One man’s name seems to be coming up with surprising regularity during this current economic whirlwind. That’s the author of ‘The Bonfire of the Vanities’ Tom Wolfe. His coining of the term ‘Masters of the Universe’ to describe the Wall Street investment bankers who bestrode Manhattan in the mid 1980’s devouring all around them like King Kong colossi, has once more been pressed into service thanks to the small number - 250 or so - of extremely avaricious men who have let their egos run away with them and in doing so ruined the World’s banking system.
But ironically it is not only Wolfe’s 80’s satire that feels so prescient. His novel ‘A Man in Full’, examining the absurdities of the new American art market and its collusion with big business, also feels more than a little relevant in the light of the well-timed if highly dubious open auction of Damien Hirst’s left-overs at Sotheby’s two weeks ago, the day the stock market crisis finally hit. And just to complete the trilogy, it could be said (and don’t get me started on her - if nothing else, the Prime Time talk-show awaits) that Sarah Palin’s attack on Barack Obama’s tenuous links with former member of ‘The Weatherman’, Bill Ayers somehow echoes Wolfe’s denunciation of the half-baked liberals cosying up to Huey Newton and ‘The Black Panthers’ in his essay ‘Radical Chic and the Mau-Mau Gang’.
All these ideas seemed to dovetail into last night’s private view of an acquaintance’s first Art show. A self-proclaimed artist is always something to see (to paraphrase John Lennon). Much like the Victorian hobbyists, anyone who on a first outing prices each piece somewhere north of a grand, must be said to have a somewhat inflated sense of themselves. Family life is put on hold, often to some cost, while the artist struggles with his demons, determined to make something useful of their life, to make a mark, to lay claim to their own existence. It reminded me of Jackson Pollock, another painter who dabbled in the abstract. But these paintings, unlike Pollock’s, exhibited no emotion, no rage, passion or wildness, something that might reflect our turbulent times. While Pollock’s huge abstracts reflected a reconfiguring of the American Dream, a sense of Existentialism - man alone, trying to make patterns from the swirling mass of chaos which surrounds him - the paintings that hung so neatly on the walls of the large private house turned - very successfully - into a make-shift gallery, felt no more than decorative squares of abstract obsessiveness, differentiated only by their choice of colour.
They consisted of a series of dots painted on dots painted on dots. Thousands of them. Tiny. Microscopic. A blue dot overlaid with a lighter blue dot, overlaid with a white dot. And so on. One stared at them hoping something might arrive... a dolphin perhaps, or, in a pink version, a word in 3D spelling ‘LOVE’. But nothing did happen. The paintings just lay there politely, not accusingly, not even drawing you in. Just a small splash of rice-krispied colour, guaranteed to brighten-up that don’t-know-what-to-do-with cranny.
It was if someone had taken a Seurat and blown it up macro-sized, as if to examine the side of a cheek perhaps, a turn of a sleeve, a piece of tree bark... one inch blown up to a two foot square. And then, on each of Seurat’s dots, another dot had been painted, and on top of that, another. It was no more than pointless pointillism.
But away from it all, I began to ponder its possible significance.
It was while the great and the good gathered to admire and support their friend’s work, that I had been first reminded of Wolfe and his society of furiously paddling swans, chaos lying just beneath the surface symbolised by a wrong turn into a bad neighbourhood. Here the smooth bravado belied the unhappy marriages, the thwarted careers, and now more than any time in recent memory - even more than after the collapse of The Twin Towers - a sense of ‘fin de siecle’. The economic chaos which ebbs and eddies like starlings in flight seems unfathomable even to seasoned economists, their predictions veering wildly from one day to the next. In the meantime the rest of us peons are left to batten down the hatches and wait for the bomb to explode over our heads.
This had been coming we had been been repeatedly told. But the boom was so compelling, along with everything it brought, we stayed at the table, continuing to roll the dice because we couldn’t stop winning. What real gambler ever quits while he’s ahead?
But as this fiesta slowly came to an end - the houses now bigger, the holidays more frequent, the restaurants, the clothes, the private memberships all increased - the painter whose work I saw last night, decided to abstract himself, the years of decadence and indulgence finally becoming too much. So he shut himself away and painted dots. Dots upon dots upon dots.
That’s all that was left when the party was over... when the the brain was left so mangled from the pounds of MDMA ingested over two decades... nothing but meaningless semi-autistic renditions of pebble-dashed emptiness, a brain filled with microscopic blobs of decorative bubbles. A brain exploded like the heart of an atom.
And as I looked around the rooms of the make-shift gallery, people chattered and drank and ignored the pictures on the wall, unsure what to make of them.
Possibly fearful of what they might be saying about the painter’s mind.
Or maybe afraid of what they might be saying about themselves.