The Season of the Idiot
There’s little as sexy as stupidity
damping down the depth of A B or C
to be more mailable.
Virtue comes with the simple message
that culture hasn’t just ate itself
as made a meal out of the banal:
Warhol’s tinned split pea soup
Double Elvis
Diamond Dust Shoes
All skyscraper high, filling walls.
All of it all a show,
that there’s as much beauty
in consumerism, than there is
in any past master’s brushstroke
or sainted conceptual design.
The season of the idiot
is a marked card
of surface over feeling.
Wilde once said: “All art is quite useless”
We’ve run with that one
we have lost not the tools
but the expertise, the craft
that finished with Art Deco.
There is no different between what’s popular and what’s avant garde
Marx tells a friend over a pint of stout
“True life, true work, is being able to see yourself reflected in your labour.”
Warhol checks his reflection,
tells Marx his 15 minutes are up.
Wilde searches the stars for inspiration
But they are just orbs of rock and gas.
Baubles on a universal chain,
always there, but seldom understood,
so many lost to light pollution,
from all the TV sets and phone devices.
If we are really in the gutter, we are still head dug into the screens
We use to make ourselves seem whole.