Artist Wins BBC2 Art Show

Artist Undercoat Pointillist last night won BBC2’s pseudo-highbrow talent show Infant School Artshow with her ‘amazing piece’ called simply Old Rope.

Her piece, which consists of a length of old rope thrown casually down on a table impressed the judges with, what one judge, the famous Brit Art artist, Lepidoptera Disestablishment, called:

Its sheer presence and immediacy. It is so unpretentious and says so much about the plight of humanity at the dawn of the 21^st century. I had to wipe away a tear when I first saw it, especially when I realised how much I could have got for that piece of old rope I threw away a couple of weeks ago.

In a post-award interview Undercoat Pointillist spoke of the inspiration for her piece:

I was just walking along by the canal one day and I saw this piece of rope. It wasn’t doing anything important, just tying a boat up to the side of the canal near the lock. Something about its sheer… availability spoke to me, and when, looking around, I realised no-one was watching me. I knew then – instantly – that that piece of old rope and I were meant for each other.

It must have been cosmically-inspired or something, because I heard later on the local news that, not long after I left the canal area, a boat somehow mysteriously crashed into the canal lock, causing thousands of pounds of damage to the canal lock, sinking the boat and drowning the boat owner’s cat.

Anyway, when I got back to the studio I just dropped the piece of old rope on a table and just… well… forgot about it. Then when the TV programme judges came around a few hours later they walked straight past the piece I’d prepared for them by getting all my mates to piss on some screwed up newspapers I’d painted purple and then thrown into a skip, and headed straight for the piece of rope on the table, I’m fairly sure one of them had an orgasm from just looking at it.

When I realised they had mistaken the piece of rope for my competition entry, I did think about telling them the truth, but then what is truth when we are talking about art, a substantial amount of prize money and the beginnings of what could be a very lucrative… I mean a… very artistically-fulfilling career?

Asked why the viewing public has to put up with all this guff, a TV critic explained:

BBC2 wants to have popular programmes like the myriad of reality and talent shows that infect the other channels, however it is under the delusion that it is above such common prolefodder, so instead it makes programmes like Infant School Artshow, that purport to be serious about ‘serious’ subjects like art and culture, but instead reduce them to the status of freak shows just like all the other ‘reality’ and ‘talent’ shows. Frankly, though, who really gives a shit about this conceptual art bollocks anyway? Even the tabloids have given up on pretending to be shocked and outraged by it any more.