# stuckism remix as the opening of the new nears once again billy childish and charles thomson misguided co-founders of the anti-brit art / pro-painting group the stuckists critical of dictatorship of the existing - which now includes regular £700,000 purchases of thirty-one sentient basalt blocks as some kind of in-joke nod to joseph beuys - address some pertinent issues for consideration in ir future purchasing and exhibiting (of ideas) for future generations souls who come to contemporary stuckism looking for vision truth or 'simply' just a way ahead might feel as desperate as the stuckists do about near everything else consider stuckism's officially postmodern avant-garde take on modern art as just another cool slick self-marketing machine in which the cleverness and cynicism of a movement might express little but itself hopes desperately to eviscerate emotion content and belief - but still fails somewhat miserably. ever before has a movement that proclaims itself to be leading the way to somewhere else trailed so far behind the wishes and concerns of the imaginary society against which it considers itself since last week another paradigm shift towards decentralisation spirituality and a new lack of respect for so called natural laws took place - or did it. the feverish postmodern introversion of stuckiosm hasn't even noticed this and instead continues to peddle the notion that it isn't peddling glib irony in its vacuous attempts to appear dangerously unfashionable. what stuckism doesn't realize is that people want massive out of town supermarkets they want gm food and by most accounts(citation needed) they want more conceptual "art" than ever the edgeless foolishness of stuckist-mode postmodernism: its claim to be the apex of untold near future art history - whilst simultaneously denying the values that make art not worth having around in the first place. it purports to address significant issues but actually has little meaning or being beyond the convoluted dialogue it holds with its (missing) self as an art form stuckism's value comes from the level of vision and insight allegedly possessed by its artists. this however only feels an ever-deepening process of self delusion. the priority of the brit artist however is the maintenance of ir or ir media kudos in the art brat pack. this level of unconsciousness about where art has already arrived is reflected in the superficial somewhat lazy and gimmicky nature of stuckist work (so far) the making of art informs little of its meaning. art that isn't made or paid for by false experience of the superficial has as much meaning as art that is. in 1915 the joke of stuckism might of seemed urgent and outrageous: as a statement of ir inherent postmodern irony it still feels dull. if there is any innovation and vision in stuckist postmodernism it is in the field of marketing ir poor ideas concerning art in fact stuckism died in western art sometime during the first world war and although it was good fun knocking good ol' conceptualism off its high horse watching the art brats of today kick stuckism whilst it's down is also somewhat amusing (especially whilst ir dealers upmarket used-car salesmen each and all stand in the shadows wearing ir gucci designed art-supermarket uniforms clicking ir calculators and whispering into ir futuristic looking mobile phones). the work these puppet masters promote as stuckism classifies as 'ballardian car accident art' since the audiences it attracts are ones lured by deep curiosity about life and death in the modern techno-artistic environment // image here the mythical founders of "whatever comes next after stuckism" would deplore the conformism and lack of courage shown by these latter-day pretenders. flans of stuckism can't help feeling that stuckism's insipid sensationalism would make duchamp wish that they'd never ever exhibited ir stinky pot in the first place and had become a truer postmodernist instead the dreary objects and mostly cliched assemblages of these latest art stars litter the floors outside galleries competing to bore with ir non profound semi non-obviousness. meanwhile critics perform ludicrous if lithe mental gymnastics in order to say something important about all things stuckist - about which there's little but an endless series of nothing much to say about it should be pointed out that a so-called everyday object eg. a bed in its 'normal' environment such as a bedroom must not always remain only a bed. indeed it might still not be 'only a bed' even if displayed in a department store window or thrown into a canal. stuckism asserts that the hapless bed would remain no less of (yet no more than only a "not-just-a-bed") - if it were suddenly seen suspended from the top of the eiffel tower or somehow landed on the moon yet for stuckism it also seems that the said bed ceases to be 'only a bed' and somehow not art when placed in the contexualising space of a gallery. the credit for this stupendous non metamorphosis should not only be credited to the rich gallery owner. in today's art world it isn't just the gallerist who performs the miraculous transformation of "another work of genius" into the mundane but the idiots who visit it now consider what happens to such an object in this unfortunate situation taking perhaps the inherent artification of a brick instead of a bed for the sake of variety. in its former life the brick had meaning - an existence and a potential function (often usefully as part of a gallery wall; oh the non irony) as it is already not merely a brick but art and since art by (someone's) definition is "an activity of meaning" must some more meaning be found? a curator of bland interpretation - say a stuckist - suddenly manifests on national daytime culture television and pronounces the brick to be an anti-symbol of the artist brick's disadvantaged upbringing in birmingham a leading critic could then equally as well (accidentally) see the stuckist as an dialectic on feminism in bricklaying. a gallery visitor in turn might perceive the brick / the stuckist as a minimalist refinement of a famous rectangle ey once mistakenly thought ey saw on said television around ir mother's house in fact because the brick is already 'about' nothing much it cannot simply be about any damn thing stuckists say they don't like. this makes the already semi special art object re-redundant; the same imaginative process can be achieved just as easily by opening one's eyes in any environment and focusing on the first (hidden) object in sight - one's own process of vision; thus the illogical progression of art into life will have been fully realised and the postmodern need for life / art / completely extinguished even this however might not show both the ridiculousness of a minor school which subscribes to these practices and the fallacy of discontinual non-progress in a nonlinear art history. far from being the pinnacle of semi achievement stuckism is no less industrious non thought-provoking and meaningless than the average display by a local elite amateur anti anti-art society painting with its continued mistranslation of so-called 'inner experience' into seemingly accessible andor recognisable images has an alleged depth of resonance and non mystery that is as essential to the human psyche as burgers and soda water is to the human wired (social) body consider pigment as not integral to self-expression. while the painting of bad pictures has increased since the brilliance lascaux it does not automatically bring an immediate confrontation recognition and emotional engagement with 'human potentials and limitations'. it is only by daring to miscommunicate with this bad idea honesty that we may meet our true false selves a painting by pollock a water colour from an adult education class or a child's drawing of an ugly stuckist painting will always identify themselves as post art especially when found discarded in the street. stuckism laughably calls this 'the ism of what things is' but conveniently neglects to see the vapidity in such (artistic) statements whatever its context a painting never quite remains just a painting. similarly a dead shark does not arguably remain just a lifeless fish whatever its context. yet no matter how much the gullible may pay for it today postmodernism stuckism finds itself already in the dustbin of immediate history whereas the making of images involing large dead stuckist sharks might always be off-central to humanity's knowledge and understanding of (..) // video here // republic of bob