There was once a thing called art.

Artists produced some beautiful paintings and sculptures.  Those works raised the spirits and made us appreciate the world around us.  They were works of beauty, inspiration and gladdened the soul.

Then along came modern art.

I presume it all started when people who realised they couldn't paint or sculpt decided to "push the boundaries".  We suddenly had gigantic rectangles of pure white paint being sold for thousands because the artist was being "bold" and "exploring our inner depths" or some such arse dribble.  Rooms with nothing in them were being displayed as "an examination of the sense of loneliness" and a pile of bricks in the middle of the floor brought forth gasps of admiration and declarations of sheer genius.  No one had the guts to say the emperor was naked.

It has reached the stage now where anything goes.  Wrap a bridge in plastic and apparently that's "art"?  Bollox!  It's a fucking bridge wrapped in plastic.  A bloke sitting in a plastic cube suspended over a river is pure genius?  Fuck off!  It's just a fucking twat sitting in a plastic cube suspended over a river.  It is not art and has fuck all to do with art.

There was a time when if I stood on top of a tall building and pissed on the people down below, I'd be arrested for public indecency or something.  Now I can piss to my heart's content by calling it "performance art" and can claim a fortune in grants for my "work".

The latest "work of art" is brilliant in its pure stupidity.  Lock a few idiots in a shipping container for 24 hours and this is hailed as "art"? This is a "container installation" called "Infinity"?  Jesus wept!

The participants were "humbled" and "moved beyond words" were they?  Why don't they just lock themselves in their bathrooms for a couple of days and shut the fuck up about it?  You can call this voluntary incarceration, or you can call it blind naivety but the one thing it isn't is art.

They claim it was to highlight the plight of refugees who are shipped in containers?  The one thing I will say in their favour is that they didn't use the word "awareness".  So how exactly am I to experience the plight of refugees because eight people decide to lock themselves in a steel box?  Seeing as I wasn't included in their jolly soiree, how is it supposed to affect my experience?  By now most of us are well aware of the bodies that have been discovered in containers so we don't need a bunch of fucking wannabe "artists" trying to grab the limelight and belittle people's suffering in the name of "performance art". 

Dumping piles of scrap metal at the side of motorways to get EU grants is one thing, but this has gone over the edge.

Rembrandt, Michelangelo and Constable must be spinning in their graves.