The Big Win

The Big Win: A Modern Morality Tale is Barnaby Barford’s latest piece, showing at the Laing Gallery in Newcastle. Barford – who is yet to have a Wikipedia page (and is therefore curiously anonymous for an international prize winner) – satirises in a series of dioramas about the size of a fish tank the hopes and dreams of the sordid British public. Well, one element of our public at least.

In a modern-day Dickensian narrative, a takeaway- and TV-addicted Rab C Nesbitt-type antihero wins the lottery, lives it up for a while and, inevitably, squanders it. It provides the art-going public with a brief platform from which to condescend. BP (Burning Py-izz-ire) would prefer a slightly broader critique, which incorporates the lazy hypocrisy of the art-goer himself, who sniffs at "Rab" here and then on departing the gallery delves deeply into the Propasphere ("Propaganda sphere") - more deeply, because he knows not where he swims.

Is The Big Win "classist"? Probably. But then it sounds eerily like the life of Michael Carroll, sans some of his anti-social abuses (when truth trumps art, art's missing something).

And then we ask: but is it art? Well, it has a clear enough message. Is that the point?

The discussion of art in terms of its meaning, rather than the beauty of its execution, the real riddle of modern art and why most of it – Duchamp’s bog, Schwitters’ shit-house – baffles the bourgeoisie and bores the working class, came about after Kant (Clement Greenberg).