Online tool makes everyone a master of artistic pretentiousness

The online Arty Bollocks Generator offers every would-be artist an opening at pretentiousness.

Demon with Bowl by British artist Damien Hirst.

What a week it was for art frauds, starting with the sensational acquittal of Peter Gant and Mohamed Siddique over the fake Brett Whiteley/Brett Whiteley on a bad hair day paintings. The flamboyant dealer and the retiring restorer walked free after their convictions for faking three Whiteley paintings were overturned in the Victorian Court of Appeal, leaving the late painter’s one-time wife and long-time champion Wendy Whiteley professing her shock.

Over in Venice, things were just getting going for Damien Hirst, the bloke who became famous for pickling sharks, which, incidentally, were caught for him by the subject of my last column, the great shark hunter Vic Hislop.

That unholy alliance began in 1991 when Hislop caught the 4.3m tiger shark that was destined to become The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. The great critic Robert Hughes declared it “a cultural obscenity” but that didn’t stop Hirst becoming the avatar of the Young British Artists movement.

After a decade out of the limelight, Hirst is back with another aquatic-themed sensation sprawling over two palazzos in Venice, hyped as one of the most expensive art exhibitions in recent history and dubbed Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable. Its massive pieces depicting gods and monsters with pop culture faces are supposedly part of an art collection lost at sea, owned by a former Turkish slave.

Said The Telegraph: “Rather than seeming grand and epic, it all feels tawdry and low-rent, tinny and fake. This has a lot to do with the outmoded presiding visual style, best described as Eighties Po-Mo kitsch, and the many naked, quivering maidens, excitably menaced by monsters. Water, water everywhere — nor, sadly, any drop to drink: ‘Treasures’ is Hirst’s Waterworld; in other words, a flop.”

The Guardian was more positive: “With his exhibition, which not only fills a Venetian palace but also the capacious halls of the ship-shaped Punta della Dogana at the mouth of the Grand Canal, the arrogant, exciting, hilarious, mind-boggling imagination that made him such a thrilling artist in the 1990s is audaciously and beautifully reborn.”

Meanwhile, in a quiet corner of a tiny gallery in Sydney’s Glebe, another art fraud was quietly unfolding — a modest exhibition of my own digital paintings, cobbled together on my iPad and printed out on large canvases.

I managed to sell a few of my pieces but I couldn’t quite shake the feeling of being a big phony waiting to be exposed. I managed to cobble together a spiel about how the smartphone and tablet revolution had fundamentally changed art, making all of us artists possibly famous for 15 seconds, the length of an Instagram video.

I’ve since discovered I needn’t have bothered: all I needed was the Arty Bollocks Generator, a hilarious online tool that generates an instant artist’s statement and makes life immeasurably easier for budding Hirsts and Whiteleys.

Here’s mine: “Jason’s work explores the relationship between Pre-Raphaelite tenets and unwanted gifts. With influences as diverse as Rousseau and John Lennon, new variations are crafted from both mundane and transcendent narratives. Ever since I was a child I have been fascinated by the traditional understanding of meaning. What starts out as vision soon becomes corroded into a manifesto of distress, leaving only a sense of decadence and the inevitability of a new synthesis. As spatial replicas become frozen through frantic and diverse practice, the viewer is left with an insight into the edges of our era.”

And for those feeling like artistic fakers and frauds, the same site offers an “Artist Certificate” approved by the “Artistic Practice Licensing Authority”. In order to be licensed, the aspiring artist must agree to:
• At least occasionally produce works of art, or under exceptional circumstances the authority may accept “talking about producing it a lot” or “going to start it next week” as substitutes for this condition.
• Study learned treatises on “real artists”, their qualities, achievements, practices and heroic struggles, for the purpose of understanding how hopelessly short of their standards you fall.
• Constantly question, to yourself and others, whether you and your work are good enough to ever be a proper artist.
• Mutter under your breath at least daily that someone will expose you soon.
• Cultivate brow-furrowing, chin-rubbing and other anxious mannerisms appropriate for artistic practice.