Your Art, My Art

The Vancouver Art Gallery has lizards and other strange small creatures on display today. It is part of a new "installation."

I have some advice for you, Art Lovers. As soon as you hear the word, "installation," get on your palimino and head off in the opposite direction as fast as those 4 legs'll carry you.

Installations and video works are among the greatest hoaxes of the modern art world.

I remember vividly wandering through the wondrous halls of the San Fransisco Museum of Modern Art a few years ago. Much on display was wonderful. Then I entered a very large room where a crowd of people were encircling something.

I muscled my way into the inner layers of the crowd and this is what I found.

Hundreds of stuffed toy poodle dogs, black and standing about knee high, were arranged in dozens of concentric circles, all focused on a $5 toy baby doll lying on its back in the centre of the circle.

The people were silent. They were giving serious consideration to this drek.

I started to laugh. Then I howled. Then I said something real friendly, like, "You folks are idiots," and I moved on to the next room.

What the art galleries of the world need these days is more living creatures. Not lizards and spiders, but curators and administrators who can tell the difference between exciting new art and lazy, conceptual put-ons.

When it comes to Art, with a very big A, the emperor has no clothes.