Ich bin ein [Texas-Born] Berliner

By sheer coincidence, our classy tri-national German-language satellite television network called 3sat has just knocked me for a considerable loop with factual reports of recent alleged artistic phenomena that move me to write this bulletin.

What little exposure I’ve ever accidentally had to the deliberately morbid rock freak called Marilyn Manson sufficed to turn me away in a hurry.  Well, kiddies, Mr. Manson – anatomically male but self-recreated as a freak affecting a pseudonym taken from Marilyn Monroe and the Californian serial killer Charlie Manson, whose “Manson Family” savagely murdered victims including the young film star Sharon Tate – has turned to painting, of a kind every bit as grisly as you might expect, and an art gallery in Cologne will tomorrow open an exhibit of his work scheduled to run through August 5th, under a title swiped from the great French poet Charles Baudelaire: “Les Fleurs du mal” – Flowers of Evil.  If you want any more information about that particular artistic excrescence, you will not get it from me.

Even more revolting comes word that a far more repulsive Frenchman named Nicolas Claux has also turned to even more horrific painting as a means of expressing himself in more or less fine art.  The Parisian press some years back made him at least locally famous as “the vampire of Paris” for reasons including his having stolen blood stored in a hospital and drunk it.  He followed that up with the fatal shooting of a hapless victim he acquired through a personal contact ad.  The sentence he received expired five years ago, and he then began his present, apparently more or less flourishing career as a painter, concentrating on his concepts of the portraits of some of history’s most hideous serial murderers, including Charlie Manson, Chicago’s John Wayne Gacy, Germany’s Dieter Haarmann, California’s Richard Ramírez (a.k.a. the Hillside Killer and the Night-Stalker); add to those Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer, who you may recall not only murdered fifteen young men but also at least partially ate them, and also Ed Gein, the infinitely worse real-life murderous psychopathic prototype for the comparatively bowdlerized one Alfred Hitchcock portrayed in his horror film “Psycho”.

And all this, in today’s world, manifestly has a commercial value.

The two apparent Anglophones (one of whom “holds a double degree from the University of Maine at Orono in Political Science and Psychology, earned with Phi Beta Kappa and Highest Honor Distinction”) who have set up a merchandising website for M. Claux’s artworks provide a bit of background for their pioneering eBay-like undertaking: “In 2005, [one of the partners] had the incredible fortune of meeting one of the world’s greatest true crime artists, Mr. Nico Claux.  Nico’s paintings range from stunningly photo realistic to truly disturbing.  Not surprisingly, his full color caricatures share one morbid similarity.  Each painting in the ‘Human Predators’ collection displays a different notorious serial killer….”  Other merchandise pushed includes watches, calendars, and buttons, all bearing the visages of “brutal criminals”.

Such artistic creations have even acquired a new generic name: murderabilia.  According to that 3sat report, the money involved in such commerce runs into “millions” and ramifies into unexpected peripheral categories.  For instance, that report says “American auction houses are riding the Killer Wave with locks of Charles Manson’s hair as relics” – using a German word customarily applied to such items as the bones of a saint.

I don’t think I want to tell you any more about this, except to mention that it does cast a certain relative light on much of what comes my way via German television from such temples of the avant-garde as two most important ones now current, Venice’s Biennale in Italy and Kassel’s huge documenta here in Germany.

Older hands may recall an ancient “New Yorker” cartoon, from so long ago that they still used two-part captions.  Mother to little daughter at table: “It’s broccoli, dear.”  Riposte: “I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it.”