Good art used to be about good gossip

Good art used to be about good gossip. I guess that’s when art used to be about heartbreak. In my history of art class we did old British masters — and of course Victorian artists absolutely loved painting jilted lovers and broken vows. They had a bad fascination with betrayal and despair.

Nowadays, if art is about space travel then everyone is happy because then it’s mainly about human endeavour. It’s not about gender inequality or armed conflict, which art can’t do much about, even though artists try. And you have to love them for it.

The Artemis II crew flew around the moon in 10 days and you have to ask yourself what you achieved in the same period, while they were doing pretty much nothing, except make sure their rocket stayed on course so they wouldn’t float away and die (like the astronaut in Bowie’s track Space Oddity). 

Anyway, their act of survival made our little choices down here seem quite trivial: what to wear, what to eat, what color to paint an astronaut’s space suit … all if which they don’t have to worry about while they orbit the planet to get a good look at the dark side of the moon.

It’s a wonderful time to be a living artist, for the simple reason that the opposite doesn’t apply.