There’s been an example of some particularly bizarre and probably publicly funded artistic agitprop doing the rounds in Europe which has been featured on Brietbart. Two ‘artists’, in reality political activists, have constructed a 20 foot (6 metre) high inflatable refugee which they are touting round Europe in order to bully Europeans to be more ‘tolerant’ of the invaders whoops, I mean refugees. Here’s some of the pictures that Brietbart published of this unmitigated pile of bovine faeces.

This ‘art’ project shows the truth in what I was told when I was a photographer, which was any old shit looks interesting once you enlarge it past 20” by 30” size. Even poorly composed images with an abundance of technical flaws hold the attention of the viewer when they are printed in huge proportions. As with photographs so with this ‘art’ project. It is really piss poor bit of agitprop of the sort trundled out to various extremist leftist demos by often equally extremist art students. It’s not even a new idea. I seem to recall papier mache Margaret Thatchers and similar leftist hate figures being a feature of some Leftist demos in the 80’s and 90’s. This inflatable invader is a lazy shitty idea which has only gathered attention because of the bulk of the structure.

This project typifies the authoritarian, ‘out there’ middle class Left. Those who designed this air filled propaganda blimp probably think that there is no valid view about the current problems other than that possessed by the artists themselves. It’s arrogant beyond belief. Worse than that it’s a statement of arrogance from artists who appear to have very little to be arrogant about apart from their virtue signalling political ideology. It’s a work designed to bully Europeans into accepting thousands of people whose culture is completely at odds with ours and who commit vast amounts of crime. It’s a classic example of creatives who think that they are being cutting edge when in reality they are completely cut off from reality.

Sometimes artists do need to push the envelope of acceptability or do stuff that is determinedly not of the mainstream and this is as it should be. Art would not grow without artists taking creative risks. However this is nothing like that. This is not an artwork it is mere political propaganda, therefore should be considered as no different from the sort of stuff that came from the Stalinist and Nazi cultures and is now quite rightly derided.

This project shows just how cut off some artists are from the concerns and worries of the man and woman in the street. While these artists are spending who knows how much money from who knows what source telling Europeans to open their doors to people who are a clear and present danger to them and their families. You can’t get more cut off from reality than that.

This is a poor idea that the artists have tried to make relevant by making big. It’s not even a new idea it’s a bit of tired, empty, leftist agitprop that has been commented on only because of its size and maybe because the utter stupidity and vacuity of those who created it. I’ve nothing against art being used for a social purpose or to highlight something the artist is concerned about or thinking about or the impact of great events on humanity. There are many great examples of artists in my own former field, photography, who have had a social, personal and artistic conscience such as Lewis Hine, Dorothea Lange, Don McCullin, Bert Hardy, Margaret Bourke-White or W Eugene Smith, to name but a tiny number. This pair of Belgian artistic clowns do not come into the category of great artists, far from it. They are merely dishonest political design operatives and I hope that one day this pair will be put in the same category of journalistic liars like Walter Duranty, a man who backed Stalin even when he could see with his own eyes that Stalin’s policies were causing mass deaths.

I’m normally loathe to approve of vandalism but I would laugh loudly if someone punctured this empty windbag of a political statement both physically and metaphorically in order to to remove this inflatable monstrosity from the horizon. It would also help to inject a much needed dose of reality into the minds of the artists themselves.