Mick Hartley

I had a go yesterday. Now here's Jo Bartosch at Spiked on the fourth plinth farce:

The lump of art unveiled this week on the Fourth Plinth couldn’t be more revealing. For the next 18 months, visitors who pass through Trafalgar Square will be confronted by a cube of 726 pseudo-death masks of ‘trans and nonbinary’ people.

Each of the casts, moulded from volunteers in the UK and Mexico, face inward towards a void in the middle of the work. This perfectly encapsulates the vacuous narcissism of the trans movement, not to mention the stupidity of the establishment figures who prop it up with obscene amounts of taxpayer cash. In selecting this work, the fourth plinth judging panel has put a spurious cause quite literally on a pedestal.

This was by no means the intended message. Mexican artist Teresa Margolles created the piece, titled Mil Veces un Instante, to commemorate Karla La Borrada. La Borrada was a trans-identified singer and male prostitute who, like many in Mexico’s sex industry, was tragically killed. Margolles uses her art to highlight the vulnerability of what she terms ‘the trans community’, a cause that arguably has more relevance to those selling sex on the streets of Mexico than to, say, whining nonbinary brats at British universities….

Of course, according to the woke values of the British art establishment, this new installation ticks every box – the masks are, after all, of brown, poor, transgender sex workers. What judging panel could ask for more? Yet art that is chosen to further the patron’s preferred politics is sucked dry by the process. Granting awards and exhibition opportunities according to the right diversity criteria is the multimillion-pound equivalent of painting by numbers.

Margolles offers something else the elites think is juicy, too – a tiresome, boundary-pushing edginess that has become a substitute for talent. As a pioneer of ‘corpse art’, Margolles’s studio in Mexico City adjoins a morgue. She even boasts of using fluids from the dead bodies brought in.

…the choice of Margolles’s ghoulish monument to an overhyped threat points to a moribund future where shock triumphs over substance. In this, it is perhaps best understood not as a memorial to a murdered Mexican male prostitute, but rather as a memorial to the butchered British arts.