A daub of art criticism

In principle we refrain from dabbling in commentary upon the visual arts, criticism of which, for us, consists simply in nodding benevolently in the direction of Norman Rockwell (upon whom be peace).  Yet we could not help noticing a recent news item, buried between the police blotter and the racing results:

A celebrated portrait by Francis Bacon of his lover and muse George Dyer could raise up to 30 million pounds ($49 million) on auction in London next month, Christie's said on Wednesday.

A Bacon triptych sold last year set an auction record of $142 million.

The "Portrait of George Dyer Talking" from 1966 is one of the most famous images of Bacon's lover and was exhibited at his Retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1971, a Christie's statement said.

The Irish-born Bacon met Dyer in London's Soho district in 1963, drawn to him by his fragility and need for protection. An anxious, constant smoker and problematic drinker, Dyer went on to dominate Bacon portraits for the rest of the decade.

Dyer committed suicide in 1971.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/01/15/us-art-auction-bacon-idUSBREA0E0YQ20140115

(Not before time …)

For any of you who are so blessed as not to be acquainted with the painterly excretions of this individual:  they are the visual equivalent of projectile vomiting.  And now this framed sputum has become the speculative plaything of moneylenders, and kingpins flush with cash.

There would be no point in polemicizing against this, any more than against pit bulls or scorpions.  Our duty is simply to note, that Homo sapiens seems to have split into two subspecies:  which, given time, might no longer be able to interbreed.   All that is quite normal, quite within the Scheme of Things;  for just such gradual and aleatory processes gave rise to such creatures as the toad, the slime mold, and the baboon.  H. sapiens baconiensis should fit right in.

The silver lining to this (as we darkly contemplate the future of our race) is that baconiensis, being wholly given over to unprocreational paraphilias, is unlikely to produce offspring, at least in the normal way.  Though, with the aid of certain Satanic medical procedures (human cloning, IRF [Intra-Rectal Fertilization], implantation into swine wombs), humanity as we have known it throughout civilized time, might yet be swamped by wave upon wave of eyeless, suctorial, creeping, anus-breathing, mephitic albino hypoanthropoids, swarming crabwise over the last remaining ramparts of civilization.

Cato the Elder was right.

Caton Major

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