Modern art

I'm afraid I've got really old-fogeyish about Modern Art, so it was good for me that my friend Fiona came to Bologna this weekend and made me go to MAMBo, the Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna. My problem with modern art is twofold:
1) so much of it seems like banal things that people did then deconstructed later, like the nude bloke dancing in slow motion in the Tate, which the artist said she basically did for a laugh (though now it's on the front cover of a Will Self book I suppose it must be art). Plus a lot of it seems to be about expression of the artist's huge hollow ego, like acting.
2) I have envy. There's plenty of daft but resonant things I'd like to do but I don't think I'd get away with them. It annoys me that the modern artists get to be the Holy Fools of our time. (That's not meant in as harsh a way as it sounds, I'm a big fan of the Holy Fools, like St Simeon).
But MAMBo was interesting and worth going to. The current exhibition is by a man who badly needs a good slapping. (Sadly there wasn't a visitor's book.) It was mostly nude photos of the artist as various gods, goddesses, or legendary figures, here having sex with a swan, now painted blue and with extra arms, etc. In the eastern-based ones he was accompanied by a small naked boy, the big freak. But the permanent collection was very good, with some interesting stuff. At the end there was a wall covered in very very simple works, each on a separate small piece of paper, numbered and signed, and you were supposed to interact with the art by choosing one and taking it away. Mine says that if I ever accept money for it the artist's signature will be invalidated and the work will become false. Given that all those arguments about what is art are usually supposed to be settled by "whatever you think is art is art" it's interesting, and perhaps a bit rich, to have artists imposing conditions under which we're not allowed to think of their work as art. It's bound to have been done and I just don't know it in my ignorance, but if I were an artist I would make art labelled as not art on a Tuesday, or if it's ever been touched by a man with a beard, or not art for anyone who has seen a corpse. The piece Fiona chose just says that selling it is forbidden, which is a good deal less interesting.

Anyway I wanted to post about that to clear the way for my next post, which will be on the theme of Venice: surprisingly undisappointing.