Mick Hartley

Great stuff from Nick Cohen:

Last week, I went to the East End of London to witness the death of the avant-garde. At first glance, Gilbert and George’s Sonofagod Pictures: Was Jesus Heterosexual?’ exhibition at the White Cube did not look like a wake. The bright and glistening gallery is in Hoxton, a corner of town that has been full of life since it was colonised and gentrified by ‘Young British Artists’ in the early Nineties. As fashionable visitors move between its loft conversions and cafes, ‘edgy’ is the highest compliment they can bestow and ‘taboo’ the gravest insult. Taboos are taboo in Hoxton.

Even on a wet Thursday lunchtime, there were plenty of sightseers from the metropolitan intelligentsia enjoying the show rather than mourning the passing of their world. In prose that might embarrass an estate agent, novelist Michael Bracewell told them in the catalogue that Gilbert and George were engaged ‘in rebellion, an assault on the laws and institutions of superstition and religious belief’.

Burbling critics agreed. Gilbert and George still get a ‘frisson of excitement’ by including ‘f-words, turds, semen, their own pallid bodies and other affronts to bourgeois sensibilities’ in their work, wrote a journalist with the impeccably bourgeois name of Cassandra Jardine in the Daily Telegraph. ‘Is it the perfect Christmas card to send George Bush at Easter? Yeah, yeah,’ added groovy Waldemar Januszczak of the Sunday Times

Their justifications for edgy art won’t work any longer and not only because the average member of the educated bourgeoisie likes nothing better than f-words and pallid bodies on a visit to the theatre or gallery. After the refusal of the entire British press to print innocuous Danish cartoons, the stench of death is in the air. It is now ridiculous and impossible to talk about a fearless disregard for easily offended sensibilities.