I like this guy

[mbarrick]

This morning I heard a clip of the British Minister of Culture, Kim Howells, slamming the "Avant Garde". I couldn't find the complete text of the what I heard but I did find this much:

This brigade that was on show last night, the charcoal suits and the black shirts and the incomprehensible psychobabble that accompanies all of this, they are the establishment, and the art that they favour is the one that for the moment seems to them to be closest to that sense of mystery and elitism that they espouse so much.

Last October, after viewing the artists shorlisted for the Turner Prize, wrote on a comment card at the Tate Gallery

If this is the best British artists can produce then British art is lost. It is cold, mechanical, conceptual, bullshit.

He's also received flack for saying in parliament that listening to folk music was his idea of hell.

I find this all amusing. Naturally the "avant garde establishment" (and folk musicians) are less amused. Shame we can't have a culture minister with balls like this. It's most certainly true that the "incomprehensible psychobabble" is all there is to post-Modernism. Since the "end" of Modernism in the mid-1970's nothing in the art world has managed to rate a name of its own. Everything is simply the crap that comes after Modernism, i.e. post-Modernism. Yet this Modernist avant garde tradition continues. Nothing is considered worthy unless it is tearing down some institution or other. Actually building something is frowned upon.