Art that is (literally) a dead duck (From Bournemouth Echo)

Art that is (literally) a dead duck

10:53am Wednesday 3rd February 2010

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ART is supposed to make you react. So a dead duck, bizarrely sprayed with gold paint, attached to a wooden framework and left to decay, could certainly be called art.

It could also be called a very stupid thing to do indeed.

Or was it just a silly prank?

I don’t know who the budding Damien Hirst was who thought it meaningful to apparently impale this specimen on a post. Nor would it surprise me if some art critics gasp in delight at the cavalier originality of its creator. But not me.

To my eye, it may be art and it may have some telling symbolic significance that escapes me. But it is bad art.

Art can shock and this bird left to rot in woodland could certainly do that. It could shock any child who had the misfortune to walk along the footpath past it.

I hope that nothing untoward happened to that duck. To be honest, I don’t expect it did. But stringing it up and leaving it for others to see while it rots seems a bit sick.

I suspect the would-be Picasso may read this and puff up with pride at their success in offending my bourgeois sensibilities. So be it.

I’m not really offended. I’m just unimpressed.

I may be a philistine next to more sensitive souls who have a deeper understanding of the work of the Young British Artists.

But my reaction to the image of the dead and stinking duck was like Crocodile Dundee’s response when he first confronted abstract expressionism at a New York exhibition featuring the work of an American artist.

It was Jackson Pollock’s.

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