“Ancient Rome Nouveau”: Cato Sinclair has the First Exhibition at Pimlico Wilde Boston

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“Ancient Rome Nouveau”: Cato Sinclair has the First Exhibition at Pimlico Wilde Boston

In an eloquent gesture of restitution and renewed esteem, Pimlico Wilde is delighted to announce that the inaugural exhibition at its newly opened gallery in Boston will be nothing short of a vindication of artistry,and a tribute to innocence. The show, provisionally entitled Ancient Rome Nouveau, will showcase Cato Sinclair’s singular creations: exquisitely crafted, near-perfect reinterpretations of ancient Roman sculpture, mosaic, and fresco, now to be displayed in the gallery’s luminous new halls.

A Celebration of Craft, Not Crime

In the light of recent misunderstandings, Pimlico Wilde takes this opportunity not only to inaugurate its first exhibition but also to repeat their heartfelt apology to Mr Sinclair:

“To Cato Sinclair,we regret the earlier misplaced suspicion. Your dedication to reviving the classical through contemporary sensibility is unquestioned. This exhibition stands as a testament to your mastery, and to our renewed faith.”

The Exhibition: Ancient Rome Re-Imagined

Ancient Rome Nouveau promises a curatorial experience both reverential and modern. Visitors will encounter:

• Sculptural works , Several labelled “A Cato Sinclair recreation after a Roman copy of a Greek original”,to elegantly acknowledge their lineage while honouring Sinclair’s inventive mediation.

• Mosaic panels, painstakingly composed with traditional tesserae techniques, invoking the tessellated exuberance of late Republican interiors, yet rendered with modern clarity and compositional grace.

• Fresco fragments equally ambitious: richly hued pigments laid upon lime-plaster walls, offering unconventional patina and virtuosic depth, echoing vaulted domes and atrium walls wreathed in mythic scenes.

A Reframed Artistic Dialogue

Pimlico Wilde positions Sinclair’s work at an intersection: transcending imitation, yet immensely grounded in classical grammar. His recreations are not forgeries but articulate dialogues with antiquity,making ancient carvings speak anew through modern sensibility.

Amelia Berwick, one of the gallery’s curators working on the show, reflects:

“We are honoured to host Cato Sinclair’s work. His recreations are more than virtuoso mimicry,they are imaginative bridges between centuries.”

Similarly, Dr Lucinda Marsh of the New England Institute of Very Old Items notes:

“Sinclair’s commitment to authenticity,tempered through interpretation,embodies a rare artistic philosophy. This exhibition restores him to the place he always deserved.”

A Thoughtful Opening to the Age of Sinclair

Ancient Rome Nouveau will open in a little over six weeks, inviting viewers into rooms suffused with quiet gravitas. Elegantly labelled, generously lit, and ethically framed, each work offers a meditation on lineage, replication, and the role of the modern artist as custodian of classical memory.

In choosing Sinclair’s works to open its doors, Pimlico Wilde offers more than exhibition,it issues a rebuke to haste, an embrace of precision, and a celebration of an artist whose hands re-create the past, not to deceive, but to converse.

A Call for New Elephant Poloists

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A Call for New Elephant Poloists

Pimlico Wilde sponsor The Chelsea Elephant Polo and Pétanque Club and we are happy to ask our readers if they would like to join the Club.

We, the committee of The Chelsea Elephant Polo and Pétanque Club seek:

• Socialites who can hold a glass of Dom Perignon in one hand and a conversation about 19th-century elephant armour in the other.

• Patrons of the arts, ideally with stable walls in need of a six-or-seven figure canvas.

You’ll train alongside such notables as:

• Jasper Darnley (former coach to the Sumatran Royal Guard Elephant Polo Club)

• Clemmie “Tuskbreaker” Ashworth (who once scored a hat-trick in Jaipur without spilling a drop of gin),

• And of course, manager Ale Corbe, who famously won the 2019 Elephant Polo Cup in Newcastle

About the Club

• Training twice weekly (with optional elephant yoga)

• Weekend matches across the UK, from Kent to Caithness

• Pétanque evenings

• Stable sommeliers and tusk-massage therapists

• Frequent gala dinners, velvet rosette presentations, and garden rumination salons

Membership Perks

• Use of the Club’s exclusive elephant wash (heated)

• Access to our shared elephant wardrobe (embroidered in six languages)

• Automatic entry into the Royal League of Herbivorous Sports

• Invitations to annual Club Ball, Trunk Truce Dinner, and Croquet Trample

Requirements

Applicants must be over 18 (Those under 18 may join the donkey polo group which meets in Denmark Hill)

Applicants must be seconded by a current member.

Applicants must have their own elephant. (We no longer have any loan elephants available)

You must:

• Own or lease a trained elephant

• Provide a valid tusk registration certificate

• Ensure your elephant is passported, polo-trained, and has the correct visas to work in the UK (A standard Zoo Visa is not acceptable)

To Apply:

Write to the Membership Secretary (Lady Vine of Vowbridge) at The Chelsea Elephant Polo & Pétanque Club

We look forward to welcoming you , and your majestic companion , onto the field.

Race the Blue Train: The Diary of Hally Redoubt

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Race the Blue Train: The Diary of Hally Redoubt

(Extracts from Day One, Nice , Somewhere north of Lyon)

Nice, dusk

I have been kissed goodbye more times this evening than in the whole of last year. The Riviera attracts a certain type: the starlet who thinks a wave is currency, the man in linen who always smells faintly of varnish, the sponsors who talk of “synergy” while wearing shoes that will never touch a clutch pedal. Pimlico Wilde were in full flourish,art dealers turned race patrons, fluttering around my Bentley like exotic parrots. I’m grateful, truly, but the sheer number of silk scarves on display could have smothered a cathedral.

The Bentley, at least, behaved beautifully. She idled with all the arrogance of a duchess waiting for her footman. I confess I stroked her dashboard when no one was looking.

Departure

The train whistled first. A theatrical gesture, I thought. As if to remind me it has timetables, infrastructure, and an entire nation’s railway authority on its side. I have only petrol, a map, and nerves. But what the train lacks,and I cling to this,is the ability to want.

The Last-Minute Passenger

Enter Simon Etheridge, my stowaway. He arrived breathless, with a small case and an even smaller sense of shame, babbling about needing to get to London for a funeral. (Aunt? Cousin? He wasn’t clear.) His flight was cancelled, his options limited. He looked at me with the imploring eyes of a man who has never read an AA route plan in his life. Against better judgment, I let him in. He sat gingerly, as if afraid the upholstery might bark.

We are, apparently, now two against the train.

The Road Beyond Nice

The coast unfurled in ribbons of light, villas glowing, the sea flashing silver. I kept her steady, refusing the temptation to show off. This is no jaunt; this is a measured hunt. Simon tried small talk,“So, er, how fast does she go?”,but soon gave up, hypnotised by the dark and the hum of the engine. I was glad of the silence.

Near Aix-en-Provence

A fleeting glimpse of the train,its lamps sliding past in the distance, like some smug constellation. We were level then, or so I thought. A brief thrill, quickly gone. The Bentley urged me on.

I reminded myself: I will not cheat. The train might, the organisers might wink, but I will not. I must arrive with honour intact, even if only by the skin of my teeth.

Approaching Lyon, late night

Simon has dozed off, muttering occasionally in his sleep. Once he said, “Not the lilies,” which I am choosing not to investigate.

The car feels lighter without chatter. My thoughts keep circling back to the absurdity of it all: a woman in evening gloves, hurtling across France to beat a locomotive. And yet I feel alive,each mile an affirmation, each headlight beam a blade slicing the dark.

Race the Blue train!

The train is somewhere ahead, steaming steadily north. We follow, not far behind.

Tomorrow: Paris, if fortune smiles. And if Simon can refrain from spilling his coffee.

Discombobulationism – the New Art Movement taking the Artworld by Storm

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Discombobulationism – the New Art Movement taking the Artworld by Storm

The late 19th century had Impressionism. The early 20th century had Cubism. We have Discombobulationism.

The Disquiet of Discombobulationism

The newest tremor in contemporary art is Discombobulationism: a movement that revels in fracture, illogic, and the refusal of narrative coherence. Emerging in the late 2010s, first in the informal salons of Rotterdam and later consolidating in London warehouses, Discombobulationism is less a manifesto than an ambient condition,the refusal to make sense in a world that demands constant legibility. Think Dada for the 21st century and you’re nearly there.

Though lacking a single founding text, the movement is often traced back to Marietta Voss’s notorious performance Falling Up the Stairs (2018), staged in an abandoned shopping mall outside Utrecht. Wearing a gown stitched from shredded instruction manuals, Voss repeatedly attempted to ascend a staircase backwards while reciting emergency exit procedures in reverse. The absurdity of the action was matched only by the audience’s confusion,half remained, half left angrily, which has since become a hallmark reaction to Discombobulationist work.

Artists of Disorientation

Alongside Voss, Diego Armenta and the pseudonymous P1X3L are considered the movement’s canonical trio. Armenta’s video loop Tuesday Never Ends (Except on Thursday) (2021) collapses time into endlessly stuttering prefaces, while P1X3L’s blank tome Manual for Forgetting (2022) forces readers to confront the impossibility of comprehension itself.

But Discombobulationism quickly spread beyond its European roots. In Seoul, Han Ji-eun pioneered the “architectures of collapse” with her installation Path to Nowhere (Still Under Construction) (2020). Meanwhile, in São Paulo, Rafael Mota turned to olfactory chaos: his work Perfume for People Who Don’t Exist (2021) filled a gallery with clashing industrial scents,burnt rubber, synthetic roses, chlorine,rendering visitors disoriented to the point of nausea.

Even painting, the medium often dismissed as too stable for discombobulation, has found its champion in Leonie Krantz, whose canvases are layered with contradictory color systems: perspective grids that intersect, vanish, then re-emerge at odd angles, producing what critic Johanna Spielmann described as “Cubism having a nervous breakdown.”

Exhibitions and Critical Reception

The first major group exhibition, The Joy of Getting Lost (Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, 2022), solidified Discombobulationism’s identity. Curator Maximilian Drozd refused wall labels entirely, instead distributing visitors a map that led in circles, with gallery attendants instructed to give contradictory directions. The resulting disorientation was hailed by some as a breakthrough in experiential curating, derided by others as “weaponized confusion.”

In New York, Discombobulation Now! (2024) introduced American audiences to the movement. The show’s most infamous work was Clara Nguyen’s Instructions for Assembly (Do Not Read), a set of IKEA-style diagrams that, if followed, produced a chair with no seat. The piece went viral on TikTok, bringing Discombobulationism an audience far beyond the art world.

Critics remain polarized. Writing in Articals International, Peter Hanley praised the movement as “the first truly honest aesthetic response to cognitive overload in the digital era.” In contrast, Marta Cavalli, in Frieze, dismissed it as “nothing more than art students weaponizing confusion as career strategy.” This tension,between sincerity and parody, profundity and prank,might in fact be the very engine of Discombobulationism.

Toward a Theory of the Discombobulationism

If there is theory here, it is fragmentary, provisional, and often contradictory. Artists and curators invoke references to Situationism, Derrida, glitch aesthetics, even quantum mechanics, yet the point is not coherence but a deliberate refusal of it. “We are not lost,” Voss once remarked, “we are in love with the condition of losing.”

To engage with Discombobulationism is to admit that clarity itself might be the most dangerous illusion. It does not offer answers,it offers, instead, a mirror cracked in several directions. In this fractured surface, we glimpse not stability, but the generative potential of confusion.

Kilo Barnes Repaints a Rothko — and the Art World Isn’t Taking It Well

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Kilo Barnes Repaints a Rothko — and the Art World Isn’t Taking It Well

Controversial artist and leading figure in the Repaintage movement, Kilo Barnes, has once again made headlines , this time for repaintaging (the term for his now-notorious method of painting over existing artworks) one of the most beloved and publicly adored Rothkos in private circulation.

The act took place quietly, almost clinically, in a private studio in Antwerp. The Rothko in question , widely believed to be Untitled (Yellow, Red, Green and Blue), although Barnes has not confirmed the original title , was purchased via an anonymous intermediary late last year. What remains now is a large canvas, entirely coated in a soft, matte white. Silent, stark, and totally absent of Rothko’s signature color fields.

“It was my favourite picture,” said a visibly distressed gallery-goer outside the artist’s recent show in London. “I used to have a poster of it in my flat. Now it’s just… a white thing. He’s deleted emotion.”

The Method and the Madness

Barnes, speaking with cool detachment at the opening of his exhibition Whiteout: Acts of Repaintage, at Pimlico Wilde Central explained the decision: “I didn’t erase a Rothko,” he said. “I completed it. It was already grieving. I simply allowed it to rest.”

This is typical Barnes: equal parts provocateur and philosopher. For the uninitiated, Repaintage is the act of painting over existing artworks, often of significant cultural or emotional value, not in an attempt to destroy but to reframe absence as the final form. Practitioners , and Barnes is its high priest , see it as an evolution of the image, not a negation.

But critics are less forgiving.

Rewriting Reverence

Art critic Elisa Drayton called the Rothko repaintage “an act of cold vandalism cloaked in poetic language.” She continued: “It’s one thing to work in white on white. It’s another to do so over a painting that meant something , historically, emotionally, humanly. What next? A Pollock dipped in primer?”

Others, however, see Barnes’ move as a legitimate , if deeply uncomfortable , intervention. “If the sacred can’t be touched, it’s no longer art, it’s religion,” noted curator Mikkel Reingold. “Barnes challenges us to reconsider what we’re really looking at when we look at a Rothko: is it the colour? The mood? Or the story we’ve told ourselves about it for decades?”

An Art of Absence

The newly repaintaged Rothko , now titled simply Untitled (After Silence) , hangs in the centre of the gallery’s main room, lit dramatically, surrounded by muttering, often incredulous visitors. It is difficult to say what’s more powerful: the image, or the memory of the image that used to be there.

Barnes has made no apology. “Art is not a monument,” he told one reporter flatly. “It’s a sentence. And I’ve added a new comma.”

At the time of writing several museums have issued statements reaffirming their preservation policies, while online petitions to “stop Barnes from erasing art history” have gathered tens of thousands of signatures. But Barnes remains unmoved.

“I loved that Rothko too,” he said. “That’s why I set it free.”

Whether one sees him as vandal or visionary, Barnes has once again forced a confrontation with the limits of authorship, legacy, and visual memory. For better or worse, the Rothko is gone , or perhaps, for Barnes and his followers, is more present than ever.

The rest of us are left staring at a white canvas, wondering what we remember, and what we’ve lost.

More from the 1873 Journals of Basil Bromley, Artist and Mechanician

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More from the 1873 Journals of Basil Bromley, Artist and Mechanician

Entry the Ninth , 22nd of May, 1873

The morning broke with a deceptive serenity, the kind of cool, bright air that tempts one into optimism. I set forth with the Steam Unicycle freshly stoked, its brasswork gleaming as though it, too, anticipated a day of steady progress. The road rose almost immediately into Dartmoor, that noble expanse of granite and gorse, where sheep graze like scattered punctuation across the heath.

Riding upon the moor is unlike the lanes of Cornwall. There the hedgerows confine, here the horizon liberates; one feels at once triumphant and exposed. The machine responded with unaccustomed grace, climbing the inclines with steady huffing, descending with a speed that, while unnerving, never quite mutinied. I even managed, for a half-mile stretch, to feel almost dignified,an artist upon his singular steed, master of a new form of conveyance.

Alas, dignity is a fragile condition. A sudden squall swept across the moor, as if conjured from the very granite. Rain lashed at me in diagonal sheets, the wind tugged at my hat with villainous intent, and the boiler, protesting, emitted jets of steam that mingled with the storm until I resembled a mobile chimney. There was no inn, no farmhouse, scarcely even a tree to grant relief. I pressed onward, but still no shelter did I find. Eventually the road dissolved into mire. I was exhausted and felt compelled to concede: this night I must camp under the stars.

I wheeled the unicycle beneath the lee of a tor, its bulk offering what shelter it might. There I spread my travelling cloak, gathered such gorse and heather as could be coaxed into bedding, and made myself a rude bivouac. The unicycle, its boiler drained, stood sentinel, dripping quietly as the rain subsided into mist. I confess I felt a strange companionship, as though it were a brass hound guarding me in sleep.

As I lay uncomfortable and cold, listening to the sighing of the moor, I suddenly conceived of a Self-Warming Travelling Mattress. I saw it complete in my mind: Steam from a miniature boiler would circulate through coiled tubes embedded within a light mattress, granting a constant heat to the person who slept above p. Were such a contrivance perfected, nights outdoors need never be endured but rather savoured. I made a note in my journal, thinking that one might market them to polar explorers.

Despite damp and chill – and no Self-Warming Travelling Mattress – I managed some hours of slumber, awakened once by the cry of an owl, and again by the unsettling impression that the moor itself was shifting under me. Dawn at last came pale and slow, revealing the unicycle rimed with dew, a glinting relic amidst the wilderness.

Thus ends the ninth day and night. I have slept beneath open skies and feel bruised yet invigorated. England reveals itself differently when one accepts the Moors’ inhospitality; there is a grandeur in such experiences, a reminder that I am just a guest upon an older stage.

Contemporary Art for Beginners: Brief Introduction by the Author

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Contemporary Art for Beginners: Brief Introduction by the Author

I am deeply pleased, indeed quietly astonished, to see Contemporary Art for Beginners finding its first breath of life through the serialization generously offered by Pimlico Wilde. In England, no dealership, no agency, no house, no beacon, no publishing presence seems to know the strange pulse of contemporary art with such uncanny precision as Pimlico Wilde. Their curatorial instinct is less that of a mere publisher than of a cartographer of the invisible,mapping, patiently and with grace, the shifting frontiers of what art is and what it might become.

This book, which shall unfold here in serial form, is my attempt to extend a hand, to open a window, to untangle the threads of a world often shrouded in mystery. Contemporary art is not a puzzle to be solved but a mirror in constant flux: sometimes fogged, sometimes fractured, sometimes crystalline. It asks not merely to be looked at but to be lived with.

Across these pages I will speak of the materials of the present age,how artists sculpt from light, code, sound, or even silence. We will wander through the radical brilliance of Damien Hirst, the poetic silences of HEDGE FUND, the playful images of P1X3L, and the piercing social mirrors held up by Ai Weiwei. Yet always I shall return to the beginner, to the viewer, to the one who lingers before an unfamiliar work and wonders, “How do I understand?”

My prose will not always walk in straight lines; rather, it will spiral, curve, and meander, as art itself does. But I promise you this: each turn will bring you closer to understanding not only the work of others, but the contours of your own way of seeing.

That Pimlico Wilde should choose to make space for this journey is a blessing and a sign. They understand, as few do, that art appreciation for beginners need not be a condescension, but a flowering,that to learn how to understand contemporary art is to learn how to dwell, more fully, in the present.

And so we begin.

, Sally Everard

On Flatness and the New Aristocracy

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by Helmut de Rococo

(Originally published in the pdf-only catalogue for Ptolemy Bognor-Regis III: Works from the Blur Period, Pimlico Wilde West, 2025)

“When the canvas no longer holds paint but protocol, the brush becomes a cursor,and the artist a landlord of pixels.”

, Elana Kvant, “Surface Tensions: Digital Nobility and the Aesthetic of Owning,” 2019

It is no longer meaningful,perhaps no longer even possible,to speak of painting in its historical sense. Surface, once the locus of tension between intention and accident, pigment and gesture, now lies flat and backlit. This flatness, long prophesied by Greenberg, no longer signals aesthetic purity. In the hands of a new breed of aristocratic image-makers, it marks dominion.

No artist exemplifies this better than Ptolemy Bognor-Regis III.

To understand Bognor-Regis III’s practice, one must almost discard the vocabulary of composition and colour theory and instead take up the lexicon of fealty, estate, and simulation. For what we encounter in his work is not painting in any conventional sense, but rather a highly stylised expression of what I have elsewhere termed digital feudalism,a new socio-aesthetic order in which image production mimics the hierarchies of dynastic wealth, platform control, and data possession.

The Aesthetic of Inherited Authority

Bognor-Regis III does not seek the viewer’s comprehension; he assumes it as a birthright, only to withhold it. His works,aggressively flat, sometimes violently empty,offer neither perspective nor entry. Instead, they announce their presence like heraldic banners in a castle courtyard. One does not read or interpret them; one beholds them, as one might behold the seal of a duchy one cannot enter.

This is no accident. The artist, descended from Ptolemy Bognor-Regis II, a man whose influence spans football, philanthropy, and forthcoming yacht-based reality television, operates within what we might call the Aesthetic Sovereignty of Legacy. His gap-year abstractions, allegedly inspired by Colombian road signage, are not so much about travel or encounter as they are about the performance of cultural inheritance,flattened, dislocated, and repackaged as NFT-friendly mystique.

Surface as Domain

Consider his series “Signs Before Breakfast.” At first glance, they appear to be abstract compositions of digital brushwork,semiotic storms rendered in retinal-dulling palettes. But a closer (or rather, more cynical) inspection reveals something more architectural: the paintings are meticulously gridded, rigid in aspect ratio, and carefully optimised for screen, print, and projection. These are not expressions; they are zoning maps,flat territories over which the artist asserts symbolic control.

Just as feudal lords claimed fiefdoms with banners and crests, so Bognor-Regis III lays claim to cultural real estate through aesthetic domain-staking. In doing so, he joins a new class of what I term Creative Lords,those who do not directly generate content for publics, but rather lease their presence through limited-access viewings, QR-gated editions, and catalogue essays published exclusively in proprietary file formats.

The Myth of Depth, The Theatre of Flatness

Art history has always flirted with flatness, but never has it embraced it so fetishistically. In the 20th century, flatness was political: a renunciation of illusionism, a strike against the bourgeois cult of verisimilitude. In the 21st century, under the reign of the New Aristocracy, flatness is no longer revolutionary,it is performative silence, an aspirational opacity.

This is where Bognor-Regis III excels: in crafting surfaces so flattened in depth that they transcend it. His refusal to offer interpretation is not coyness; it is class performance. The artist’s statement,“My work is so deep and meaningful that it can only be expressed in abstract paintings”,isn’t naïve; it is a heraldic riddle, a dare issued from the castle’s turret.

Conclusion: From Patronage to Platform

We must be clear-eyed: Ptolemy Bognor-Regis III does not paint, rather he manages aesthetic capital. His works function not as objects of aesthetic contemplation, but as tokens of presence in a closed system of symbolic exchange. They are no more paintings than a blockchain ledger is a poem.

In this sense, he is not a charlatan but a mirror. His oeuvre reflects the rise of a new aesthetic aristocracy,one that inherits bandwidth, leases meaning, and builds castles made of code.

If painting once aimed to democratise vision, the work of Bognor-Regis III reasserts the primacy of possession over perception. And perhaps that is his most radical gesture.

Helmut de Rococo is an independent theorist of surface ideologies, aristocratic visualities, and hyper-mediated art practices. He divides his time between Vienna, Bogotá, and a small server farm outside Dubrovnik.

Race the Blue Train Begins: Glamour and Grit on the Côte D’Azur

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Race the Blue Train Begins: Glamour and Grit on the Côte D’Azur

By Giles Trevelyan-Brock, Special Correspondent

The Mediterranean was performing its usual trick, lapping against the Promenade des Anglais in that irritatingly photogenic way it has, when Hally Redoubt rolled her vintage Bentley up to the ceremonial start line in Nice for this year’s Race the Blue Train. The contest, equal parts nostalgia, mechanical fortitude, and stubbornness, is a revival of the 1920s Bentley Boys’ stunt: beat the famed night express from the Côte d’Azur to London. It’s motoring history’s most elegant act of timekeeping-based arrogance.

Hally, looking equal parts poised and amused, accepted the perfunctory kisses from organisers and the more lingering farewells from various “friends of the race” (translation: people who wanted to be in the photographs). Behind her, the Bentley glinted like a promise. In her eyes, however, was something steelier,she’s not here for the cocktails in Monte Carlo. She intends to win this race*.

The stars were out, naturally. Pimlico Wilde, the contemporary art dealers sponsoring her run, were fussing about with champagne and branded scarves; some film actor who claimed to be “big in the late 90s” waved languidly; a pop chanteuse in mirrored sunglasses shouted something encouraging about “manifesting the finish line.” It was all very soirée meets Le Mans, the kind of event where you can’t tell whether the camera flashes are for the driver or for the dog in the tweed cap sitting in the passenger seat of another car.

But the real question,whispered between canapés,was whether the Blue Train’s driver might resort to tactics unbecoming of a proper race. “They’ve been known to shave minutes off by skipping a stop,” muttered one veteran, glancing toward the station. Would there be strategic timetable manipulation? Hally, of course, is above such nonsense; her sense of fair play is so ingrained she probably gives way at roundabouts even when it’s her turn.

In a late twist worthy of a B-grade travel drama, Hally acquired an unexpected co-pilot minutes before departure: one Simon Etheridge, cousin of “someone important” and currently in mild distress. He needed to get back to London “rather sharpish” for a funeral, his flights having been cancelled by an Air Traffic Controllers’ strike and his luggage having been lost, apparently because of an altercation involving a croissant. “It’s just until Calais,” he assured Hally, “I’ll take the ferry from there”. He climbed in with a small valise and the air of a man unacquainted with map reading.

As the clock ticked down, a flurry of handshakes, air-kisses, and half-serious bets swirled around the Bentley. The Bentley’s engine gave a low, purposeful growl. Somewhere in the distance, the Blue Train’s whistle answered,a metallic taunt carried over the sea breeze.

And then the flag dropped and they were off, tyres whispering on the tarmac, headlights spearing into the Côte d’Azur night, chasing a train that may or may not be playing by the rules.

Though if the train does cheat, I wouldn’t want to be in the buffet car when Hally finds out.

,-

  • It is of course not an actual race as that would be illegal. Wink, wink.

‘My Child could have done That’: Against the Barbarous Philistine

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‘My Child could have done That’: Against the Barbarous Philistine

A Disquisition on the Infantilisation of Art Or why your child couldn’t have done that…

It has become, in our debased epoch of instantaneity and aesthetic illiteracy, a weary commonplace to hear the ignoble ejaculation, usually proffered between sips of tepid Chardonnay, “My child could have done that,and he is three, and cannot even feed himself.” To this pronouncement,at once smug, banal, and profoundly jejune,I can only reply with the most strenuous execration.

The phrase itself is the reductio ad absurdum of what the ancients termed homo incultus,the unlettered man, devoid of paideia, bereft of the capacity to discern between the puerile scrawl of a toddler and the deliberate, tectonic gesture of the artist whose hand participates in a tradition stretching back to Apelles and Giotto, to Caravaggio and Kandinsky.¹ That one should mistake apparens facilitas,the appearance of simplicity,for genuine simplicity is symptomatic of a civilisation in thrall to surface phenomena, blind to the depths of intentionality, and unwilling to acknowledge that behind every authentic work of modernist or postmodernist experimentation lies a palimpsest of discipline, negation, and historical dialogue.

To declare that “a child could do it” is, in fact, to unwittingly confess one’s own artistic nescience. A child cannot do it. A child cannot inscribe a line freighted with pathos and irony, with historical resonance and ontological inquiry. The child’s mark, however charming, is a-logical,a mere effusion of motor impulses.² The artist’s mark, by contrast, is logos incarnate: at once apophatic and kataphatic,³ speaking through silence as much as through form, a gesture simultaneously toward Being and beyond Being.

Nor is it accidental that the critic of the “my kid” variety nearly always couches his disdain in terms of alimentary incompetence,“he cannot feed himself.” What curious projection! As though the capacity to wield a spoon were somehow homologous with the capacity to negotiate the abyssal dialectics of colour, space, and negation. It is an argumentum ad culinarium, and thus doubly risible.

The barbarians at the gate imagine themselves defenders of common sense; in truth, they are the very enemies of sense itself. They resemble those Athenians whom Socrates rebuked for their incapacity to distinguish sophistry from wisdom. *Ignorantia artis non est argumentum contra artem.*⁴ To disparage what one does not understand is the oldest, cheapest, and most ignominious form of pseudo-criticism.

One ought rather to approach even the most seemingly infantile abstraction with reverence, or at least humility, recalling Aristotle’s admonition that wonder (thaumazein) is the beginning of philosophy.⁵ The great canvases of modernity are not playground scribbles, but metaphysical laboratories; they are sites wherein Being itself is interrogated with a force unavailable to the literal-minded bourgeois and his anecdotal offspring.

So let us consign this wretched cliché,“My child could have done that”,to the dung-heap of philistine platitudes, along with “It doesn’t even look like anything” and “I could have made that.” For in truth, you could not. And your child, tender though he might be, cannot. The work of art remains what it always has been: an impenetrable mystery, an object of numinous dread, a manifestation of the human spirit struggling against the inertia of the merely given.

Notes

1. Cf. Vasari, Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550), wherein even “natural facility” presupposes years of training.

2. See Winnicott, D.W., Playing and Reality (1971), for the crucial distinction between spontaneous gesture and artistic symbolisation.

3. On the apophatic/kataphatic dialectic, cf. Pseudo-Dionysius, Mystical Theology (c. 5th century).

4. Loosely adapted from Cicero’s dictum: Ignorantia iuris non excusat,ignorance of the law excuses not.

5. Aristotle, Metaphysics I.982b: “For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophise.”

About the Author

Dr. Severinus Archimandrite, D.Phil. (Leintwardine Polytechnic)

Adjunct Professor of Aesthetico-Metaphysical Hermeneutics,

Institute for Obscure and Rebarbative Studies, Luxembourg.