Art World Goes GaGa over Chimp -- Disses Warhol and Renoir

Pictures by Congo the Chimp [AFP]

Just what you always suspected about fine art -- the connoisseurs have lousy taste and the collectors are supremely ignorant.

Reuters reports:

The art world, confusing at the best of times, took another right-angled lurch at Bonhams auction house yesterday.

Amid wild scenes, three paintings by a chimpanzee were sold for £14,400, more than 20 times their estimate.

In the same sale an Andy Warhol painting and a small Renoir sculpture attracted so little interest that they had to be withdrawn.

Congo, the chimp who produced the "artwork" was something of a celebrity in London half a century ago.

Picasso acquired one of Congo's 400 works, Miro swapped two of his paintings for one of Congo's, and Salvador Dali was so smitten with the ape's canvases that he declared: ''The hand of the chimpanzee is quasihuman; the hand of Jackson Pollock is totally animal!"

No quotes from Pollock, though.

A Bonham's spokesman said: "It was quite an historic moment and it was fantastically exciting.

"People seem to see these paintings as the truest form of creativity."

I'd be excited too if I had just pulled down a nice commission for selling mindless crap.

Read it here.

Here we see the complete divorce of art from human agency and the intention it implies. There is such a thing as "found art" which results from natural processes, but think about the implications of this stuff. It renders the artist completely irrelevant. All that matters is the seller and the buyer, and of course the "expert" who declares it to be art. Pure commerce -- pure bull hockey.

Actually, I wouldn't waste a dime on August Renoir [his son Jean is another matter] or Andy Warhol either, and I agree with Dali's assessment of Pollock. As for Picasso and Miro -- they always did enjoy a good joke.