Mick Hartley

Have you downloaded your “free and exclusive art work by Jake and Dinos Chapman” yet? You can get them here, at the BBC website. Hurry though – the offer only lasts till 22.35 on Thursday 22nd November.

Clever eh? It’s like they’ve taken some toy money, and scrawled like demented schoolboys all over the faces to make ’em look like a skull with a swastika on the forehead (Dinos) or some kind of zombie (Jake). So, at one level, it’s a comment on the nature of money. It’s all imaginary, right? Just a convention. It’s frozen desire: death. It’s shit.

And then…..well, the art world’s all about money, isn’t it? Why not cut out the bullshit in between and just make money the work of art. Most of the idiots who buy art do it as an investment. They wouldn’t know art if it came and bit ’em on the arse. Money’s shit, art’s shit. Might as well be honest about it.

It’s pop art, reproducible, like Warhol maybe. They’re crappy bank notes. And the scribbling, the defacement, is really badly done. Like punk, but talentless, childish.

So….you download these works of art in the knowledge that you are, really, downloading worthless infantile shit. What kind of an idiot does that make you? Just because they’re done by a couple of Britain’s leading artists…

But they are works of art. They’re done by the Chapman brothers. If they were one-offs in a gallery they’d fetch thousands. So maybe you’re not an idiot, especially if you’re downloading them with, you know, an ironic smile.

Then again, even in the context of the Chapman brothers work (some of which is genuinely disturbing) these pieces are rubbish. They’re trite. As they admit, they’re flogging a dead horse. Something for people to download off the BBC website for free? Here you go then. Took us all of ten minutes.

Those, I imagine, are the kind of thoughts that get Jake and Dinos sniggering all the way to the bank.