Art: Is There Nothing It Can’t Do?

Johann Hari is still banging the global warming drum, and is looking to enlist the crème de la crème for hopeless leftie causes – artists:

When I was a child in the 1980s, the threat of nuclear war pervaded the culture. It was there in movies, in novels, even in pop songs: I still feel a little pre-adolescent shiver when I hear "99 Red Balloons".

Me too, Johann. Though I suspect for different reasons.

Mine being that it was a crap song…

The swelling evidence of man-made global warming is now finally compelling artists into creation. The terrific new exhibition at the Royal Academy "Earth: Art of a Changing World" brings together dozens of the greatest visual artists in the world to respond to the climate crisis – and what it reveals about us.

I don’t know what it reveals about us, but I suspect it reveals that they never miss a chance to earn a quick buck by following trends that liberals are keen on about artists…

The theme that pervades the exhibition is the slow realisation that our existence here is arbitrary and contingent. Life on this rock in space developed by fluke, and it can be ended by a series of man-made flukes – like releasing massive amounts of a colourless, odourless warming gas into the atmosphere.

So now global warming is going to end all life on Earth, is it?

Even Roland Emmerich isn’t falling for that one…

The first exhibit is called Semiconductor. The artists Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt have used the raw visual data from one of Nasa's space observatories (Ed: powered into space via pixie dust and goodwill, I suppose?) to track the solar winds that wash across the universe. As you stare at them – and the utterly alien sounds of space are blasted all around you – it's hard to escape a sudden sense of being an object in a void, with nowhere else to go if we render this rock uninhabitable.

Except that even the most fevered of warmists isn’t saying that. Because they know it’s rubbish.

Nature Paintings by Keith Tyson underlines this point. Tyson had an accident in his studio where chemicals mixed with pigment, and they independently formed gorgeously painterly patterns.

That’s what constitutes art now?

Who knew, when I dropped a bottle of tomato sauce on the kitchen floor, that I was an artist..? I just thought I was clumsy!

In the corner of one part of the gallery there sits a small steel orb that will explode in precisely a hundred years from now. It was designed by Kris Martin, and it is called 100 Years. It stares at you, silently. Where will it be when the explosion comes? Will this part of London be underwater?

Errr, no. And even if it was, I suspect there'd be time to ensure the nation's treasures were safely tucked away. After all, they were in the Blitz, weren't they?

Though it's possible we might choose to overlook this sort of cheap publicity stunt masquerading as 'art', I hope...

Some of the artists at the Royal Academy have taken a more literal look at the crisis. Antti Laitinen, in It's My Island I, films himself trying to build an island out of rocks in the open ocean, and we watch it being swallowed by the sea – a fate that awaits many nations. Lucy and Jorge Orta have built a makeshift refugee camp Antarctic Village, stitched from the flags of all the nations that would be crippled by runaway warming.
Shiro Takatani shows an ice core that has been drilled out from the depths of the Arctic, revealing the carbon dioxide levels at every point in history. There is the snow that fell during the Battle of Hastings; there is the snow that fell during the American Civil War; and there we are, changing the fossil record with a massive blast of warming gases.

What, nothing from the medieval warm period, Johann? Perhaps they didn’t dig down deep enough…

Though it seems that when the subject is art, at least, Johann does have some small modicum of intelligence and discernment:

The only exhibit that doesn't work – that plays to the dumbest sliver of environmentalism – is Tracey Emin's I Loved You like the Sky. It is a (bad) drawing of several cute animals, with scrawled romanticised bursts of guff: "Your heart is like the wind," she announces, meaninglessly. You can't slop together any old sub-Michael Jackson ramblings and call it a green statement.

Ooooh, get him…

These visual artists are not alone. The Road, for example, is a parable about what would happen to humanity if we are stripped of a stable ecosystem. In the novel and in the new film version, something – we are not told what – causes nature to implode. Nothing grows; a thin layer of ash lies across the world. Almost everything dies. A man and his son stagger across this landscape, finding nothing, being nothing.

Oh, dear. Is this a parable for our future?

No:

Utter collapse certainly won't happen overnight, as it does in The Road.

Bit pointless raising it as a suitable warning then, no? You might just as well mention M. Night. Shalamdingdong’s little opus as a parable of our time.

Well, except for the small fact that it was ludicrous, of course…

But by accelerating the process so dramatically, McCarthy shows us what we are risking in the space of just a few lifetimes.

Really?

I’m not convinced. Any more than I feel the need to ensure my house has giant robot damage insurance as a result of other Hollywood blockbusters…

We are in the process of dramatically destabilising the stable ecosystem that stands between us and The Road.

What stable ecosystem? Surely the point is that it isn’t stable, that our current occupancy is a mere blink of an eye in geographic terms.

To comprehend the gamble we are taking, and why we are responding so sluggishly, we need scientists first, for sure. But following closely behind, we need artists. Now, at last, they are coming in on the rising tide.

…of money, you podgy cretin!

There’s gold (or grants) in them thar global warming panics….