SUPERART

The supermarket art of the 21st century

SUPER PERSONIFESTO*

by John Michael Wade, sculptor, author, poet and piss artiste

OUT with the portentous parodies and pastiches of post-war sculptural artists whose grasp of reality is so nebulous as to be a mere wisp of mist in an alien landscape.

OUT with the naked bricks of Andre - bullshit personified - and his ludicrous acolytes.

OUT with the rural stone placing of Long and his country bumpkin followers.

OUT with the clueless Royal Academy sculpture toffs and the culturally-blind art school teachers.

OUT with the mechanistic meanderings of Smith and his welding wankers.

OUT with the gormless Gormley figurines, the repetitious, bland, blind and boneless bodies that litter the seaside sands.

OUT with the destructive animalism of the hubristic money-grubber Hirst.

IN with the plebeian plastics of the iconoclastic counter reformation, the supermarket art acknowledged by the working folk of Mansfield, of South Shields and of Romford whose relationship with Cork Street culture is so tenuous that it is as thin as the gossamer in a spider's web.

Just as, a century ago, Marinetti launched his Futurist manifesto lauding speed and the modernity of the early 20th century, now in the 21st century age of the internet I aim to promote the era of the common man and woman in the street who are eagerly grasping the tools of artistic self-expression and usurping the establishment norms of the political and governing classes.

The age of the underdog has arrived.

John Michael Wade, London, Monday, December 6, 2010 at 5am GMT.

*This celebration of the art of the supermarket was originally entitled Super Manifesto. It was changed in the interests of political correctness emanating from coalition compromising. This came about in a mulling over on the Island of Mull in the Western Isles of Scotland in the 2012 Olympic year when the Retford-born, Mansfield, Edinburgh, German and Australian-educated former golf club captain, ex-Gentlemen's Club president, malt whisky connoisseur, Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, eminent academic visionary, author, Op artist, German linguist and potty snooker player who happens to be my brother manfully raised the question as to whether or not there had ever been a Womanifesto. I fear not. And Personifesto - a word he coined - has about it that ring of insincerity and absurd nihility prevalent among the numerous charlatans inhabiting the art world of the 21st century. It is a concept for the art of our time.

Tobermory, Isle of Mull, May 9 2012