Blog

Iraqi curators thought the biggest threat to their art was American bombs. They weren’t prepared for looting…

There won’t be many buyers. “The major salerooms greatly restrict their sales of antiquities, most of which have no commercial value unless they carry with them what effectively amounts to a passport. The history of any major piece must be well known to make that piece saleable.”

“In Paradise Square, Baghdad, tearing down a giant bronze Saddam is seen as moving, heroic and symbolic. Bad art about bad people deserves all the abuse it gets, we might argue, but where do the lines of acceptability lie when an artist wilfully wrecks another artist’s work? Jake and Dinos Chapman are in trouble again for defacing a complete set of Goya’s 80 Disasters of War etchings. Goya worked on the series for a decade from 1810 and never saw it printed in his lifetime.” But strangely, the defacement is moving…

“The art in Saddam’s palaces is very emphatically the embodiment of ideas and appetites, and as such, it is not really that funny. The erotic art is particularly recognisable as the sort of thing you’d see in Hitler’s private collection – right down to the Aryan types. But Saddam is less elevated in his taste than Hitler. The Fuhrer was more pretentious. By contrast, there are no high cultural allusions whatsoever in the Saddamite paintings. They are from the universal cultural gutter – pure dreck. They look spraypainted, in a rampant hyperbolic style where all men are muscular, all women have giant breasts and missiles are metal cocks. These are art for the barely literate, or the barely sentient, dredged from some red-lit back alley of the brain.”

The cave paintings at Lascaux in central France survived 20,000 years. But the prehistoric wall paintings are threatened with irreparable damage by modern man’s attempts to save them.