by Jerome du Bois
I don't write about art anymore, but I do write about artists, and I want to call attention to the overinflated self-importance, the corpulent, world-shadowing arrogance of Fernando Botero, who thinks he has weight to throw around.
I use the obvious clichés because he does, in his new series --wherein he channels Leon Golub-- on Abu Ghraib ("this great crime," he intoned over the phone from his Paris studio).
The NYT Times article by Juan Forero published Sunday (member site) is outrageous, horrific, and hilarious, sometimes all at once. For example, the beginning:
Fernando Botero, Latin America's best-known living artist, shocked the art world last year when he broke sharply from his usual depictions of small town life to reveal new works that depicted Colombia's war in horrific detail.
Now, Mr. Botero, 73, who lives in Paris and New York--
Okay, hold it. Botero is 73 years old. Colombia, his home country, has been in an increasingly brutal civil and drug war for 40-plus years, since he was Jesus's age. What took him so fooking long? Well, Forero writes later in the piece,
Mr. Botero explained that he had decided he could not stay silent over a conflict he called absurd.
Absurd? What does absurd have to do with it? That is a mere minor note amid the organized brutality and exploitation by powerful people of vulnerable ones --e.g., history.
I don't buy it. Maybe it's hard to hear your suffering people from New York and Paris and Rome and Hanover and Athens.
No, no, no. I don't understand, they say:
"These works are a result of the indignation that the violations in Iraq produced in me and the rest of the world," Mr. Botero said by telephone from his Paris studio.
the rest of the world?
Old man, take a look at your life: nobody with any real weight gives a damn what you paint or what you say or how goddamned indignant you are, even though
. . . last year, his paintings of Colombia's long guerrilla war, full of blood, agony and senseless violence, became a big draw in European galleries, surprising followers astonished by Mr. Botero's bold departure in substance, if not style.
(European galleries; I'm not surprised.) Botero thinks he actually has weight:
Now, he said, his indignation over war and brutality may turn up increasingly in his work.
"I rethought my idea of what to paint and that permitted me to do the war in Colombia, and now there's this," he said. "And if there's something else that compels me in the future, then I will do it."
Mr. Botero, citing the Impressionists and the many works of a favorite of his, Velasquez, said he had once thought that art should be inoffensive, since "it doesn't have the capacity to change anything."
But with time, and his growing outrage, Mr. Botero said he had become more cognizant that art could and should make a statement.
He pointed to the most famous antiwar painting of the 20th Century, Picasso's masterpiece that depicted the German bombing of Guernica, Spain. Had Picasso not produced "Guernica," Mr. Botero said, the town would have been another footnote in the Spanish Civil War.
Sure. Picasso raised his mighty hand and stopped the bombs in midair. All that bloodshed since the late 30s has just been a long red smear of a bad dream. And, of course, every person on the street know what the word "Guernica" refers to.
Botero, like many artists and their boosters, continues to inflate the importance of his calling, especially when he makes inane statements like
Mr. Botero said he had become more cognizant that art could and should make a statement.
No shit. But just as science cannot yet avert a single thunderbolt, art has not yet found the strength to have a direct impact on policy. The candid photos from Abu Ghraib, taken by nonartists to say the least, will endure far longer than Botero's bloats or Richard Serra's whiners.
"He said he read about Abu Ghraib in The New Yorker . . ."
Does anyone else but me find that hilarious? The account would be by the notoriously sterling character Seymour Hersh, the very definition of a five-sided confabulating comedian. By that time, of course, the story was two weeks old.
Calling himself an admirer of the United States --one of his sons lives in Miami-- Mr. Botero said he became incensed because he expected better of the American government.
So did we all, but again we need to deflate the bloviating. It wasn't the whole "American government," just a miniscule bunch of clowns even now being punished. And Mr. FatEgo has taken while to get incensed --quite a slow burn. We have been moving on.
But that's not enough for this guy. Why? I'll tell you why. There's a clue we almost passed over above --the income from the European galleries. This is about money and fame and keeping your name in the game. Yes, I read his disclaimer:
. . . the works being exhibited, and those he has continued to create on Abu Ghraib, were not for sale because it would not be proper to profit from such events.
Didn't "Guernica" get sold? This series is not for sale yet, but I predict it will be. This series is simply a career move by another fading circus act who should have folded his canvas and left the scene years ago. What incenses me is that this arrogant, complacent old man will tear into our fading pain, and rip off our healing scabs, merely to stay in the limelight just a few years longer.