Art Continues Its Free Fall into Obscenity

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Jan 31, 2000 | by Stephen Goode

By now almost everyone's heard of "Sensation)" the exhibition of young British artists at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, among whose controversial works is Chris Ofili's Holy Virgin Mary -- created from paint, elephant dung and pornographic magazine cutouts.

Here's a description from the London Daily Telegraph of another work by another highly regarded young British artist, Tracey Emin -- hailed according to the New Criterion, a conservative American journal of culture, as one of the chief contenders for this year's Turner Prize, the highest of British an awards. Emin's submission for the competition is My Bed: "Emin shows one new work, supposedly her own unmade bed, complete with torn pillows and urine-stained sheets, surrounded by ashtrays full of smoked fags, a box of sanitary towels, medicines, nylons, soiled underpants, a candle, a pregnancy test.... On the gallery wall there's a neon sign in Emin's own script that says, `Every Part of Me's Bleeding,' an appliqued wall hanging (`F -- School') and a wall of her scribbly drawings, in most of which the word `f--' is scrawled like an incantation, a guarantee of authenticity."

For the people simply can't understand why this piece of work should be nominated for anything except, perhaps, for the Messiest Room of the Year Award.