28-10-10, 10:35 PM
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David Miliband's awful painting: what it tells us
David Miliband's awful painting: what it tells us - Telegraph
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Who does not get a chilling thrill of horror at the sight of The Miliband Painting? In my own case, the coldly curdled blood is mixed with a delicious voyeur’s sense of delight at the discovery of a hitherto secret (and very horrible) family indiscretion. A bit like finding a severed head in the linen basket, a gun in the bathroom cabinet, a whip in the downstairs loo.
Yes, it was infinitely touching of Mrs M to buy the picture (seen here hanging on their wall) for David’s 40th birthday. But it was one of those decisions possibly made after lunch. Many of us have catalogues of regrettable purchases made at this most uncritical time of day.
A swarm of pink adipose maenads, waving limbs and dangling bits like a pantomime Greek chorus after a few lagers, makes some sort of ham-fisted and ham-thighed reference to Matisse’s great La Danse series of 1909-10. But that’s the second-to-last time you’ll find the superlative Matisse in this shabby story. The Milibands have not acquired a School-of-Matisse. It is not even School-of-Beryl-Cook. It is not even a cartoon. Good cartoons have vitality.
The nuclear physicist Wolfgang Pauli used to say of unsolicited student theses: “It’s not even wrong”, as if to suggest that being wrong would at least mean it was in the approximate area of being right. The Miliband Painting is not even bad. It is middle-brow junk. It is the sort of thing you can find arriving in Ford Transits at the dreadful Affordable Art Fair in Battersea Park. I am afraid affordability is rarely a good test of quality. Besides, Elizabeth David’s dictum about food applies to paintings, too: a bad meal, she said, is always expensive.
Given the Miliband family’s podium position in the very sharp-elbowed field of the north London socialist intelligentsia, it is surprising that David is not more aware of that Olympian pronouncement by Eric Hobsbawm, Britain’s favourite Marxist historian and a Canute of taste. Hobsbawm declared that the less educated the public, the more likely they were to profess a taste for decoration. Of course, David had a peerless education, which may prove Hobsbawm as wrong in art criticism as he was in political theory. Then again, you look at the difficult shirt and the terrible cushion, and you wonder.
Judgments about art are not based on snobbery, but on consistent, accumulated, intelligent and sensitive observations. At least, mine are. If only political thought were subject to a similar evolutionary process. So let’s say this painting is a manifesto. What does it mean? It exists to confer sophistication – there are nudes! There is vigorous brushwork! We are worldly bohemians! – but in fact confers the very opposite. It is a lazy gesture, but one that is none the less full of meaning.
Bad art is at least as fascinating as good art, the more so when it hangs on the wall of a leader of political opinion. Were it not for an episode of colour-saturated 3D Biblical stab-you-in-the-front fratricide, the owner of this badly drawn, cruel daub would be a potential prime minister. To explore a Rumsfeldian universe of categories: there is good art, there is bad art. Then there is good bad art and bad good art. The Miliband Painting is bad bad art. It is kitsch.
Kitsch is an over-used, but not well understood, term. It is about fakery and falseness. It is about pretending to be what it is not. It is about claiming the effects of art without making any of the necessary efforts to create or understand it. Kitsch is joyless, lifeless and dead or dying. It is cynical and exploitative. Is this what a Leader of the Opposition manqué should have on his wall?
The great competitive adventure of the contemporary world is that the things we possess murmur truths about us, betraying little secrets here and there. Sometimes they do not murmur: they shout. We are continuously at risk of being denounced by our possessions – and here is a denunciation as thorough in its way as the NKVD-sponsored show trials of the Fifties. Unwittingly, Mrs Miliband’s generous birthday present has confirmed suspicions about her husband’s taste and tolerance first raised by his banana.
And then there is the question of “gift” culture itself. The gift transaction is a treacherous and aggressive one: the real pleasure belongs to the giver, not to the receiver. Generosity plays only a small part in gift-giving. Instead, it’s a form of emotional combat.
Another telling picture this week was of the Queen inspecting with heartbreaking glumness a range of ugly gifts from the Persian Gulf. These are things Her Majesty would surely have preferred to be without – and unlike Mrs Blair’s collection, protocol prevents her dumping them on eBay.
My imagination now rushes back to July 15, 2005, David Miliband’s 40th. What aspirations remained on this auspicious day, before the yellow banana and the red fratricide had tarnished gilded ambition! Ripping the paper off the adipose maenads, an automatic grin, an exchange of pieties. How little the happy couple realised the dead and leaden weight of kitsch and the retribution it would bring. Politicians shouldn’t mess with art.
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Well I'm not mad on it either, but criticising it in those terms makes you come across as something of a cunt.
I've always found it a good rule of thumb (with a few exceptions) that an artist's talent level is inversely proportionate to the amount of green that he uses.
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