I've just got home from a weekend at the Hay Festival and feeling inspired to do some writing. With limited time before bed, I'm torn between adding a post here, or doing some drawing. The blog wins, but mainly through a sense of duty: I've only just started it and I feel I should add something regularly, but lets leave comics and medicine for tonight and let me tell you about Hay: if you don't know, its a literary festival, and has become so successful it is now being exported and copied all over the world. It is very well organized and terribly…civilised, in a well spoken, slightly left wing, intellectual kind of way.
I went to a talk by Jake and Dinos Chapman, chaired by Tim Marlowe. I admire their work because I tend to like things that are made to deliberately offend the common sensibility (providing, I guess, that it doesn't contain real violence or animal cruelty or whatever). They were, by turns, deliberately obnoxious, ascerbic, puerile, incisive and funny. Jake seemed to do most of the talking. I did quite like some of their ideas; I'm not that keen on fine art that has an obvious moral message, and positive insight can come out of occasionally exposing oneself to the gruesome or gothic. (although having the choice to do so, it should be remembered, is a privilege) In the end I decided that I preferred to look at their work than listen to them talk, and left feeling rather unsure as what to think: are they really as mean as they seem to make out?
I was sitting on the second row. In front of me sat a guy with long grey hair and a grey beard. At his feet was balanced a canvas bearing a painted portrait of the brothers. He seemed poised to make some sort of approach to the stage. I couldn't get a clear view of the portrait but it looked to me like it was rendered in a naive style. "Shit", I thought, "he's going to present them with the painting, this could be mortifying". In the end, he wanted them to sign it, making his move after the ending applause died down. I hung back slightly and waited to see if he'd get his wish or whether he'd be told to "Fuck Off". He got his wish: as I left I saw Jake, seeming to overcome a moment of puzzlement, signing his name across the forehead of his painted avotar. I later saw they grey haired man walking around carrying his canvas and wondered what he was going to do with it: was it simply a piece of fandom to proudly display to his friends or some sort of comment on authorship, or was he going to stick it on ebay?
