You mean those two pasty old tarts are still alive?

Good on Nick Cohen for calling Gilbert and George and the BritArt boor-erati onto the mat for what it is: inconsequential.

"It's so cowardly to attack the church when we won't offend Islam":

«Burbling critics agreed. Gilbert and George still get a 'frisson of excitement' by including 'f-words, turds, semen, their own pallid bodies and other affronts to bourgeois sensibilities' in their work, wrote a journalist with the impeccably bourgeois name of Cassandra Jardine in the Daily Telegraph. 'Is it the perfect Christmas card to send George Bush at Easter? Yeah, yeah,' added groovy Waldemar Januszczak of the Sunday Times.»

It’s the UK we’re talking about here – there’s never a shortage of artists talking in circles realizing uninventive results. Having sought a apparent cachets of decadence, sincerity, and default free-speech advocats, they've become interchangeable with any number of other artists with nothing to say about the world. Nick Cohen, again:

«The fear of being murdered is a perfectly rational one, but it is eating away at the cultural elite's myths. In the name of breaking taboos, the Britart movement has giggled at paedophilia (Jake and Dinos Chapman) and rubbed salt in the wounds of the parents of the Moors murderers' victims (Marcus Harvey). It can't go on as if nothing has happened because the contradictions between breaking some taboos but not others are becoming too glaring.»

Do the denizens of that echo-chamber really think the public care to see them chasing the mice in their heads and see artists talking about themselves anyway? Sorry, guys – Van Halen weren’t thinking of you when they wrote “Hot for Teacher.” Now that they have little to say to the public, one has to wonder just who is it they’re talking to?