modern art ?

_{toilet paper tower by Martin Creed pic from Nytimes .com}

There’s an old story written by Hans Christian Andersen called the emperor’s new clothes. A vain emperor cheated by a couple of thieves that makes him believes in an invisible new suit. The subject in that story is the level of stupidity a person needs to believe in an invisible cloth and how insecure the king was to let others drag him to a situation like so because he just could not say I DON’T SEE IT and end of the story.
Today we have the same problem with art, is a very subjective issue because we consider art rock paints made by somebody 5000 years ago, and is art (even when look like been made by a 5 years old kid) as much as the Sistine chapel or the elevation of the cross by Peter Paul Rubens. taking advantage of this subjectivity in the more extreme frontier of art dwells untalented artists trying to make money with anything. Under the modern art we can find good pieces of artistic talent but is the refugee of pseudo-artist and scammers like the ones in Hans Andersen’s book.

_{Jens Cederskjold picture of a can full with excrement}

The first piece of ''no-art'' I saw was Merda d’Artista Made by Piero Manzoni in 1961. 90 cans with a label proclaiming contain 1 oz. of human feaces carefully written in 4 languages to make sure that everybody knew what’s inside the can, and of course autographed by him. With this show Piero Manzoni made a strong critiscm about the treatment of art pieces like glorified merchandise, the cult to artists, and the consumption and waste of money through art. I have no idea if the message reached the right people but the cans with excrement in 1961 had the same cost that 1 oz. of gold and in our day one of those canned human waste were auctioned in 250.000 Euros.

Between strong black coffee and cigarette’s smoke I was talking about this matter to a friend of mine and he told me about a plastic artist with a YouTube channel called Antonio Garcia Villarán who develops new concepts to refer properly about the no-art work and artists. He usually calls it Hamparte in Spanish. Hampa make reference to organized criminals, so in English will be something like Mafiart or delinquent-art, I don´t know if someone have a word for that already but the idea define those ‘’artist’’ like smugglers, scammers of simply like a mafia with the objective to pull out tons of money from the snobs’s pockets. This you-tuber even have a numbered requirements for the Hamparte in a manifesto and I will not put it here because is a little bit long, but basically talks about massive production articles of daily life put in galleries to create art, the lack of talent required to make the ''masterpiece'' and the subjective worth of it given by a theoretical context surrounding the art piece. Then I suddenly remembered that banana attached to a wall with duct tape in the art Basel Miami Beach.

Maurizzio Cattlelan created that silly piece called ‘’the comedian’’ Selling each one over 120.000 U.S.D ¿do you need talent to put a banana in a wall? ¿or maybe the talent is in the act of buy the duct tape? It require the same amount of talent that put a simply glass of water in a shelf or make a pile of toilet paper rolls and I’m not talking about simply actions of our daily life, I’m making reference to another masterpieces of scam-art. Maybe the people who buy this kind of modern art know what are they doing and just go along whit the crowd in a river of decadency and money waste or could be so blind to really believe in the hoax-art. Recovering the initial idea with the Hans Andersen's story we need a kid like the one who yells ‘’the king is naked’’ but in this time should scream ‘’that’s not art’’.

_{pic by ARCO modern art Fair 2015 Archive.this masterpiece of wilfredo prieto cost 20.000 U.S.D}