Martin Boyce

Right as fashion photographer Mario Testino was about to announce the winner of this year’s coveted Turner Prize, a beefy brute in a pink tutu and sensible black socks materialized from nowhere and launched himself into a graceful belly flop on the stage.

As the black-clad forces of artistic order pounced on the intruder and frog-marched him out of the gallery, Testino pressed his pale lips into a smile: “And the winner is—Martin Boyce!”

The Northern Echo later reported that the tutu man had the words “STUDY THIS” written in marker around his navel. For lack of anything more serious, they nicked him “on suspicion of disorderly conduct.”

Since its beginnings in 1984, the Turner Prize has become an institution, a cultural event as loved and respected as the Eurovision Song Contest. But after years of quality entertainment, it may have finally jumped the shark. Martin Boyce proved to be anticlimactic in more ways than one. A funny little man with the air of a stamp-collecting milkman, Boyce had little to say about his work, instead only taking the opportunity to thank his “mum and dad, brilliant wife, and gorgeous children.”

The critics couldn’t find the words for it either, though a lady at the Guardian found it “quietly atmospheric” and “lyrically autumnal.” Quiet it certainly was, since the installation consisted of little more than a rubbish bin set in a large white room.

It’s been a difficult decade for the Sham Art movement in Britain. Since the chairman of the Institute for Contemporary Art broke ranks and called Conceptual Art “pretentious, self-indulgent craftless tat,” since Damien Hirst was outed as a serial plagiarist, a lot of the glitter has worn off the brave new world of the Young British Artists.

Even Charles Saatchi, the ad man whose millions did so much to pump up the Sham Art boom, recently told the Guardian that he finds the contemporary art world “comprehensively and indisputably vulgar….It is the sport of the Eurotrashy, hedgefundy, Hamptonites; of trendy oligarchs and oiligarchs; and of art dealers with masturbatory levels of self-regard.”

He ought to know. Meanwhile, we have learned that the tutu streaker’s name is Mark Roberts, and he isn’t exactly new to this line of work. This was his 505th streak, and he considers it his career’s pinnacle. “I’m an artiste,” he told reporters. “What I do is part street art, performance art, and contemporary art.”

The shamsters, at long last, got outshammed.

Rogue intellectual elites’ power plays make up one of modern history’s creepier themes. It was George Orwell who first caught on to the game. Like the Bolsheviks, 1984’s Inner Party was an elite that discovered it could manipulate opinion enough to gain total control of society—control which it would never relinquish. Underneath the Newspeak it was never about ideas or ideals, never about anything but power.

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In the 1920s, sweaty-palmed intellos all over the world followed Lenin’s example, dreaming up ever more picturesque totalitarian movements. Art played a major role in all of them—in the costumes and regalia, the posters and pageants, and especially in the hijacking of serious art to promote party goals.

The artists themselves would learn the lesson and retool it for their own purposes. Le Corbusier drilled modernist architects into the CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne) in 1928. For the first time, art had a movement organized on political lines, with manifestos, rules, solemn congresses, and a publicity machine.

Le Corbusier’s personal politics, like his ideas for redesigning cities, were profoundly totalitarian. He kept it vague enough, though, hedging his bets so that he could serve whatever new masters—communist or fascist—might eventually emerge in Europe. (During the war he would serve Vichy.)

More importantly, in an increasingly academic and hierarchical world, he and his followers saw that the road to ideological triumph lay in gaining control of the new positions of influence—professorships and critic’s columns. When modernists started pouring out of Nazi Germany into America after 1933, that is just what they did, infiltrating and then taking over the architectural schools, eventually imposing their creed on a country where nearly everyone despised it.

They and the cheerleading critics who passed through their schools have ruled American architecture ever since. Other art movements eagerly learned the same tricks. Interestingly, many of the early protagonists were communists such as Clement Greenberg, the highbrow critic who almost singlehandedly foisted Abstract Expressionism on an unsuspecting world in the 1940s.

Like any good communist, Greenberg was well-schooled in agitprop techniques. He popularized the terms “avant-garde” and “kitsch” in the US, fashioning them into the precise aesthetic counterparts of “progressive” and “reactionary.” If not committed to the first, you were obviously mired in the second.

And on and on, right up to the thrones and dominations of Sham Art that squat above the big galleries and art schools today. Sham Artists, though most may still be fashionable Sham Radicals, no longer worry about taking over the world. Today they’re little more than hipster nihilists, glad to hold the role of anointed tastemakers and positively itchy for any chance of a good strong pull on the public teat. They’ll lecture us philistines about what art really is, knowing all the while that every work they create, every essay they write, is a juicy hocker spat in art’s face.

How do we get rid of them, short of some cathartic mob violence? That’s the real joke—we can’t. This bizarre virus, this self-organizing, self-replicating, cancerous intellectual cabal, is a disease that only appears in free, open societies. No cure has yet been found, though after all the sound and fury of the bloody 20th century we at least seem to be building up a little resistance. Maybe it’s time to dust off that old tutu in the back of your closet; maybe all we can do is laugh.

The Beast’s arrival in Europe brought comparisons to the Hindus’ Juggernaut, the giant sacred conveyance that carried the idol of Jagannath, transcendental cause of the Avatars. Mandeville wrote in his Travels about how in the pilgrimage procession worshipers would throw themselves under its crushing wheels to prove their devotion.

From the beginning of President Obama’s European tour, The Beast has occasioned nearly as much comment as its occupant. As under his predecessor, a visit from Obama to a foreign country requires a polite-but-firm American military occupation of the host country. But even with the fleets of helicopters and battalions of Secret Servicemen in place and all the sewer lids welded shut, the president can’t feel safe without shipping over what they call “the most technologically advanced protection vehicle in the world.”

At about eight tons, it is also the heaviest. With a Cadillac badge on the grille and a GMC truck chassis underneath, The Beast pretends to be made in Detroit, though it is really much more a product of the military-industrial complex. Its security and communications systems are Top Secret, although we know the body has five inches of composite armor. (US troops driving around Kandahar in M2 Bradleys have to make do with slightly over an inch.)

The Beast possesses shotguns and tear-gas cannons for the president to practice impromptu riot control. It has bottles of his blood for emergency transfusions. Even the windows are several inches thick. They do not open, but the car is capable of creating its own atmosphere in case of chemical attack. In keeping with the administration’s guidelines on environmental dissimulation, the mileage is estimated at 8MPG, though the laws of physics suggest it must be more like 8GPM.

The Beast’s first stop was Ireland, where it was secretly filled up by the Secret Service at a BP station. Its only job would be to take the Obamas from the US Embassy to Moneygall in County Offaly. Sadly, it was not up to the task.

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The Embassy compound’s drive is equipped with a concrete ridge that rises slightly to meet the gate so that not even the tiniest terrorist might squeeze underneath at midnight. The concrete was, as the Irish would say, too clever for The Beast, and with a lurch and a clank the Juggernaut found itself beached like a whale. Its inaugural state procession in Europe had taken it about thirty feet.

The president might have picked a more respectful country than Ireland to maroon himself. The crowd outside immediately began to laugh and jeer, especially after the Secret Service waved up a bus to park in front and conceal the presidential embarrassment: “Need a push?”

Kelly’s Towing Service of Kilmacanogue, County Wicklow, was sent for, and Kelly soon found that the slight impact had been enough to collapse The Beast’s mighty suspension. Still, even in its wounded state The Beast proved too clever for Kelly’s tow truck, and in the end the biggest tow truck in all Ireland had to be called in from Baldoyle to finish the job.

It took three hours, but The Beast was conveyed to a secure area where the Secret Service checked it for breaches of security and then secretly checked it again. Finally it was towed back to the airport, and the US Air Force’s biggest plane carried it home to an undisclosed location. They vow the Eight-Ton Lemon will ride again.

In childhood innocence, we believed that our presidents passed over history’s stage like colossi, like the emperors of old: Eisenhower Pius, who reigned in the golden age, Nixon Agonistes, William the Deflowerer, George the Ghazi, and George the Lesser.

Now, with illusion put away, we’ve sadly learned it’s all the same guy, an idol of gilded clay like the god inside the Juggernaut: A frightened little man, safe for the moment behind his five inches of armor, lost in his great plush seat, playing with the recliner buttons and looking up through the windows that not even he can open.

In theory, he could direct the driver to take him anywhere he wished to go, but he never does. He follows the planned route because he knows that though he may reign, it is The Beast who rules.

Eric Schmidt has seen the future, and he’s been kind enough to share it with us. In a recent interview with the Telegraph, the Google boss gets all dewy-eyed and breathless over the search engine’s future. “I can only describe this now as a ‘wow’ moment,” he says, “the beginning of the real revolution in information.”

Most of us think Google was made merely for finding cheap tickets, recipes, and pictures of girls in lingerie. But according to Schmidt, the thing’s only in its pupal stage now, and when it bites its way out of its chrysalis it will know where you are, everywhere you’ve been, everything you like, and what you were supposed to be doing this morning. It will offer personalized suggestions for you on any subject you require. It will be (“with your permission,” Schmidt suavely adds) a kind of omniscient “personal assistant.”

Schmidt is smarter than we are, and he is right. Imagine unlimited broadband in the air we breathe, GPS technology, social media, the much-heralded computing cloud, Google’s gigantic servers, and many other baubles we haven’t yet dreamed of, all wrapped up in a colorful velveteen presentation case with your name on it. In a couple of decades or so, you’ll be getting one for Christmas.

There’s no reason to worry about computers taking over; the division of labor is obvious: “... the stupid stuff that we have to do, like remembering things, they can do, and the things that we are really good at—like judgment—they don’t really need to do.” The new gadget will be the ultimate household convenience, the greatest thing since the rotary-agitator washing machine.

Even Schmidt can’t know what the thing will look like when it’s ready. A tablet, like the iPad?  Primitive—that technology’s already a year old. Perhaps it will be all contained in your phone, or in an emerald bracelet, or implanted in your brain’s frontal lobe. My sources say it will be a kind of demon, a small, faint, fairy hologram in lovely translucent Chinese colors hovering on the edge of your field of vision and whispering personalized suggestions in your choice of over sixty different voices. If we are lucky, it will not be designed by Disney, and if we are very, very lucky it will not talk to the police without a warrant.

If my wife’s reading this, wait ’til they go down in price, and then I’ll be happy with the standard model. No sense paying extra for the Virtual Video screens or the Smell-O-Vision.

I want one. But I have doubts that the gadget will be as much of a boon to mankind as Schmidt thinks. Brilliant inventors have appeared before with innovations they claimed would make life perfect. The great Egyptian god Thoth comes to mind, the inventor of written language in the long-ago Dreamtime. Socrates tells his story in Plato’s Phaedrus.

The Greeks associated the ibis-headed Thoth with their Hermes, for he was an extremely clever boy. Besides writing, he invented arithmetic and geometry, astronomy and surveying, medicine and many other good things. He brought his inventions to King Thamus at Thebes as a gift to the Egyptian people. Though grateful, the king surprisingly had his doubts about the letters:

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This, said Thoth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Thoth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth.

On the whole, there’s probably something to be said for writing; Homer didn’t need it, but when the alphabet arrived it carried his poems, and classical civilization, on for a very long time. But the great gift of letters may have also brought with it some of the seeds of decay.

By the end of antiquity, the only things the Romans bothered writing down were woolly theological tracts and excruciatingly detailed tax records. The barbarians who filled the vacuum of their imploding empire had no letters or towns. They did, contrary to what you may have learned in school, have better swords, better technology, better government, a higher standard of living, and clearer minds.

It’s a sad truth that every advance that pushes civilization onward also in some way diminishes us as individuals. It is true for practical as well as intellectual skills, the physical as well as the mental. Consider young George Washington, hardly an isolated case in the brilliant world of can-do, self-sufficient, 18th-century America. At the age when his modern counterpart is receiving a worthless B.A., Washington could manage any farm job, live in the wilderness as comfortably as an Indian, build a cabin, survey and plat a county, or lead a militia into battle.

What writing took away from our mind’s faculties, we can only guess. Robert Graves wrote of the Irish ollamhs, master poets in pre-Christian times who were required to know by heart and recite on command some 350 long-verse romances and histories, memorize the laws of the country and expound on them, and know the genealogies of kings and the derivations of all words. An ollamh was learned in all the arts and sciences, and as a poet was required to extemporize on any subject in any meter while accompanying it on the harp (not to mention the ability to kill rats or raise a blister on your nose with a poetic curse).

Writing took a great part of our mind and put it outside us. We’re adjusted to that by now, and obviously we couldn’t survive without it. When Schmidt’s demon comes to work for us, we won’t need memory for much of anything, and what crumb of it remains will eventually atrophy and die. Civilization may look smarter than ever, but the people in it? When the next barbarians come, they may well find old King Thamus was right when he predicted:

…they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.