“‘Let copulation thrive’, said King Lear
And he lived before Viagra was thought of
Such were the fruits of his wisdom
Though he was an old fool — well, sort of.”
From Arrows of Desire by Bachchoo

Please, dear reader, don’t think I am place-name-dropping if I say I have often been to Venice — sometimes to attend a film festival and a few times just to be there. There are two things I don’t like about Venice. In summer it stinks. The canals smell as ripe with sewage as the Mahim causeway in Mumbai. The gondolas are out and tourists take rides in them but doesn’t the miasma kill the romance? Enough.
My second caveat is perhaps more than unfair. I can’t stand the breed of American tourist who infests the restaurants and cafes of the floating city disturbing the peace with nonsensical views about Titian and Tintoretto.
I don’t mean anything more than that it disturbs my own peace in the restaurant or bar when there are a gaggle of such American pseuds sounding pompously off. It’s not that they contradict my opinion of Titian’s or Tintoretto’s works — I hardly have any.
Though I do pride myself on knowing something about the quality of writing of all sorts and can give most original or academically recognised critics a run for their money on literary opinions, I have been repeatedly humbled on my preferences in music and my opinions about art. This not in competition with professional critics, but with my children who feel qualified to judge my responses in either field.
The reason, dear reader, why I have chosen to impose these ramblings and personal details on you is because this afternoon I tuned in to a BBC radio programme called Desert Island Discs. This popular format features a famous person on each programme and interviews them about their lives, their work and their fame and asks them to choose six pieces of music which are for them the most memorable and around and about which they can talk about a phase or a facet of their lives.
Till the Eighties, the programme had been very exclusively “white” but I remember when a researcher from the programme, having traced me as working in television, phoned to say that their guest the following week was to be Salman Rushdie and he had chosen a Hindi song that was not in their archives and asked if I could help trace it. It was the film song “Mera joota hain japani…” and I said I had a recording of it at home and they could send a courier across to collect it.
Khair!
This week the programme featured the artist Damien Hirst. He was questioned about his work and career and at one point said, or perhaps the interviewer said, that one of his “works” had sold for a sum of some millions of pounds and the single work was therefore worth more than all the paintings in the National Gallery. (I perhaps misheard and haven’t played the programme back on my computer to check this quote.)
I have been several times to the National Gallery and admired the works in it for myriad reasons and with varied responses.
I have also seen works by Damien Hirst which strike me as being a gigantic fraud visited on a gullible world. Hirst has placed the carcass of a shark in a glass tank in some preservative chemical and called it art. The shark was not his first foray into faux taxidermy. He gained his notoriety by doing the same to a sheep. Following that triumph, the shark in the tank was commissioned, he told us, for huge sums of money by one Charles Saatchi who made his fortune as part-owner of an advertising firm which publicised and induced the public to buy everything from the produce of international capitalists to the Tory Party. He has made millions and has founded a modern art gallery in Chelsea which exhibits a very diverse, constantly changing display of “art” that Mr Saatchi has patronised and acquired.
I go there and stand and stare.
The early 20th century artists discarded or overthrew visual representation. Fair enough — cameras could do that. Art in the West became idea. Craft was steadily devalued till the West got to Marcel du Champ exhibiting a male public lavatory’s pissing bowl made in a factory. He didn’t make it, he admitted, but he “chose” it.
The viewer was expected — and this canard circulates to this day — to respect “choice” as “art”, or perhaps to value the idea the choice stimulates. What does the dead shark in formaldehyde tell me? The mortality of the ferocious predator? The wondrous texture of its scales? More than I can get from a haiku which suggests mortality? Or from an aquarium or a fishmonger’s? Worth a few million pounds?
Hirst went on to say that he had bought a house with 300 rooms and told his manager that they could spend a million pounds a year on its refurbishment. No doubt the works and the Hirst franchise, which now sells stuff online, will provide those millions.
His art sells because it has patrons. Indian art through the ages depended on the patronage of religions and rajas who paid for representation of their pieties and their conceits.
The same applies to European art where the church, royalty and aristocracy indulged their piety in, for instance, the Renaissance paintings of the lives and martyrdom of saints and in portraits of themselves and their families. In later centuries, art began to depend on the patronage of the emergent bourgeoisie and, in turn, reflected their concerns and conceits. All visual art worth the name prompts new ways of seeing. What ways of seeing does Hirst’s art give the world? His output includes a skull constructed of pure diamonds. Perhaps that is a fair indication of the concerns and conceits of those who admire and patronise his work.