Sign of the times: Type "naked woman cuddling dead pig" into Google, and your first result is not one of those horrid pervy sites whose pictures make you want to bleach your eyeballs.
No, you get a review of a British performance artist. For four hours she hugged a porker while spectators filed past and thought: "There's something you don't see every day, a fact that might be conclusive evidence of a benevolent G-d."
Naturally, she got a grant for the project; public pounds paid for the dead pig, which she stabbed with a knife in order to bond with the corpse. Bring the kids! And the next time you're in the grocery store holding some bacon, consider taking off your clothes and selling tickets. You might make enough money to make bail.
You're thinking: so? It's this year's Mapplethorpe-painting-with-elephant-dung-dunked-in-urine story. People have been complaining about modern art since that hack Marcel Duchamp hung some bathroom plumbing and called it sculpture.
True. But. It's hard to convince Britain's radicalized immigrants to assimilate if it means they must pay for some naked lady getting jiggy with piggy. These are the values of the West? We must pay for this, and you call it freedom?
Good question. What is Western culture all about these days, anyway? Little but narcissism, lassitude, sneers and muted despair, it seems. No, correct that; it's European/U.S. elite culture that seems unmoored. Standard lowbrow American culture is quite clear about what it likes: snakes on planes, loud cars going around in circles with the occasional airborne detour into the stands, high-quality TV shows, mediocre pop music, naked people without the whole arty pig thing.
It's generally confident and not particularly self-reflective, which leaves the "elite" stratum of the arts worlds to face the true hard issues of our times. Like pig-hugging and the threat to democracy posed by Joe McCarthy.
Really. One well-reviewed play in a recent Scottish festival, "Mickey Mouse Is Dead," concerns the efforts of some brave, scrappy cartoonists who attempt to unionize the Disney shop at the height of the Red scare. Will Mean Old Walt report them to the junior senator from Wisconsin, as required by the National Overblown Paranoia Act of '51? Probably not, since the Disney studio actually unionized in the '40s, rendering the entire point of the play moot. No matter; you get the point.
Mickey Mouse was founded on a lie! The dark side of America contains more truth than the bright! Thomas Jefferson owned slaves! Everyone is corrupt, grown-ups are hypocrites — the usual adolescent rant. The play was performed by an American troupe, which knows the route to Euro-love. Tell 'em how much you hate your daddy.
Ah, but it's an analogy for our times, you see. Folks in the '50s were paranoid for no reason, since Communism was later revealed as a practical joke played by mischievous Russians. So our current "concern" over "terrorists" who blow up "buildings" must likewise be a spasm of nervous Nellie panic brought on by regimes that seek to rule through fear.
Of course, one could make the case that the greatest threats to the freedoms of the West are posed by the head-choppers, plane-exploders, their many merry supporters, and the nuke-seeking state that supports them.
But don't expect the artists to make the case. They saw what happened to that Theo Van Gogh fellow. Pay no attention to that imam behind the curtain. Here's the ghost of Eisenhower. Booga-booga!
The artists seem more concerned with a culture that won't let gays marry than one that won't let them live. They fear the charge of "Islamophobia" or cultural insensitivity, lest they have to explain a joke to a stone-faced Belgian court. ("It is the verdict of the court that you stink" doesn't look good on the handbills.)
They take the easy way out, these brave souls; they'll perform "The Diary of Anne Frank," but only because now some people think it has a happy ending. They cradle their illusions like a big dead pig, singing them lullabies.
Hey, maybe it's a metaphor after all! Give that woman a grant.
