The 20th century produced many silly people, but perhaps none as silly as Peggy Guggenheim. She was the modernists' groupie, the over-moneyed, awestruck simpleton who, if told a piece of stained mattress was art, would promptly buy it and hang it in a gallery, writes Kevin Myers.
The essential fatuity of the woman is attested by her activities in 1939-40, when the world was slipping into slavery: and what did our Peggy do, but embark upon her project to "buy a picture a day". You can present this as a steely resolve to preserve Western civilisation as the poisoned darkness rolled out from the vaults of the Third Reich; or you can see it for what it is, a spending spree by a pampered, self-indulgent fool who was too wrapped up with her own folly to perceive what was going on in the world.
In October, 1942, when the SS had begun to slaughter the Jews of Warsaw, thousands a day were dying at Stalingrad, the US Navy was taking a beating in the Solomons, and a wave of executions swept through Norway, she opened her museum-gallery "Art of This Century" in New York. She wore a Tanguy ring in one ear, a Calder in the other - in order, she said, to show "my impartiality between surrealist and abstract art".
October 1942. Yes, indeed, a bad month in world history. Yet who could have guessed back then that the Guggenheim blight would in time spread from its home in New York, right around the globe? For the Guggenheim McModernist empire now has outposts in Venice, Bilbao, Berlin, New York, with two in Las Vegas. And those two in the city of casinos tell all you wish to know about the three things which drive McModern art: money, money and money.
In 1948, and probably for about half-nothing in post-war Italy, Guggenheim bought the 200 year-old Palazzo Venier dei Leoni on the Grand Canal in Venice. In time she turned it into the home for that meaningless assembly of tat from the 1942 New York exhibition - and this, not in Lurgan or Hull, but in the most stunningly beautiful city in the world. But be consoled, for there's this to be said for the Venice location. Firstly, the palazzo is known as the unfinished palace, so at least Guggenheim didn't rip out magnificent interiors to house her collection of junk; and secondly, the buildings are small enough and contained enough to make them eminently suitable for a cruise missile attack, and with absolutely no collateral damage.
Actually, there is one further point to be made for the Guggenheim McModern gallery. Some of the great villains of 20th-century art are represented there. If you want to get a full feel for the vapidity, for the arid pretentiousness, for the bloated pseudo-intellectualism and for the posturing witlessness that lie at the heart of Modernism, and McModernism too, then the Venice Guggenheim is the very place for you: and in order to give vent to the artistic feelings which will certainly go surging through your heart at what you see, be sure to bring a can of petrol and a lighter.
Daubs, smears, paint-trails, doodles, random shapes: here you get them in abundance, and even where you get something tangibly related to reality, such as Marino's sculpture of a man on a horse, you get this explicatory drivel: "This whimsical image has something of the crude vitality of ancient Etruscan sculpture. . .Horse and rider have a metaphorical quality hinting at the tension between spirit and matter, ecstasy and placidity, or between the artist's idea and the limitations of his materials."
Actually, the only thing interesting about the figure, which everyone duly notes, but pretends not even to see, is that the naked rider is blessed with a positive broom-handle of an erection. That piece of jolly bawdiness should at least have brought a smile to any normal face, as should Pegeen Vail's childishly primitive sketch of a woman masturbating. Instead, nothing but the lugubriously pensive solemnity of visitors who are quite baffled by what they see, yet still pretend to draw great significance from artistic incompetence masquerading as talent, or from the old-fashioned snake-oil fraudulence.
Klee, Vandinsky, Chagall, Mondrian, Ernst, Dali, Miró: these were immensely capable artists who could have enriched the world with their talents, had they not been tempted by the poisoned apples of lazy abstraction, by the vile pelf of over-rich imbeciles like Guggenheim, and lastly and perhaps most infuriatingly, by the endlessly banal verbiage in which modernism stews.
Thus of one Guggenheim sculpture: "The monstrous absence of the head alerts us to the realisation that all five of the senses are deposited there." Jesus Mary and Joseph, is there a single 10-year-old anywhere who doesn't bloody well know where the five senses live?
Pablo Picasso was the primary culprit for the debacle of 20th-century McModernism. He was the central figure who, with his boundless energies and his sublime talent, could have steered the vessel of visual creativity away from the maelstrom of unskilled, unprincipled self-indulgence by which it has since been consumed. Naturally, he is of course well represented in the Guggenheim. My only critical reaction to his "The Studio" - the culmination of cubism into a canvas too tritely meaningless to describe - is to time-travel back to the 1920s and beat him to death with a rolled-up copy of "Guernica". That done - first things first, after all - there's a little ex-corporal in Munich I need to speak to, using a large claw-hammer.