Brandis, without knowing what he was doing as ratty Minister for the Arts, got involved in chosing the value of art “excellence”. 

So the Gadfly recalls an incident when the notorious art specialist Brian Adams went to the information desk of the AGNSW and trying to get directions to an exhibtion, he was asked to spell the name “Nolan” by an ignorant attendant. Bugger. Sidney Nolan is one of the most famous artists in Assieland. 

This is the problem with “die demokratische Kunst”. One needs to wear lapel labels. In the days of kings and courts, the next arrivant would be announced by a maitre de ceremony who would know everything including the celebrationary purpose of the fireworks: “Milord Richard de Acklandia and the Baroness de Gadfly”... Thus would be introduced the famous Lord of the Law. 

But according to one of Gus’ many unreliable sources (Gus has more spies than the CIA and more bugs in pots plants than the NSA around town), die demokratischen Reihen took over, and, at the Ivy desk, Richard had to spell his own name in order to get his lapel label for the Journo Freedom Dinner. The ignonimity of not being seen on TV anymore. The ignorant rats win again.

 

Gus Leonisky

Your local art Kritik

 

Please read: gonski 0.5...

 

a famous piece...

Picture (very small extract shown) at top by Gus. 

 

Der erwachte Herkules vertreibt die Pygmäen

Cranach der Jüngere, Lucas (1515-1586)|Maler

1551

Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister

Inventarnummer

Gal.-Nr. 1944

Material und Technik

Öl auf Lindenholz

Maße

188 x 261 cm

Objektbezeichnung

Gemälde

http://skd-online-collection.skd.museum/de/contents/show?id=247515

 

To Gus, "the little people" look too much like real people, aka politicians, kings and nobility of the time, that the artist, Lucas Cranach der Jüngere, chose to incorporate in a satirical manner. I could be wrong.

 

From STAATLICHE KUNSTASAMMLUNGEN DRESDEN

yes I know... the bloody rats...

Police in the Indian state of Bihar, where alcohol was outlawed last April, have accused rats of decimating the majority of the stash of booze confiscated over the past year – over 40,000 cases, or about 900,000 liters.

According to the Hindu newspaper, senior superintendent of police of state capital Patna, Manu Maharaj, was informed of the disappearance of contraband from storage in a meeting this week, and was initially skeptical about how rats could have gained access to sealed glass bottles. His subordinates told him that the rodents chewed through the bottle caps, before glugging the drink.

read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/387291-india-alcohol-ban-rats/

vale charles... life is a piece of cheese...

Australian artist Charles Blackman has died just days after his 90th birthday, after a long struggle with dementia.

Blackman, most famous for his Schoolgirl drawings and Alice in Wonderland series of paintings, died at 5:30am Monday morning according to his son, Auguste Blackman. “Charles painted our dreams,” Auguste Blackman told the Australian. “The dream of his life was the dream of all our lives.”

Blackman was part of a radical set of artists in post-war Melbourne who gained influence in the Australian art scene through the 1950s and 60s, largely through their rejection of the growing trend in abstraction and expressionism in art.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/aug/20/charles-blackman-au...

 

I met Charles a few times in the early 1980s... 

 

Read from top.

the rain in spain...

 

It is believed that the dead animals, which were found in debris in water and sand along the popular beaches, were washed ashore after heavy rains struck the region last week.

Yellow flags were raised on ten beaches in Barcelona on Sunday after dozens of dead rats washed up on the Spanish coast, El Periódico daily reports.

In videos posted on social media, the corpses of rodents are seen floating along the seashore in debris. Some of them have accumulated in the sands of packed beaches, presumably because of storms and flash floods that hit the city on Friday.

 

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/europe/201808201067328407-dead-rats-wash-upon-ba...

 

Read from top... There are more than 7 billion rats on the planet — one for each one of us... Ratus ratus are the rodent equivalent of the ape homo sapiens...