Mark Wallinger

The gall it took to print a large photograph of a great artist’s great painting (Innocent X, by Velasquez), hang it from the ceiling, & call it his own, astounds—especially after it has already been treated with such power by Bacon in his version. Wallinger invites merited derision by inviting comparison to real artists.

A series of self portraits embodied as the letter ‘I’, repeated in haphazard, indifferent calligraphy ad nauseaum, is too small an idea, too badly executed, to occupy a full gallery wall. It might delight, instead, as a single page in a chapbook. Just as the room-full of chairs each with his name written in paint on its back, are too trivial to fill a room.

The large Rorschach charts painted with fingers in black paint on white, soon-to-be-yellow, gesso, fill one with desire to use the large, expensively stretched canvasses, for something worthwhile, or at least, sincere, by painting over his daubs.

If he is selling, it goes to show the sad state of today’s art world, & if he’s not, he ought to look for another line of work, because art, plainly, is not within his nature’s disposition.