I never much liked Surrealism. As it went - the best I could do was muster a bit of fun with Magritte, who was all about visual games and less about premeditated decadence. Charlie Finch gives a wonderful short article that ties Orwell, Dali, Hirst, money and decadence into one great conversation using Orwell's essay entitled "Benefit of Clergy." I hadn't read this essay before and Charlie hits it right on the head regarding both Dali and Hirst. He shows us how Orwell sets about the task of trying to understand "genius" in an art work, and it is here that the criticism of Dali is sharpest.

"If so, his aberrations are partly explicable. Perhaps they are a way of assuring himself that he is not commonplace. The two qualities that Dali unquestionably possesses are a gift for drawing and an atrocious egoism. ‘At seven’, he says in the first paragraph of his book, ‘I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.’ This is worded in a deliberately startling way, but no doubt it is substantially true. Such feelings are common enough. ‘I knew I was a genius’, somebody once said to me, ‘long before I knew what I was going to be a genius about.’ And suppose that you have nothing in you except your egoism and a dexterity that goes no higher than the elbow; suppose that your real gift is for a detailed, academic, representational style of drawing, your real métier to be an illustrator of scientific textbooks. How then do you become Napoleon?"

This is the crux of the matter. If you have the talent for "... a detailed, academic, representational style of drawing, your real métier to be an illustrator of scientific textbooks. How do you then become Napoleon?" Though the talent may be there, Orwell's essay contends, the character that propelled artists like Matisse or Picasso to challenge visual history is lacking - it is a different drive. The implications for the use of academicism is connected to the need to entertain rather than to innovate. Dali uses his academic ability to define his decadence and cop out on the hard work of building something new. Just as Hirst uses POMO academicism to define his corporate enterprise. The groundwork of "how" to make art has already been fleshed out - one need not reinvent the wheel in order to conquer like Napoleon. There is none of the personal fortitude it takes to push into new visual territory. One has but to arrive with one's need to be Napoleon and describe one's wickedness to a participating audience. For Orwell Dali's enterprise is the easy way out of real aesthetic exploration and an easy in with a decadent world. This sort of art became the trophies of the "advanced" upper classes in their day, just as Hirst's work is trophy art of the powerful Hedge Fund classes today. This critique can go further - painters like Curran and Yuskavage also explore the naughty subject matter while upholding an academic style. It is a sign of our time that the art of our time is mired in the past. To know what something is before it is seen speaks of our own myopia. Our need for the comfortable and familiar in the face of our own new visual world speaks loads about how our culture has outstripped our understanding of it.

Again my mis-reading of both of these essays is directed at POMO aesthetics - the fact that in the 21st century aesthetic innovation is disregarded while we continue to hang onto the tired, outmoded visual solutions of the past. We ignore the salient problems of vision in our changed world - vision and its essential basis to thought and meaning. It is not enough today to be like Dali in his day and paint for the "...corrupt world of the nineteen-twenties, when sophistication was immensely widespread and every European capital swarmed with aristocrats and rentiers who had given up sport and politics and taken to patronising the arts." We want something relevant to our time.