Scold the front page

The art world is like a newspaper. It needs a story. It is tabloid by nature. The knickers really matter. The private jet. The number of security men. The banality. Art? What on earth is art? The superficial pedigree of the company the high-profile artist keeps is far more important to the machine invented to follow it than any lit-fest or brain-vain genius. Glib-celeb, that's the new fool by the whirlpool. You can even have a perfectly good artist today whose work bleeds a kind of melancholic significance but whose every story written about them will deliberately ignore the painful subtle truths for the smirk of the sex and regurgitate and concentrate on the cheekily 'sordid' or wackily 'dysfunctional', thereby turning even a potential moment of genuine high art into an easy-story portrayal of trashy low life. It's almost as if no one is listening or watching any more. We have become deaf and blind at the same time. The only thing we can say now is nothing. Anyway, it was on the back of all this that the artist this morning had a sudden loss of nerve and a real moment of doubt swept into the flat and encircled the artist's head like some thin black line of smoke rendered in a visual effects factory. And there was nothing one could say to wave away the pain. In an instant, an earlier piece of work was retrieved from the fourteen others leaning against the wall by the door. This was given its own space briefly in the living room and was aesthetically revisited, challenged, and tried. Instead of the large amount of time spent on all the work being the reason the work is so good, it was now being used as a cosh to beat the artist up with. And it was a good six or so hours later before the situation resolved itself when a golden animator and literary angel visited and saw the work with fresh eyes. In a flash, a kind of self-worth was re-established on the part of the artist and confidence broke like a news story throughout the entire flat.