Will Self

Oh, I do so hope, dear readers, that you don’t feel I’ve been neglecting you? I do try so very hard to give the impression that I’m a grounded sort of a fellow, with a proper appreciation of the follies of our age – but it’s difficult you see, when I’m in such a whirl. I’m just back today from São Paulo, where the deliciously modest and unassuming Tracey Emin had a little vernissage at White Cube. I’d gone there from Hong Kong where I attended the opening last Thursday evening of Takashi Murakami’s new show at the Gagosian Gallery – lovely bright paintings of flowers and skulls that would make good wallpaper.

Before that, I was at another Gagosian on Madison Avenue in Manhattan for the launch of 30 new works by Bob Dylan, no less. It was a bit awkward, because I’d just been in Honkers for the Elad Lassry opening at White Cube, but obviously I couldn’t just sit there and wait. Oh, and before that I was in Rome, again at a Gagosian opening – this one for Rachel Feinstein’s neorealist architectural photographs. Such beauty! Such fun!

I’d popped there from Berlin, where’d I’d touched down for the Jannis Kounellis launch at BlainSouthern (awfully droll), and prior to that I’d also been in New York – yet again at the Gagosian – this time for an Ed Ruscha show wittily entitled “Stock Market Technique Number One”. I’d been hanging out in New York for a while, having pitched up at Antony Gormley’s opening at the Sean Kelly Gallery – well, one has to fly the flag, no? The day before that was one of Richard Prince’s “Four Saturdays”, also at Gagosian. While we’re on Gagosian, I must tell you how adorable their bijoux art showroom on the rue de Ponthieu is. I’d flown into Paris for Rudolf Stingel’s reception and stuck around for Anselm Keifer’s out on the Avenue de l’Europe. And don’t you just adore William Eggleston’s Ektachrome photographs of otiose Americana? I know I do – which is why I was in Los Angeles for the opening reception . . .

Not that I want to give you the impression that all I’ve been doing these past couple of months is gadding about the world attending exhibition openings. Oh no, I’ve also been doing some pretty serious attending here in England: trolling up and down Cork Street, making forays to Oxford and even benighted Liverpool in order to enjoy a glass of shampoo, a daub and some chitchat . . . At least this is what someone might conclude were I to expire at this moment, and they were to go through the six-inch-high stack of pasteboard on my desk.

The truth is I can’t remember the last time I went to an art opening – but that doesn’t stop these Frisbee-sized come-ons zinging through my letterbox. And not just invitations but also large and glossy catalogues, the unit price for which is probably well into double figures. Who, I often ponder as I scoop another highend print-job off the mat, seriously imagines that I will attend a Tracey Emin opening in São Paulo, let alone buy one of her hyperbolically overpriced bits of self-indulgent appliqué?

The answer, of course, is nobody at all: I’ve simply chipped up a bit over the years, written a few pieces about art for the newspapers, and so this great slew of stuff continues to slide into my numb fingers.

From time to time I think of calling up all these galleries and getting my name removed from their mailing list but, surprise, surprise, I never quite get it together. If only it were as simple as putting a sign saying “No junk art mail” on my front door.

Because that’s all this stuff is: junk mail sent out as a marketing exercise by purveyors of investment opportunities to the tasteless rich. The reason it’s scattered so widely is that it helps to conjure up “an art crowd”, and it’s within this seemingly freewheeling and bohemian milieu that the serious dealers cruise about, their expensively tailored dorsal fins cleaving the choppy waters of sociability as they zero-in for the killer sale.

Your average thick, tasteless Richie feels pretty exposed in the minimalist fish tank of an upscale gallery – but fill it with full-time wankers, poseurs and MAAWs (model, actress, artists – whatever), and they start to relax; after all, they’re not simply in it to stock up their portfolios – oh no. They want to be acknowledged as collectors, people with discrimination surfing on the zeitgeist. And so on they go, torching the planet and punching holes in the ozone layer as they jet off to the next biennale or bean feast: the art crowd, surely one of the maddest, and the most swinishly Gaderene that there is.

The “spatialisation of culture under the pressure of organised capitalism” is how the veteran critical theorist Fredric Jameson described the Westin Bonaventure hotel in downtown Los Angeles. This behemoth of a hostelry comprises a curious agglomeration of four giant squeezy bottles coated with mirrored glass grouped around a six-storey high atrium, up the sides of which shoot glass lifts. The Westin – which has a stand-still part in the epochal video-game series Grand Theft Auto – was, with its colour-coded zones and its restaurant-cluttered levels, an early spatialiser of late capitalism but, three decades on from Jameson’s appraisal of it, Zizzi, a chain of some 120-plus, vaguely Italian restaurants, is surfing the zeitgeist when it comes to such figurations.

This is what I thought as I clop-slopped in from the rain to an empty shopping mall. Up above, a thousand little dag-tails of fairy lights dangled from a bridge of white-painted girders, atop which hunkered an office block, lit up and void – a ghost ship sailing through the urban night. It was a scene that demanded zombies; instead I found Zizzi. In turn, dramatic logic dictated that Zizzi should be deserted: a pure cultural space through which the crumpled menu cards blew like tumbleweeds, but instead the glassy hull projecting into the mall’s atrium was loaded with folk eating, drinking and talking 9.857857 recurring to the dozen.

The waiter – who resembled a stevedore – dumped me at a table by the glassy bulwark. At the next table, three flushed men in their thirties were getting performative over their second bottle of wine as they ate crispy bread strips served in a furl of greased-paper pseudo-newsprint stuffed inside a miniature bucket. I could’ve sworn one of them said – loosening the knot of his puce tie – “Yeah, I’m poisoning him with Tipp-Ex!”

I cast about me at the pillars papered with a pattern of leafless silver birches, at the dangling 1960s-style lampshades that hung in bollock couplets, at the zinc-topped counter piled with wooden platters. I took it all in and sighed: I was home, where I belonged, with my Volk: the great, lumpy British bourgeoisie, who spend all day industriously servicing one another and all evening being serviced in turn.

As to food, let one menu description act as a synecdoche: “Agro dolce – one half mushrooms, thyme, mascarpone and mozzarella all drizzled with truffle oil. The other half speck ham, pumpkin and mascarpone with a sprinkling of crumbled amaretti biscuit. It really shouldn’t work but it does.” Basically, Zizzi is a high-end pizza joint with spicy pretensions. I ordered a risotto and a green salad, which were brought by the stevedore at a decent clip and were fine. I was fine, too, if that’s taken to be an acronym for Fucked-up, Insecure, Neurotic and Emotional. The men at the next table were talking about moving offices; the Tipp-Ex poisoning victim would have to be run through the shredder before they finally departed.

The Zizzi chain proclaims the usual charitable inclinations on its menu – in this case, it’s something to do with the Prince’s Trust. It had never occurred to me before why Charlie Windsor should’ve chosen this name for his institutionalised noblesse oblige but, when you think about it, by ceaselessly bringing before his putative subjects the words “prince” and “trust”, the subliminal message “Trust the Prince” is being implanted in all of us. Zizzi’s involvement with the trust seemed to have some bearing on its work with young graduate artists, whose work is displayed in the restaurants. In the case of this particular outlet, the work was by one Amy Murray, who’d done a series of illustrations that were riveted up in the corridor that led to the toilets. This sequence “attempts to capture elements of the Orient Express’s history while also creating intimate snapshots of its passengers at the peak of its popularity during the 1920s and 1930s”. The elements in question are, of course, “exoticism, intrigue and romance”.

I was a bit confused by all this: was it Murray’s illustrations alone that were meant to evoke the Orient Express or were the toilet stalls and the corridor intentional components of this fantastical mise en scène? I’ve never travelled on the Orient Express but I wager that even among all that exoticism, intrigue and romance, there’s still the occasional, pee-soaked bit of toilet paper flotched on the floor.

Anyway, there I was, urinating inside an evocation of a historic trans-European train, inside an Italian-themed restaurant, inside a British shopping mall … Fredric Jameson would, I felt certain, heartily approve.

The opening night of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées on 29 May 1913 has gone down in the aesthetic annals as one of the most exciting art riots of all time: the premier example of an aesthetically challenged mob baying for the blood of the innovators. As Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes dancers circled the stage in wild khorovods, to the accompaniment of the atonal “The Augurs of Spring”, they trembled, shook, shivered and stamped.

According to Alex Ross in The Rest Is Noise, his history of 20th-century music: “Howls of discontent went up from the boxes, where the wealthiest onlookers sat. Immediately, the aesthetes in the balconies and the standing room howled back. There were overtones of class warfare in the proceedings. The combative composer Florent Schmitt was heard to yell either ‘Shut up, bitches of the seizieme!’ or ‘Down with the whores of the seizieme!’ – a provocation of the grandes dames of the 16th arrondissement.”

All well and good but it hardly compares with serious civil disturbance, not when you learn that, by the end of the first week, The Rite of Spring’s entire run was booked solid. Stravinsky’s and Diaghilev’s shock opera had transmogrified into the contemporary version of Les Misérables. Rather more impressive were ructions outside La Scala a couple of years ago when the Italian government announced a 37% cut in cultural funding – these featured smoke bombs, riot police and Daniel Barenboim. What’s not to like? The opening of the La Scala season has often been the focus for a bit of agg’ – however, it’s seldom got anything to do with what’s going on inside but rather represents a sort of distinctively Italian gestural elaboration on the idea of opera.

The Astor Place riot of 1849 took place outside the now demolished Astor Opera House in New York and certainly qualifies as an example of a crowd losing its head: at the end of the night of 10 May, 25 had been killed and hundreds injured. The proximate cause was the rivalry between two celebrated Shakespearean actors – Edwin Forrest and William Macready – but its real genesis was that whereas Forrest was a proud “nativist” American, Macready was a ghastly Englishman. Those who consider matters of cultural dispute to be the preserve of limp-wristed time wasters should study the Forrest-Macready bout, which has more in common with the battle between Bill “The Butcher” Cutting and Amsterdam Vallon in Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York than, say, a tussle between Daniel Day Lewis and Leonardo DiCaprio over who should have the fanciest trailer.

Belgian independence arguably owes its very fact to an opera – or to a single aria, “Amour sacré de la patrie”, sung at a performance of La Muette de Portici in honour of the Belgians’ Dutch overlord, William I. Ah, the 1830s! When even Belgium was an exciting place and a fine tenor voice could provoke a revolution. Now, the screaming death chants of the most frenzied shock rockers provoke entire stadia of narcotised face-metal-wearers to . . . buy merchandise.

But opera riots provoked by nationalism scarcely count – nothing could be more infra dig than the 1919 Times Square demonstrations- turned-nasty against a production of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger, which was staged despite the mayoral ban on German opera productions then in place. Servicemen and civilians battled the NYPD’s finest and the whole fracas was reported in the Los Angeles Times under the teasing headline “Crossfire of bricks”.

After all, if you want to riot against a Wagner opera, at least go for Parsifal or The Ring Cycle. I go to the opera quite a lot, almost always equipped with the makings of a Molotov cocktail in the hope that Bryn Terfel will spark it off and the scores of suits slumbering on corporate freebies will get torched but somehow it’s always a bit of a damp squib.

The one recent production that looked promising – from the riot point of view – was The Death of Klinghoffer by John Adams, performed for the first time in the UK at the English National Opera in February. Adams’s opera, which deals with the hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise ship by the Palestine Liberation Front in 1985, was accused of antisemitism after its first performances in 1991 and sidelined from the repertoire of the major companies. There was a lone protester outside the Coliseum but, inside, the audience sat silently through the show before applauding like the crowd of dutiful conformists that we were – how mad is that?