Thursday, May 26, 2016

Andrew Graham-Dixon: Low Life roaming the Low Countries

Andrew Graham-Dixon, double barrelled airhead whose praise for a single Caravaggio could easily comprise a million syllables, turns out to a toffish racist.

In his three parter 'The High Art of the Low Countries' Andy finally turns his attention to Belgium (in part 3/3) with a racist vengeance that would make some UKIPers blush. The festival of ignorance and undiluted bigotry starts at about 30' into this shameful document.

What's the point of Belgium [he asks]? Well, there was one once!

As if the reason for the creation of Belgium has any relevance to the lives of today's Belgians/

[Acc. AG-D] Belgium's cultural identity is hard to define, if easy to mock!
To underscore this, he goes on to quote the French poet Baudelaire, who apparently once said:
Belgians are the stupidest race on Earth!

Andrew should perhaps know better than to further promulgate the racist rantings of this poet (no matter how brilliant he may otherwise have been). Instead our racist art critic just... erm, quotes, don't you know?

He plods on:

This nation, if it truly is one, doesn't even have a common language: three AND counting!

Counting... It's true: on its Southern border with Germany the French speaking part of the country has a small enclave of German speakimg Belgians. The sheer cheek of these people!

More evidence of Belgian perfidy:

Antwerp hates Brussels, while Brussels detests Brughes.

Jokes about the British North, reciprocated with jokes about 'that London' spring to mind here but not to our artful zealot!

Yeah, take this, erm... "Belgium":

Even now, Belgium excels at making everything as complicated as possible!

Another zinger:

Belgians don't know who they are!
Belgium's catastrophically complicated structure, blah blah blahdiblah

So catastrophic it's one of the richest countries in the world! And one of the more important members of the EU...

How is it possible that on the otherwise politically correct BBC, this kind of nonsense that denigrates an entire country, its people and its culture, stands in for high brow cultural 'critique'?

Of course no Sunday Telegraph penning toff can sign off without first taking a swipe at the EU, which 'Belgians desperately embrace... in search of an identity!'

Follows then a demolition job on one of the most successful cartoon figures (Tintin) and its creator Hergé, as well as on two largely forgotten and widely despised visual artists, René Margritte and Paul Delvaux. Both get a kind of pseudo-Freudian treatment (which perhaps they deserve), as if they're somehow representative of (to Andrew's mind) Belgium's sickness of the soul/psyche.

As regards Tintin/Kuifje (yep: it too is bilingual!), listen FOOL: it's a highly successful cartoon for KIDS. Intellectual masturbation by faux-psychoanalytical racist tossers like you doesn't mean it's anything near what your impenetrably dense word salad tries to imply it is.

This tosspot is of course also the author of that ultimate bit of crapola about Adolf Hitler:

‘What I think is horrible and compelling is that the whole Nazi project began with art,’ Andrew Graham-Dixon is telling me. ‘Hitler wasn’t just a watercolourist who went into politics. Hitler was the most influential artist of all time.’
Perhaps one shouldn't be surprised that the vanity project that is Andrew Graham-Dixon comes up with these racist humdingers. What kind of man would offer the following description of himself on his own website:
WELCOME to the website of Andrew Graham-Dixon, one of the world’s leading art critics. A fully searchable archive of Andrew's written work, including his current weekly column for the Sunday Telegraph, forms the heart of this website - more than a million words on all aspects of the visual arts! An invaluable resource for schoolchildren, undergraduates, mature students - in short anyone interested in art.

Considering Andrew's indomitable verbosity, that bit about a million words is at least sure to be true...