The Rogues Gallery

It was a rainy Saturday afternoon and Sam Snort was using the Weekend or as he likes to call it, the weak end section of the Irish Times for the only purpose for which it is suited (the rolling of a fabled Mallow Marrow 21-skinner), when his attention was drawn to an as yet unscorched article which included the puzzling sentence The YBA party is over .

What could that mean, I wondered. Ya Big Arsehole perhaps? And, do you know, in my own sharply instinctive way, I was right. Because further inspection revealed that what YBA actually stands for is Young British Artists , a movement about which I frankly know bugger all, and care even less, but which I ll stake my wife sorry, I mean my life is comprised almost entirely of big arseholes.
This is only to be expected, of course, because whenever Sam encounters lads in black polo necks and horn-rimmed glasses discussing art on the telly, he is always struck by the curious fact that the sound of their voices appears to be substantially muffled by the outlandishly-shaped chairs on which they sit. (The chairs have to be outlandishly-shaped because it s an arts show, don tcha know. Indeed, the less chair-like they are the better. A contraption which raises your feet above your head and rearranges your spine into an S-shape would be just about ideal).
A typical exchange on such a programme might go something like this
Presenter: Jocelyn, you were very moved by this exhbition were you not?
Grim-looking cove in black polo-neck: Hurm urm har murm... the death of self...gnrr gurn wurn... post-modern sensibility... fnarr fnurr flurm... the landscape of the interior... urgle gurgle wurgle... use of space qua space inside a double helix... piffle wiffle splurg .
Presenter: Thank you Jocelyn. And that exhibition of cushions continues this week at the Merlin Gallery For The Intensely Gullible in Temple Bar. Now, before we move on, would someone kindly hit me on the head with a mallet because I really don t think I can take much more of this fucking shite without some kind of anaesthetic .
Sam can sympathise. Certainly, no subject in the history of the world, including that of swineherding itself, has generated more toxic pigswill than Modern Art.
Let us look, for example, at the work of Tracy Emin who what s the word? Created? Fashioned? Brought into being? Ah, fuck it who erected a tent on the walls of which she inscribed the names of everyone she d slept with between 1963 and 1995. With the blinding invention for which modern art is renowned, she then proceeded to call this Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995 .
A fucking tent, if you don t mind. Indeed, a fucking tent in more ways than one. Need I point out that if Sam had nothing better to do than to stick up a tent containing the names of everyone with whom he has ever indulged in the rites of poontang, the fucking thing would be bigger than the millennium dome.
But not content with flogging her sad little bivouac in the name of art, the same dotty babe also put her bed on display for reasons that only the deranged and, perhaps, Germaine Greer can understand. You can take it as read, of course, that The Great Snort will not be following suit, for the simple reason that I am too busy using my bed for the purposes that Jah intended as a sturdy leurve trampoline to donate it for even five minutes to a fucking museum.
So if the modern art crowd want to see Sam getting it on, off and everywhichway with babes well-schooled in the Oriental art of Fuck Shui ( Here, move your leg just a little bit up and to the left... that s lovely ), they can queue up outside the Great Bedroom in Snort Towers like all the other wannabes.
And then there s Damien Hirst... what the fuck can you say about that unmerciful poltroon? Sam Snort has probably been pickled more times than any other living creature but it never occurred to him that he should be locked in a tank and put on display to the general public. (Although, come to think of it, that did happen to me once while on vacation in Columbia, but I d rather not go into that now).
Of course, in the terminally daft world of modern art, it s not enough just to pickle a shark and invite waterbrains at considerable cost to their wallets, to inspect the damage. No, you must first give it a perfectly stupid name, such as, in the case of Hirst s shark, The Physical Impossibility Of Death In The Mind Of Someone Living . Jesus marauding Christ what s wrong with Jaws ?
And, for that matter, what s wrong with a nice still life of fruit in a bowl, a lovely pastoral landscape or, my personal favourite, studies of large naked ladies with big red lips and prominent mazoomas. Now that s real art. Remember kids, never mind the Pollocks!
Your ever lovin Samuel J. Snort Esq.