Art for Idiots?

I thought that I’d become numb to Graffiti.

Then, on a trip to the Netherlands I saw some that I couldn’t shake from my mind. The writing was psychotic and recognizable; the type of vandalistic scribbling that would never be called art. The texts were in Dutch, and relayed reactions to what art might be with statements like: “Absolute fucking retards calling this art and daring to call themselves artists,” or, ‘‘I can’t wait until the day when the average taxpayer determines what art is and isn’t.”

I’m the average taxpayer and whoever wished this, just made it happen for me. Significant cuts to state art and culture subsidies created hot debate over contemporary art and its value in the Netherlands last summer. Taken from Internet chatter concerned with this so-called cultural meltdown, like so much media, these sentences were copy and paste, but not credited. They now belonged to a project by Dutch artist Jeroen Jongeleen.

As the arts and cultural sector assessed its wounds and looked for sustainable opportunities in the ashes, the government gained broad support for what appeared as a shortsighted populist appeal to attack an elitist industry. Inspired by the overall vulgarity of the debate, Jongeleen’s mixed media intervention both documents and provokes the conversation.

Claiming other people’s opinions, he reframed civil sentiment by reproducing these reactions on salvaged furniture in an act, which returned public reflections to the public domain as clear hooliganism.

The project takes an interesting twist when these sentiments are exhibited as art and posed directly to this presumed cultural elite. How will an expert analyze this? Will he take offense? Purchase it to hang next to a ‘classic.’ Will she consider the salvaged materials, recycled opinions or historical context of such a dialectical disfiguration?

Featured at Art Rotterdam and a solo exhibition at the Upstream Gallery, indoors the handwriting sharpens and the rude tone becomes a comical, poignant and undoubtedly fearless inquiry. Hooliganism becomes equally crass humor. The language doesn’t change, but the context and meaning do. They change again as Jongeleen translates these phrases to English, reminding us that the sentiments of the late 1930’s could come back in style while offering an example of socially conscious contemporary art.

‘The sort of art only understood by idiots.’