Art for art's sake.

While I spent yesterday spreading muck down the allotment followed by a visit to the St Paul's camp and paying my respects to Withers & Co Solicitors, her indoors opted for a day at the Pallant House Edward Burra exhibition. Apparently it's a great show but what struck her was the punters that it attracted. As a young artist Burra was fascinated with the underbelly of society and gravitated toward the sailors bars, dodgy clubs and strip joints of the world. Now his work is lauded by the kind of people who think that the local Conservative Club annual dinner and dance is living on the edge. All those art lovers jerking themselves off over Van Gogh would not come within a million miles of the real life artist. It was ever thus. Not that art and music practitioners themselves, the actual scrapers of catgut and canvas, are any better. The art world, infested as it is by mummy's little fuckwit faux bohemians, has always had a deep vein of hypocrisy running through it. Yesterday's radical musician is today's champion of the free market. Bruce "Eton Rifles" Foxton actually sent his son to the school. The Situationist International may not have had a monopoly on the truth but they knew what they were doing when they expelled all the artists. Sod it anyway. We're off to the Post Modernist romp at the V&A tomorrow.