WHAT WORK? (December 15, 2005)
Every now and then I search for my name on Google. I google it, to use the proper term. Nearly every time I find a little surprise. A few weeks ago I discovered that a friend of mine had put one of my pieces of writing, actually a delicious quote from The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, on her website concerned with fashion. Today I discovered a weblog or blog referring to my website. While searching for something or other about art, someone bumped into my writings. He or she said a few nice things about the site as a whole, as well as about my commendable persistence in marginal scribbling, but ultimately concluded that my writings about the art world were rather cranky. A fair comment, I guess. In particular, I erred toward discussing the artists involved, rather than their work. A fair comment, once again. Much of what I have written in this vein was about the shenanigans of the likes of Tracey Emin, the Chapman brothers, or Damien Hirst. But, wait. What in the world could I say about their work? Actually, what work? Pray, have any of the above, or any other so-called Young British Artists from the Cool Britannia era, left any work worth a single line of writing?