Lord, how I laughed with joy when I saw that a Picasso had fetched $48 million in the auction of the Victor Ganz collection in Christies on Monday. Even now as I write, tears of ecstasy are running down my face and nervous colleagues are backing away with chairs raised towards me as if they were facing a lion who hasn't tasted a Christian in ages. May the idiocy continue and continue: this way lies happiness. Money squandered on modern art is therefore not money spent on real art, prices for which might otherwise be sent sky high.
I am actually rather tempted to dabble in a bit of Picassocreating myself, for so much of what passes for appreciation in the art world could not differentiate between a Picasso and a pick-axe. There are so many unprovenanced Picassos on the market, with many thousands of actually provenanced Picassos, that in reality they should have the face value of a German mark, circa 1921.
Witless daubing
But they have not - partly because of the folly and brainless greed which drive the New York art market, the influence of which can be seen in almost every exhibition put on by young artists in Dublin. Witless daubing, without style, technique, sympathy, composition, seems to the first and last thing young artists have in mind when they create, if that is the word I want. And there, standing as their master-figure, the man who helped start the entire wretched heresy of modern art, is our friends, Pabs.
The Picasso which went for $48 million the other day was Woman in an Armchair, a hilariously silly assembly of bodily components which purports to represent Picasso's teenage mistress, Marie-Therese Walther. Since the creation of this world, few more beautiful things have been constructed by nature than a fine teenage female body. Picasso manages to turn such a body into a spare-parts heap in a mannequin factory.
One of the heresies adduced to justify the rubbish passing as modern art is that it is no longer necessary for art to resemble that which it depicts because a photograph can do that just as well, if not better. Three seconds' rumination would dispose of that argument; for would our walls not be covered in framed photographs of haywains, madonnas, English warships being towed to their watery graves, aye, and of naked girls too, if that were so?
It is not so. There is no end to the ingenuity of human artistry and creativity, as literature has shown. The novel is no more dead than the human imagination. Writers constantly are able to invent fresh ways of expressing themselves, and reinventing literary formulas which tell us the truth about ourselves.
And there is no end to the way one could paint a beautiful teenage girl's body. Only a fool would deny that. And only a fool would wish to dismantle it as if had just been fed through a combine harvester and dumped in a skip - apart, that is, from a practical joker and a hoaxster, which is what Picasso was.
Sublime draughtsman
He was also a sublime draughtsman, perhaps the finest of the century. Technically he was a genius, as was his fellow fraud, Salvador Dali. Between them they debauched artistic standards worldwide. No silliness became too silly for them to perpetrate, no traduction of standards too heretical for them to embrace.
Perhaps it was not coincidental that both went to live in Nazi-occupied Paris, when they could have lived almost anywhere else. But they chose to live in that same city where another great fraudster of the 20th century, Jean-Paul Sartre, was also living, and dutifully submitting his work to the German censor, who would have found nothing substantive to worry about. But clever J.P. had the wit to join the Communists as the Allied tanks were approaching Paris, neatly preparing his reputation as a hero of the resistance.
All three men became draped in the mystique of 20th-century intellectual creativity, when they were the opposite: they were the prime manufacturers of self, using an impenetrable plausibility to fool a gullible world. Picasso knew this about himself, and the extraordinary truth about his reputation is that it has survived his own searing appreciation of himself.
"The rich, the professional idlers desire only the peculiar, the sensational, the eccentric, the scandalous in today's art. I myself, since the advent of cubism, have fed these fellows what they wanted and satisfied the critics with all the ridiculous ideas which have passed through my head. The less they understood, the more they admired me! Through amusing myself with all these farces, I became celebrated . . . I do not have the effrontery to consider myself an artist at all . . . I am only a public clown, a mountebank. I have understood my time and have exploited the imbecility, the vanity, the greed of my contemporaries."
Ludicrous prices
He no doubt thought he did - but he could never have thought that the myth would survive his death, or that his influence would spread like a plague through a slave ship. But it is not just idiotic ignorance which generates such ludicrous prices for Picassos, and the sub-Picassos which have followed; the market is driven also by the great financial institutions of New York, which have invested so much money in modern art that they are obliged to keep the prices high.
The stock-market equivalent of this is a company buying its own stock to keep it high, and it is illegal. But of course it is not illegal in the demented, part-infantile, part-debauched world of modern art: it is hardly surprising that, at the auction which saw the disposal of a dismantled teenage body, a work by Eva Hesse, assembled when she was aged 30 and consisting of polyethylene, sandpaper and string, fetched $2.2 million.
Peanuts. The Picasso paintings in the Ganz auction sold for a total of $164 million. It was a triumph for one the great frauds of the 20th century; but then so was the profession of Victor Ganz, the former owner. He was a psychoanalyst.