Friday, 8th August, 2003 – Q: What is a decomposing cow’s head. A: Excellent

What I was trying to say, before being so rudely interrupted by intrusive thoughts about fighting newspapers (imagine if they had special moves and powers – The Mail’s Bile Ray, the Telegraph’s Power Monocle, the Guardian’s Chin-Stroking Body Splash) was that I read what I assume is the best art review ever written in the Observer last Sunday. I have to assume that this is the case as it is also the first art review I’ve ever read. Also I didn’t actually read the whole thing – just the headline and a few key paragraphs.

Anyway, the review was for ‘Video Acts’ at the ICA, an exhibition of video installations, many of which feature their creators “sleeping or scratching, depilating or mutilating themselves, even pointlessly walking up and down in a corridor”. While I haven’t seen them, my personal favourites on the basis of the descriptions given are Pipilotti Rist, who smears herself in menstrual blood, and then pushes jewels forth from her vagina, and Richard Serra, who has filmed a pair of hands passing a block of wood back and forth for three minutes. Awesome power.

And the triumphant headline, by balloon-faced critic Peter Conrad?

‘LOOK AT ME, I’M SO CLEVER’.

Hooked by this wonderfully succinct, thrillingly juvenile headline I began to read, but was disappointed to find a sober, lucid, cynical critique of the self-indulgence of the artists on show. Why? Art reviews are wasted on the experts.

I wish for one week, Peter Conrad could do a job swap with The Sun’s White Van Man. Conrad could spend the week pontificating on the relative merits of Jodie Marsh’s real boobs vs. Jordan’s falsies, while White Van Man could be sent to the Saatchi to shake his head and scoff loudly at the pickled rhinos and tampons on sticks.

There aren’t actually any pickled rhinos, or tampons on sticks. No tampons at all as it happens. I know this because I have been to the Saatchi gallery. Ahhhhhh. Look at me. I’m so clever.

Obviously, neither I, nor the majority of the many thousands of others who have visited the Saatchi, are actually that clever at all. I find galleries boring, and ventured to the Saatchi out of a prurient desire to be shocked and outraged. Predictably, I was neither.

In fact, my official verdict is – ‘It was good. Good and quite interesting’. Stick that in your pipe, balloon-face.

Boring as it is not to have an opinion on something (and suicidal as it is to say that, and then go on to write about your non-opinion), I find myself lodged snugly between the White Van Men of the world and those be-mulletted Hoxton pseuds who would nod earnestly at my bum if it was mounted in a trendy enough ‘space’.

Today I’ve written myself into a corner. No-one really wants to read my uninformed musings on ‘what is art?’ God knows what it is.

All I know is that, art or otherwise, Damien Hirst’s Waiting for Inspiration, Red features the most bitchingest decomposing cow’s head I ever saw. It had all flies and everything. And its eye was out on a stalk, almost. Gnarly.