LONDON, ENGLAND.- It was reported recently from Britain that the Tate Britain art gallery had warned underage visitors to stay away as it unveiled works short-listed for the Turner Prize— including a cast of two large dolls engaged in a sex act. 

“The $30,000 annual prize for a contemporary British artist is regularly derided for relying on shock value at the expense of traditional forms of art. This year is no exception. The doll sculpture is one of several pieces by brothers Jake and Dinos Chapman, favorites to win the competition. Their entry also includes a sculpture of decaying bodies being eaten by maggots, snails, spiders and rats, and several grotesque reworkings of etchings by Spanish master Francisco de Goya. Fellow-nominee Grayson Perry, a cross-dressing potter, showed ceramic vases featuring images of sex acts, child abuse and death. … ‘The Turner Prize is about celebrating excellence in contemporary works and dealing with controversial issues is often part of that,’ said curator Lizzie Carey-Thomas. ‘It is only natural that works will be challenging or pushing boundaries.’ … Some of the more unusual entries in recent years have included a soiled bed, a pickled cow and a painting adorned with elephant dung. Last year’s winner, Keith Tyson, presented lead casts of every item on a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant’s menu.” (Associated Press, quoted on CNN.com) 

Writing on the SOLO Forum, Robert Winefield commented: “I can’t understand why people in the media don’t denounce it for the shit that it is.” 

Kristin Currier ventured that “the media doesn’t say anything, because like the story of the crazy emperor with invisible clothing, no one has the guts.” 

Now, it’s not quite right that no one in the media identifies the emperor’s nakedness. Here, for instance, is an entry, complete with my own comment in bold, in the new Free Radical Horror File. 

But The Free Radical is just one tiny voice, and it’s true that the modern-day avalanche of in-your-face excrement flows largely unremarked and unresisted. The view of the Dadaists that “art is shit” has long been respectable. 

In the realm of music, the conscientious destructiveness of what I call “headbanging caterwauling” is well personified in the remark of a hard rock band (Slipknot) drummer: “A guy at Sony told us, ‘If this is the future of music, then I don’t want to be alive.’ I just thought, if that’s what he thinks, then we are doing something right.” 

In literature, as one would expect, full-blown, fully articulated Philosophies of Faeces can be found in such defecations as Stanley Fish’s now-uncontroversial view that literary texts have no meaning other than that superimposed on them by readers (a variant of the establishment view that art is whatever anyone says it is). This outlandish subjectivism is dressed up in preposterously pretentious garb labelled “Reception Esthetics” and the like. 

There’s a backlash, though—a counter-revolution seeking a new renaissance. Practising artists and intellectuals like Michael Newberry, Martine Vaugel, Alexandra York, and Torres and Kamhi are leading the charge against The Age of Crap. 

And there’s SOLO, of course—the Objectivist movement for those who take Ayn Rand’s The Romantic Manifesto seriously. I conclude with a paraphrase of some relevant remarks from my call to arms at SOLO’s inaugural conference in 2002: 

“Here’s how it works: respect for reason gives rise to respect for the right to exercise it —freedom. See Ancient Greece, the Renaissance, the 19th century. Freedom gives rise to prosperity & enormous diversity, including ideas & art works that are inimical to freedom. Against such ideas & art, while defending to the death their right to exist, we should be eternally vigilant. I exhort Objectivists to get out there in the marketplace & promote good art as zealously as they promote good philosophy, both being necessary for the preservation of freedom. The tide is against us at the moment—wherever we turn our ears are assaulted by jungle cacophony. In the visual realm … well, we’ve just been reading on the SOLO Forum about the Canadian artist who won a prestigious award for ejaculating into vials; there was the Turner Prize in Britain, recently bestowed on someone whose ‘artwork’ was a room with an electric light in it. These abominations are a dime a dozen right now; it is, as I often say, the Age of Crap. I want SOLO to wage an intellectual and spiritual war on it every bit as relentless as the physical War on Terrorism.”