wordcrush

What do the TV show Big Brother (UK) and the paintings of Francis Bacon have in common? Actually, you might be surprised. According to this Guardian piece, the grotesqueries of television's worst strangely mirror "the passages of existential angst in Bacon's painting" which "too often can seem excessive and embarrassingly worked up, at best formulaic, at worst merely camp."

It's too bad that the reviewer, Gordon Burn, ultimately distances his analogy, claiming that the difference resides in the fact that Big Brother contestants' reactions are "usually out of all proportion to what has caused them." Surely disproportion plays an important role in the vast majority of our crises thse days. As Lacan says, we are "more and more losing the sense of tragedy." Perhaps we now view things like Big Brother proportionately to the way a mid-century person viewed art.

Here's a quote from Bacon on why he preferred to work from photographs: "If I like them [the subjects], I don't want to practise before them the injury that I do to them in my work." God, if that couldn't be a quote from a reality show's crew, I don't know what could.

# posted by Lintropy @ 1:35 PM