Art Hate Week!
The British Art Resistance (B.A.R.) has organized National Art Hate Week for “the disruptive betterment of culture” and for purposes of giving UK bourgeois art institutions “a necessary kicking.” Sarcastically modeled after the two-minute hate rallies found in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, Art Hate events will encourage people to express contempt for “the business of culture” as well as those who feed at the trough of the postmodern culture industry.
Art Hate actions are to be held on the steps of the Tate Modern and the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the National Gallery of Scotland, and other select locations. In part, a statement of intent released by the B.A.R. reads as follows:
“National Art Hate Week takes the symbol of the swastika hung from a gallows as an emblem of resistance against cultural fascism as disseminated by the bureaucrats of art.
National Art Hate Week is a call for direct action against the mass acceptance of art as a phantom economy for the smug manipulative elite and their ensuing grip of control over culture as a tool for mediated emotion, market lead non-critical homogeny, and boring popularism.
National Art Hate Week presents a unified front of non-unified creative individuals against all that is despicable and loved by the people. We oppose the deliberate socio-economic strategy to make us all complicit in our own idiocy. We oppose the affront of state endorsed auto-cryptic balderdash and oppose the ruffians who have been pulled from the ghetto and polished up for elevated status and easy consumption by the masses.”
If that is not clear enough, then the ensuing bit of propaganda from B.A.R. will certainly not help you in the least. The following excerpted outburst appears with its original spelling:
“such a time comes when the distinction between art and high finance has become so foggy and moribund that one has eaten and consumed the other leaving only a bloodless husk – as if a particularly veniminous spyder had swung from its web and suck’t the life essence out of an otherwise joyiously singing cricket.
and so the word ‘art’, which is a mear label or ‘catchword’ as it were, has by subtle manipulation been inverted, bit by bit, to mean its direct oppersit. what that direct oppersit is i do not venture to answer. but it could possably be termed ‘financial anti-art’, or ‘bankers dada.’
in just such epochs heros of a mythical nature are apt to step forth. Not dressed for war but never-the-less cloth’d in poetry. that these heros will be melighn’d and slandered by the cultural elite is the mark of their true worth and necessity.”
For more information, visit the British Art Resistance website, and read the UK Guardian’s article, National Art Hate Week needs you.
