We’re not yet the 51st state

A proper Mothering Sunday gift

If you wanted a brief illustration of much of what is wrong in the world today, it came on Sunday morning via Twitter.

It was early morning on Mothering Sunday and @IntelUK had decided to promote a tweet – ie spend money ensuring it becomes an online version of unsolicited junk mail – to say: “Make sure mum has everything she needs to relax this Mother’s Day #inteltablets”.

Now, when you’re going to have a bit of a rant, you might as well go the whole hog. In which case …

It was not “Mother’s Day”. That is a US invention that began early in the 20th century and is not linked to the many celebrations of mothers and motherhood that have occurred, around the rest of the world, for thousands of years.

Those have included the likes of the Greek cult of Cybele, the Roman festival of Hilaria – and the Christian world’s Mothering Sunday, which initially started out as being about returning to your ‘Mother Church’ – the main one in the area that you came from – for a service on the fourth Sunday in Lent.

As such, it became a rare day when domestic servants were given time off to attend their own mother churches – usually with their families and mothers – making this one of the few times in a year when families could be together.

According to tradition, children or young people in service would, as they made their way to join their families at church, pick flowers on the way and give them to their mothers.

Although it was still celebrated in many churches, the decline in widespread religiosity saw Constance Penswick-Smith create the Mothering Sunday Movement in the 1920s, inspired by the efforts of Anna Jarvis to create Mother’s Day in the US.

And American and Canadian troops, billeted here during WWII, made people aware of their own version, while in the 1950s, businesses saw an opportunity for flogging people stuff to mark the day.

Of course, in keeping with a country in which we now have school ‘proms’ (squirms at the mere thought) and students ‘graduate’ from school, and where Halloween has been developed into an ever bigger event (by those same businesses), one might conclude, with a shrug, that the Americanisation of the country is so far advanced that we might as well simply give in.

The really depressing thing, though, is how quickly so many Brits have given in to what has, largely, been a growth of interest that’s been orchestrated for commercial gain.

For goodness sake – what happened to leaving school on the last day with your shirt covered in autographs from your classmates?

Oh, that’s right: it didn’t provide an ‘opportunity’ for parents to spend loads in an effort to make sure that their son or daughter looks better than Mr and Mrs Jones’s offpring and arrives in a swankier car than Mr and Mrs Patel’s children.

Halloween? All about flogging cards and costumes and sweets and goodness knows what else for ‘trick or treating’. Mischief Night didn’t have the same cost implications – or the same profit potential.

And now, in order to show your mother that you care, Intel thinks you should buy her a tablet.

Right. My 84-year-old mother, who struggles with the DVD player, would really appreciate that sign of daughterly affection.

‘It’s a tablet, Mother.’

‘What do you mean, a tablet? I doesn’t remotely look like something anyone could swallow.’

‘It’s like a handbag-sized computer.’

‘So why is it called a tablet – and why do I want a computer of any size?’

‘It’ll make your life easier.”

‘How?’

This is, after all, a parent who, on those occasions that I have to re-run through using the DVD player, doesn’t know what I mean when I use words such as ‘menu’ and ‘curser’.

But Intel wanted me, presumably, to set my eyes on their early-morning tweet and leap from my bed with a ‘Eureka!’.

I’d have to phone my mother to say I’d be late to get around there to actually spend some time with her, and instead race to a shop.

A shop that’s open, of course, meaning that the staff themselves won’t be spending any quality Mothering Sunday time with their own families.

Once arrived in such a wonderful atmosphere, I will buy something that would be utterly redundant for her.

Because the only way in which you can show your mother that you care about her is to lash out money on a gadget.

And that, folks, is what Mothering Sunday is really all about; and that, in a nutshell, is a bloody good illustration of what’s wrong in the world today.

Hurrumph.

That's not art - that's sick. Yes, it is

'Nexus Vomitus', Millie Brown

It seems that someone has finally worked out how to spew up onto paper and then call it Art.

Now admittedly, I hadn’t heard of Millie Brown until spotting a Guardian story online earlier this week, but since we’ve had piss and shit labelled as Art previously, plus assorted other bodily fluids, it was inevitable.

Brown, who has collaborated with Lady Gaga, gives performances where she drinks milk coloured with food additives – and then vomits it up onto paper to make ‘a rainbow’. Well, splodges of colour.

It was the sort of article that provoked a sizable response – not least for it having taken Brown’s claims that she makes Art quite so seriously.

On the other hand, responding to someone saying that it wasn’t ‘art’, another poster noted: “One of the values of art is to broaden the possibilities of thought – you seem to have skipped this altogether.”

Well, I can’t speak for the person that they responded to, but saying that this is, err, shit doesn’t mean that you’ve lost the ability to be broad-minded about art.

Refusing to make a critical judgment on something – while all the while condemning those who make a negative one – shows a lack of personal responsibility on an intellectual level. Nobody has to make a judgment, but if they choose not to, they shouldn’t condemn others who do and whine that it’s just because critics don’t ‘understand’ it.

What Brown does doesn’t ‘offend’ me, but it strikes me that this is yet another example of the infantilising impact of commercialisation, the cult of the celebrity, the Warhollian search for those 15 minutes and the dumbing-down of our culture as a whole.

To be fair, the quoted poster was not altogether alone: after all, this was the Guardian, where some people do tend rather to get off their dreadfully right-on lack of any discernment or taste: or relativism, as it’s known.

Brown’s oeuvre has been condemned as celebrating bulimia, which begs the question of what you’re supposed to be opened minded about if her performances are about that particular eating disorder: does the idea that it can create ‘rainbows’ make it somehow beautiful?

Perhaps the best that can be said about it is just how good it makes Jackson Pollock’s works look.

Brown – and others – seem set on provoking shock and sensation. One might say ‘good luck’ to her if the gullible give her money for it (although what such performances do to your health remains to be seen).

'Departure' by Max Beckmann, 1932-35 – 'degenerate'

But attempts to manufacture sensation in art seem particularly facile when considered alongside news of an exhibition currently on in New York.

The Neue Galerie near FifthAvenue is playing host to Degenerate Art, an exhibition of some of the works that featured in the Nazis’ infamous Entartete Kunst exhibition of 1937.

It’s been curated to include examples of the Nazi-acceptable art that were shown in an opposing exhibition, and which only serve to show just how good so much of what was considered ‘degenerate’ really was.

Yet however much senior Nazis officially abided by Hitler’s hatred of the modern, many took the opportunity to grab for themselves pieces of this art.

And the crowds throughout Nazi Germany gazed in their millions on that which had been declared degenerate, while pretty much leaving alone an exhibition of the Führer-sanctioned variety.

'The Four Elements' by Adolf Ziegler, 1937 – approved

It was art that, when you think of it in its historic context, reflected the extraordinary changes that were taking place in Western life in the early decades of the 20th century – psychoanalysis, the decline in religious belief, growth of technology, the increasing emancipation of women and the moves by increasing numbers beyond the narrow confines of the home, and so much more that had the power to unsettle.

Little wonder that it disturbed.

And indeed, the Nazi-sanctioned art was, in part, an attempt to hold back the tide of change.

Perhaps my response to Brown’s attempts to shock reveal only a jaded palate – although I think not.

It does all beg the old question of the role of art: is it simply to shock?

You can provoke without shocking – it does require a tad more subtlety, though.

British artist Dave White has a new exhibition on that actually manages to be modern, reflect rather more traditional artistic skill than Brown, and are actually worth looking at.

'Great White Shark II' by Dave White

His series of paintings of sharks and other creatures are in watercolour, but are a departure from what some might see as the conventionally ‘twee’ nature of that medium, as he himself points out.

He uses the paint in a very free way and allows dripping and splashing to add a feel of movement and energy to his works.

Yet these are completely figurative and the effect actually works intriguingly well by giving the paintings a sense of having been executed at incredible pace.

White is indicative of an artistic world well beyond installations in galleries that survive on a diet of shock; of painting that is both traditional but not.

He isn’t collaborating with Lady Gaga, but his work has much more to say, and does so in a way that provokes attention and thought more interestingly than a stream of vomited milk.