Mr Umaniec has been sentenced to two years in prison for defacing (or, depending on your point of view, improving) a Mark Rothco mural at the Tate.
Ostensibly, justice has been done. Umaniec did paint his own signature on Rothco’s masterpiece Black on Maroon and he did write ‘a potential piece of yellowism’ under the signature.
But if we were to delve deeper than that, we’d realise that Umaniec has done an inestimable service to his recently adopted country. He has managed to encapsulate the essence of modernism in both his word and deed. In the process, he has proved beyond a shadow of doubt that Eastern European immigrants do make Britain a better place to live.
Umaniec, an unemployed 26-year-old Pole presumably living off our tax receipts, has started an art movement called ‘yellowism’, and I bet the word isn’t part of your everyday vocabulary. You ought to be ashamed of yourself, and from now on you won’t have any excuse.
For ‘yellowism’ is so much more than just an art trend. In fact, it’s also so much less than an art trend, for Umaniec’s embellishment of Rothco’s mural is as yet yellowism’s only tangible contribution to art.
This matters much less than you might think. For, in common with most modern art, yellowism isn’t about using brushes or chisels to create beauty. It’s about using words to create theories, preferably those that dovetail with voguish philosophies.
Rothco himself, and I hope you’ve stood up at the sound of the great man’s name, liked to emphasise the influence of Nietzsche on his work. He ought to know, but philistines like me fail to find an immediate link – other than perhaps Rothco’s attempt to prove by his life’s work that God is indeed dead.
I wouldn’t like to venture a guess on Umaniec’s direct philosophical influences, simply because any modernist thinker is a candidate for the honour. It could be, for example, Jacques Derrida with his deconstructionism, for which ‘destructionism’ would be a more precise, and concise, term – just take the ‘con’ out.
‘In a classical philosophical opposition we are not dealing with the peaceful coexistence of a vis-à-vis, but rather with a violent hierarchy… To deconstruct the opposition, first of all, is to overturn the hierarchy at a given moment,’ stated Derrida with his usual lucidity (are you again standing up in awe?).
To put it more intelligibly, in consonance with its moniker Derrida’s philosophy is about violent destruction. Its influence on an act of defacing a work of art, such as it is, is unmistakeable.
But to repeat, modernist art isn’t so much about practice as theory, and it’s there that Umaniec deserves accolades, not a custodial sentence. For the theory behind yellowism, and I do apologise to its founders if I missed something, is that vandalism is the essence of art, and possibly the other way around too. Every piece of art, modernist art that is, effectively ‘overturns the hierarchy at a given moment’, in Derrida’s phrase. As such, it represents an act of vandalism. Similarly, any act of vandalism has an element of art to it.
Extending this irrefutable line of thought, we must accept that Giotto vandalised Byzantine iconography, della Francesca vandalised Giotto, Leonardo vandalised della Francesca and Velazquez vandalised them all. By the same token, Caliph Umar, who in 641 destroyed the Alexandria Library, was an accomplished artist.
Moving closer to our time, Rothco’s abstract expressionism represented a clear act of vandalism, so Umaniec merely vandalised a vandal, thereby pushing this artistic concept up to new heights. Rather than causing £200,000 worth of damage, as the prosecution claimed, he thus increased the artistic value of Rothco’s mural, even if he lowered its commercial price.
Isn’t modernity lovely? Don’t know about you, but I’m swelling with pride for the wonderful times we live in, when everyone has an open mind and the doors are open to, well, anything.
A holdout from the less progressive, less open time might be confused. So fine, he’d say, all those artists of yesteryear were vandals. But surely that’s not all they were? They didn’t just deconstruct, they also created something, specifically art.
This goes to show how hopelessly fuddy-duddy these fossils are. They simply don’t understand what art is. Their reactionary minds still cling to the obsolete notion that art means something specific and tautly definable. It doesn’t. To our modern, open minds art is anything and everything.
Acting as evangelist to Umaniec’s Christ, fellow yellowist Ben Smith set us straight: ‘Everything is equal. Everything is art. Everything is a potential piece of yellowism.’
Art, in other words, is anything the artist says it is. Take a turd, put it in the middle of a floor, call it Defiance, possibly Conservatism or else Brown on Brown, collect the Turner Prize, indulge in some public foreplay with Nicholas Serota at the award ceremony, say ‘I’d like to thank…’ – this is art because Umaniec and Serota say so.
We must thank Wlodzimierz Umaniec for bringing such crystal clarity to issues that until now have been deemed complex. I do hope his sentence will be overturned on appeal – and that our politicians will hold him up as yet another shining example of how much new arrivals improve Britain.