Whatever! Criticism is not a democracy...

If you haven't worked it out already, I have a fairly sweaty intellectual crush on Guardian blogger Jonathan Jones. He managed to mirror so many things I feel in my voluminous gut - plenty of instinct there - and be so wonderfully succinct with it.

Once again he's done it with his spot-on post "Art criticism is not a democracy"

Jones writes :

"The reason so much average or absolutely awful art gets promoted is that no one seems to understand what criticism is; if nothing is properly criticised, mediocrity triumphs. A critic is basically an arrogant bastard who says "this is good, this is bad" without necessarily being able to explain why. At least, not instantly. The truth is, we feel this stuff in our bones. And we're innately convinced we're right."

Hi Ho, Hi Ho...

It's off to work I go. 

With nothing else to comment on I'll leave you with some links. 

Jonathan Jones on the end of his ( art critics ) love affair with Damien Hirst. Spookily, the original article I read about this a week or so ago on the BBC website has disappeared. 

Does the powerful tentacles of Hirst have the power to silence the BBC? 

A survey once again reveals what we all already know, we lie about what books we read to impress people. Duh... 

As usual, when the papers writes anything about comics they are several years too late - see the Independents article on Manga. 

Speaking of comics, the lovely Paul Gravett sent me an email yesterday thanking me for my review of The Leather Nun & Other Incredibly Strange Comics, and telling me about a wonderful Comica event. Comica is a yearly comics festival in London, but one off events take place throughout the year under that name. 

Coming up next year is Adrian Tomine's first UK appearance. Despite being on so far away in London, it's still rather tempting. Details on Paul Gravett's website here. 

Anyway, I'm off to Oldham. 

More Jonathan Jones

My fan-girl intellectual crush on Jonathan Jones continues. This interview with Mark Leckey, conducted shortly after getting the Turner Prize, cements my admiration for the chap. 

"Leckey started by saying off-camera "I've got a problem with you - I don't know if it's going to make for a good interview." I replied that it would make a great interview, so we got stuck in."

I know I'm being rather lazy and just reposting stuff by a better ( and proper ) journalist, but frankly don't want to leave my bed until someone brings me a fur coat... and a new bike... with chains on the wheels.

Almost slipped off mine twice yesterday in the ice. 

The Turner Prize... not really...

I gave up caring about the Turner Prize a long time ago. In fact, before I even gave that much of a crap about art. Back when I just liked pretty pictures, wanted to bathe myself in aura that went with artistic practise and hated - at the time, other - art students with a passion. 

I was too young to be swept along in the YBA explosion of the nineties, and my art consciousness emerged in the vacuum left afterwards. I just pootled  around, reading the set texts, wandered round art galleries and never aligned myself with any school of thought, apart from liking the power reception theory gave me.

Basically, the aim in completing various Art History qualifications was really to gather to tools to crush those pompous twats with fashionably teased hair, vacant eyes and perky little noses. 

( Incidentally, learned I passed my MA, with a decent margin, last week... and before you ask have no intention of doing a PhD. )

I wanted to, and still want to a certain extent, crush them. I refuse to believe making crap gives artists any kind of magical, unobtainable, insight. 

Anyway, this whole line of thought was spurred on by reading Jonathan Jone's assessment of this years Turner Prize in his Guardian Blog. 

Out of the many professional art critics around, i think he is the one I can really get behind - Combining a certain popular, practical, audacious thinking about art with the theoretics to back it up, without getting bogged down in them. His writing is pleasantly unfashionable and free of bullshit. 

I wonder if he would be my friend?