Art Attack - on Jonathan Jones

The blogoplanet being what it is (no, to be honest, we don’t know either – everybody else seems to, though), that tiny minority paid to do very little except blog are, rightly, the subjects of an extraordinary scrutiny. A scrutiny far more intense, that is, than any kind of journalist has been the subject of at any other point in history – and far more public, in fact: yes, the scholar Peter Holland was right to point out, in a recent lecture about reviewing theatre, that online comment-makers invariably savage each other rather than the actual, y’know, authors of articles/blogs/posts/etc. But more than ever before, the blogosphere has ensured that paid journalists can expect to see their work displayed alongside comments insulting their methodology, correcting their grammar, or often just thick with personal abuse, on a daily basis. Often bi-daily. However good they are.

Poor old George Monbiot instigates a relatively major online civil war whenever he thinks a thought. James Macintyre at the New Statesman receives a gushing torrent of Nu-Tory abuse each and every time he put throws down one of his (admittedly, Labour-fisting) gauntlet-polemics. Tanya Gold is another prolific comment firestarter – not that we blame that particular journalist’s critics. She is, by any reasonable human being’s standards, a spadefaced killjoy with all the brutal, pleasure-chapping imagination of a particularly virulent strain of syphilis.

All of which represents a context which brings into the sharpest of reliefs a question that, in a way that I’ve found unfathomable for several months now, the blogoearth refuses to ask: why, WHY does the Guardian still pay monies, MONIES THAT THE ENTIRE GODAMN WORLD KNOWS IT CAN’T AFFORD, to Jonathan motherfucking Jones. You know, Jonathan Jones. The art blog guy. The strawberry-coloured art blog guy who writes the art blogs. With the tumour-head? For the Guardian? You know, that guy? With the art blog? The blog about the art?

God, lucky you. Take it this means you haven’t been luxuriating in the shimmering pointlessness of Jonathan Jones’ astonishingly facile yet curiously addictive ‘thoughts’ about ‘art’ for the last manymany weeks like we have then? God. Weird. We thought everyone else was too. Shit, guess that’s why the Guardian still gives him the monies then. Right.

Well then, here's Jonathan Jones’ art blog. We’re genuinely sorry to do this, but it’s important that you read a few posts by way of catch up – otherwise what follows this paragraph might appear a little injudicious. We recommend you start with this one (published on November 18). It serves as a particularly good introduction to Jones’ uncompromisingly useless approach to blogging about a subject that, for reasons that haven’t yet been made clear to us, he’s considered an expert on (if ‘art’ – yes, the whole of art, all of it, all the art – can indeed be considered a ‘subject’). Let's go through it step by step, really get to the heart of what JJ’s about…

‘Art snobs can keep Poussin: next to the sensuality of Botticelli or the danger of Cezanne, Poussin’s haughty, bloodless landscapes leave me cold…’

Good lord JJ. You mean a fifteenth century Florentine and a nineteenth century Frenchman can not only be slapped together and made sense of with single, well-chosen (because who, after all, doesn’t feel altogether menaced when confronted by Cezanne’s still life curtains) adjectival flourishes, but are also represent, together, a basis for your anti-snob lack of affection for a sixteenth century French painter who, intriguingly, requires TWO similarly well-chosen adjectives to be similarly summarised. What a remarkable hypothesis. Let’s see where you go next with this…

We paraphrase (it’s easy with JJ – here's two paragraphs in ten words): ‘I’m not an art snob because I don’t like Poussin…’

Now, we’re pretty sure that most snobs’ snobbishness is defined by what they don’t like rather than what they do – and, indeed, that if too many snobs like one thing, then that thing immediately becomes an inappropriate subject for snobbish approval, and therefore no longer a ‘touchstone of high taste’. Think – let’s use an example JJ will be comfortable with – Picasso. But whatever, we’re still with you…

Again paraphrased: ‘I once stayed in a town which was hosting both a Poussin and a Botticelli exhibition – I preferred the Botticelli. Cezanne admired Poussin – I prefer Cezanne to Poussin.’

THAT’S THE LINK? THAT’S THE FUCKING LINK?

‘But on Poussin, I’m a philistine and fear I always will be…’

Ah, a bit of self-deprecation (slotted in, mind, between fatty, buttery layers of self-promoting pretension – ‘I once got to spend a night in the Villa Medici in Rome to see an exhibition of Poussin and his contemporaries curated by Neil MacGregor’ anyone? How about the bastard’s use of the word ‘milquetoast’?) to make it all okay again, to smooth over the fact that your blog isn’t framed around, we dunno, something that’s HAPPENED deserving of comment, the publication of a new book (the one he mentions is three years old), a new exhibition, something like that – that your blog represents NOTHING more than your banally-expressed opinions about three STAGGERINGLY UNCONNECTED artists.

Imagine, for a minute, what would happen if a paid ‘literary critic’ decided, spontaneously, to blog the following (and once again, we paraphrase): James Joyce is the touchstone of high-taste but I find his work rather BLOODLESS – James kind of sounds like Jones and I like Tom Jones by Henry Fielding, which isn’t bloodless, and I once read Portrait… and The Canterbury Tales in the same day and I definitely preferred the latter – more blood. Therefore James Joyce is bad, aren’t I a philistine, HO HO HO.

Said imaginary critic would, it goes without saying, be ridiculed. JJ isn’t ridiculed. JJ gets comments thanking him for his interesting opinionations. And this, thank Christ, rather more perceptive comment from ‘Dowland’:

‘I'm not having a go at JJ (specifically) here, but this is what bothers me about so much “criticism” of the arts (see the Guardian’s music reviews – any category – for similar examples, or even Peter Bradshaw’s breathtakingly uninformative review recently of An American Werewolf in London).

It basically comes down to “I like this but I don't like that”.

Come on critics – give us some insights! Expand our horizons! Show us things we might never have noticed about a piece of art! Not “I went to a Poussin exhibition and found him bloodless but maybe that’s just me.”

Any fool can do that. Even I could do that.’

You’re on the right track Dowland, really you are. But you really SHOULD be having a go at JJ specifically. Bradshaw’s nothing like as bad. The above really, really isn’t, we should add, an isolated case. Consider this, JJ’s list of the five most famous art galleries in the world complete with an explanation of which one’s his favourite – alas, the recent redesign of the MOMA ‘has left it less lovable’. Loveable? Fuck does that mean JJ? Or this altogether more troubling little bollock of wisdom: hey guys, leave state-funded tax-ducker Emin alone, she’s an artist, artists are meant to be, y’know, different an' strange an’ stuff. So just chill out yeah, silly British public.

So yeah, basically, shut up JJ. Shut the fuck up. Go have the heart attack that your pallor suggests is more than imminent. Please. You don’t know how blogging works. You’re disproportionately successful. Your work soils the Guardian's exquisite website. And you’re so, so much more physically repulsive than Rachel Campbell-Johnston. You’re ruining art for us. All of it. All the art.