Read J for Free Online

that had no utility except to offend whoever looked on them by virtue of the obscene acts they depicted. The art, they explained, when they could be bothered to explain anything, lay precisely in the offence. But the joke never took. Obscenities don’t shock country people who practise them without thinking twice. And as for the ironies of installation art, you needed department stores all around you to appreciate those, just as you need the colours of a big sky and the changeability of a turbulent sea to understand why painters have to paint. The pursuit of beauty is no mystery when you wake to it each day. And I have always argued that the real sentimentality is not the indulgence of colour but the denial of it. It went missing, anyway. Three generations lived and died without seeing colour except in its lipstick-pink and electric-blue manifestations, flashing tubes and the like, ironic statements about colour and its production, denying the naked sensuousnessthat makes true lovers of painting believe they are seeing the face of God. But enough of that. You will find my thoughts on the subject – much extended – in many a volume of Sublime Quarterly , Bethesda’s own art magazine, which can be ordered from any gallery shop in the country and also a good number of the better newsagents. I write under my own name – Edward Everett Phineas Zermansky (Everett to my friends, Phinny to my family) – and am told that I am highly readable.
    Well, my wife tells me so, anyway.
    Or at least she does when she isn’t telling me the opposite. Phinny the Palaverous is how she refers to me to her girlfriends. Who know, of course, she doesn’t mean it.
    I don’t say we fight. But we are not immune to malign influences beyond our kitchen and bedroom. How could we be? Are we not all one family?
    That the dry, embittered colourlessness of the conceptual – to return to my theme – helped harden the nation’s heart is accepted as a truism by artists of today. Art wasn’t the cause or centre of the great desensitisation, for which, of course, all artists apologise, but WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED – or TWITTERNACHT , as I like to call it when I am feeling skittish, by way of reference to . . . well to many things, one of them being the then prevailing mode of social interaction that facilitated, though can by no means be said to have provoked it – WHAT HAPPENED , IF IT HAPPENED , I say, happened, if it did, because as a people we’d anaesthetised the feeling parts of ourselves, first through the ugly liberties with form taken by modernism and second through the liberties taken with emotion by that same modernism in its ‘post’ form. I say ‘we’ because there is nothing to be achieved by saying ‘they’, indeed there is much to be lost, given that ‘they’ is a policed pronoun today, but when I am certain no one is looking (I mean this figuratively) I poke a finger at the alien intellectualism that brought such destruction first on itself and then, as an inevitable consequence, on all of us. Thus, again, the felicity of my TWITTERNACHT jeu d’esprit , twitter like much else in the same vein that was then the rage, having proceeded from the alien intelligences of the very people who were to lose most by it. Call that irony, a concept of which they, in particular, were overfond, which is an irony in itself. Let’s be clear: no one behaved well, but there is such a thing as provocation. The largest beast can be maddened by the smallest parasitic mite. (Especially when it’s clever . . . the mite, that is.) I will say no more than that.
    Except . . . No, I’ll stick to my guns and shut up. ‘You talk too much,’ Demelza is always saying to me. And I’m a man who listens to his wife.
    Perhaps future generations will describe what we do now as a cult of feeling, but better to feel than not to, better to experience love than its opposite. Better, in short, to live now than to have lived then. If the cost of not