Tooth Fairies

Just a few days ago, travelling along Portsmouth Drive, I was startled to come across some $40,000 worth of petrified human dentition. Four very large molars, chiselled out of Oamaru stone, now hog what used to be a very attractive view down the harbour. And we paid for them.

Now why did we do that? Well, we did that because we believe in art, indeed we believe in public art. When I say we, I do not, of course, include myself, or anyone else that I know, for that matter. If a partial in Oamaru stone @ $10,000 per fake tooth is art, then, I'm afraid, this particular emperor has no teeth. And someone should bite those who thought otherwise - and did so at our expense.

Alas, this is not an isolated example - far from it. How about the thousands of dollars in prize money which went to the "artist" who simply told the judges to take a waste paper basket and throw its contents on to the floor of the art gallery. Not to mention other prize exhibits in the nation's collections such as the image at Te Papa of Our Blessed Lady inside a condom. As it happens, there is a cathedral city in France called Condom, which no doubt has its own vierge noire called Notre Dame de Condom, but that is hardly the same thing, as you will no doubt agree.

Some years ago the Australian critic and historian Robert Hughes fronted a television series on modern art. One of the more memorable scenes showed him climbing a long flight of stairs to a very large room at the top of a New York apartment block. In the room was a remarkable work of art - a very large amount of earth from somebody's back garden which had been lugged up all those stairs and deposited (fairly evenly) on the floor to a depth of some two or three feet. And that was it. That was the Work of Art.

Along with the famous (and very expensive) line of bricks on the floor of the Tate Modern in London, and Damian Hirst's pickled sheep and calves, it is all rather bewildering - or do I mean infuriating? What on earth do these "artists" think they are doing? Well let me tell you what they are doing. They are preaching. Art is about meaning, don't you know, it's about The Author's Message. It's supposed to tell you something, to disturb your complacency, to challenge and to provoke.

But if we look a little more deeply, I think we find that it's all smoke and mirrors. Many artists now strike these attitudes precisely because they have nothing worth saying. Throwing waste paper on the floor is just an empty gesture made no better by the portentious suggestion that it is expressing (a) the emptiness of life, or (b) the artist's brave freedom from conventional conceptions about art, or (c) the artist's well-founded suspicion that the luvvies of the art world will be silly enough to let him get away with highway robbery - and then thank him for it!

But perhaps he and his colleagues might not have invaded the pulpit if those already in it knew what to say and how to say it.