maggins' pietà: who would create this disgusting image?
Good morning everyone, I am Harvey Miltz — art critic and gallerist, as well as founder and contributing editor to the East Croydon Review of Abysmal Art — and writing this blog to you today through my supple-fingered, auburn-haired and liquid-eyed amanuensis Sebastian. What a delight he is.
From the off I should make it quite clear that like all sophisticates in l’age TikTok I must do anything to make ends meet, and hence I find myself engaged by the egoists at Maggins Figurative Art to serve critical appraisals of the Maggins artistic oeuvre.
That is to say I am being paid. Not large sums. Not moderate sums. Barely even enough to cover Sebastian’s fee. And certainly not enough to cover the goblet of expensive chablis which he always insists, in his open-collared, perfectly shaven way, on having at hand as he types on my behalf. But paid I am, and I feel it only right to make this clear at the outset, lest I subsequently find myself the target of harsh and envious words, such as shill, stooge, or vanity-critic.
But I am also getting paid by the word. And this blog will be correspondingly lengthy in order to squeeze as much shrapnel from the
I should also make clear my position. Needless to say I am no fan of Maggins. Our professional rivalry reaches back decades. To the credit of the gallery they have given me a wide critical berth, perhaps recognising that only Harvey Miltz M.A. has the necessary experience and personal insight to unpick the lurid tangle of Freudian threads that underlie his revolting artistic product like the slimy roots of a mangrove swamp.
On to the Pietà.
pietà (dream of the wedding night)
So goes the full title of Maggins’ work, rent of its capital letters as if good grammar was some kind of bourgeois tyranny. But grammar is the least of our worries. Pondering this disgusting image one wonders what on earth was going through the artist’s mind during its conception. What prompts an act of creation such as this? Who would do such a thing, and why? Lacking this court-side psychological view I felt it necessary to go back to the commission itself and search for our evidence there.
Lo, la lettre de mission from the unwitting patron:
“Dear Maggins,
“My friends John and Kate are deeply in love and getting married soon and I want to mark the occasion with a beautiful painting for them. I saw that you do commissions! Could you paint a beautiful portrait of them for me? We come from a religiously conservative and virginal. I enclose two photographs of them at their betrothal ceremony last month at our community church. Don’t they look so lovely!
Yours admiringly,
[Name withheld due to GDPR]”