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From: blp Category: Art Date: 10 June 2008 Time: 06:23 PM Review: Well aren't you the charmer. It's a bit rich to come on so strong when you admit to not understanding what I was talking about. But I do agree. You haven't understood and the manner in which you misunderstand rather seems to prove my point. On the one hand, you peddle the now deeply conventionalist line disqualifying 'real feeling' as a spurious, crypto-mystical appeal to authenticity. I don't make this appeal myself, but, unsurprisingly, your half-baked theory primed knee jerked into action to rubbish me for it in the crudest terms anyway. My point was just that similar assumptions about feeling seem to have led the Chapmans into the teeth of a contradiction that renders their efforts null. They want to disturb, but unfortunately that would involve an appeal to, oops, real feeling. You're the same, ripping into me for being sentimental, asking me on the one hand to come at the work with a bit more distance, but, at the same time, amazed that I'm not disturbed by it. Re this question of the Chapmans' audience and my assumptions about the lack of gore and war in their lives, you have a point, I haven't done a survey, but any time I've been to White Cube there weren't any people who didn't look like they lived in a suburban comfort zone there. Still, I made the point badly because, on reflection, I don't think it would really matter if there were, what with appeals to real feeling being ruled out of court. See, you could have made that point, Clem, and then you would have had something like a plausible argument to swing around in your sneering, bullying manner. Here's the thing. I think there's bucket loads of real feeling in your reaction to the Chapmans and, whether they'd realise it or not, it makes you their perfect dupe. Why? Because I think you're totally getting off on the horror, which is why you enjoy darkly sexy phrases like 'infernal machines from which there is no escape' and why, in the final analysis, you come on like such a total and utter bastard. Well, at least you may be right about the infernal machine with no escape part - if you mean the Chapmans' practice. But as long as you're going to come on all Deleuzian, you could also consider another of Gilles Deleuze's bon mots: 'You might try to be a bit nicer'.