Humbug again

I haven't finished Robert Dessaix's On Humbug as yet, but stopped short yesterday to muse over his words,  'In America, humbug is probably more closely associated with figures from the Jacksonian era such as PT Barnum (The Greatest Show on Earth)' (2009:21). So, yes, of course I'd heard of Barnum and Bailey Circus, but it was when Dessaix said, 'The point was not whether Barnum's 'Fejee mermaid' with her fish's body and monkey's hand and head, his 'Tom thumb', his 'Irish giant', his trained fleas, fat boys, bearded ladies and dwarfs were really monsters, but that they were intriguing, they were fun!' I remembered that I'd made a post on Stelarc's Articulated head and used the words 'Bah Humbug' in the title. When Charles Dickens attributed the words 'Bah! Humbug' to Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, he was, according to Dessaix objecting to the whole idea of wishing someone a happy Christmas, '...that's what humbug does: it makes a show of concocted attitudes and feelings...' (2009:6) '...as far as Scrooge was concerned, his nephew was an emotional impostor, a humbug' (2009:7). When I used Bah! Humbug! I was really talking about the bullshit element associated not only with art, but also with science and there's certainly a lot of insincerity in the art world as well as great deal of stroking. And you'd have to admit that there's more than a little Barnum and Bailey in the art word today (and the world of science and politics) - you get more funding and greater crowds if you exhibit monsters. More people have probably seen Gunter Von Hagens Body Worlds - an exhibition of plastinated bodies (water and fat from a corpse is replaced by certain plastics so that it will not smell or decay) than any other art show. And how many years is Stelarc going to fly the 'Ear on Arm' circus, is it really SO monstrous, so engaging that we can't live without seeing it? It's already five years old and remains mute, but perhaps that's what makes it monstrous? (Of course, I'm in no way implying that muteness in an individual  is monstrous.) I'm still surprised that people (or is it only younger people) are over-awed by this kind of body modification. But, we all like a bit of bull shit in the art world, it's what makes it go around - keeps the curator's in a job, not to mention Gallery Directors and of course, the Australia Council, all of which probably make more money curating, writing and organizing art exhibitions than  the artists make themselves! Oh yes, we love our artists, we drag our bodies off to the 'gallery' (meaning of course, the National Gallery) when we have nothing else to do on a Sunday, and feel that by admiring art that we are somehow like artists. Sure, I can hear you saying that if no-one looks at the art then artists wouldn't make art - not so. The creative urge is there whether or not you have an audience. Well, after all that, what can I say, perhaps I should ask myself the question: Is there a certain amount of humbug in all of this, humbug being '...a kind of bluster, with a casual disregard for whether something is strictly true or not. If it seeks to mislead at all (and sometimes it can barely be bothered - it's having too much fun), it seeks to play tricks with the speaker's everyday reality (situation, attitudes, stance), rather than to deceive anybody with false information, the semantic weight of humbug being pretty much zero'. (Dessaix, 2009:10).