I spark up a blunt of Nettle Kush in the gallery. It is
opening night and the audience immediately turn on me and my foul drug spliff I
chong on the dancefloor. I see my Nemesis. My Enfant T'errible. Jonathan Jones, art critic for The Guardian since 1999.
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I lock eyes with Britain's second greatest art critic.
"JJ you son of a bitch. What do you think of this art?" I say, going over and crushing his hand.
"Well if you ask me its typically pedestrian." he says, avoiding all eye contact.
It is as if his pupils were magnetically opposite to my own gaze. Had this guy been reading too much?
<o> <o>
I snap out of it. Jonathan Jones the journalist. The art critic. The scholar. The landscape painter.
Here he was, in my domain, like some old dog leaking piss from his bladder and thinking its marking its territory.
I grab a plate of pickles from a passing waiter, beginning to munch on their Vinegary crispness.
“I saw you at the Warhol gig recently. That shit was awesome.” I say, sucking an olive off a cocktail stick.
“Well if you ask me it was absolutely awful.”
“Jonathan. Bubby. Why are you writing about art when you don’t even like it?”
“Um, no, actually I do like art. I have standards and if you expect an art critic to not bring that to the table then why the hell am I getting paid £856,000 a year to share my views to you, the guardian readers.”
“Guardian readers can kiss my ass.” I say, taking a huge hit from the blunt and passing it to Jonathan, who then also takes a triple hit and gets the hiccups.
“Look, I know you think we’re enemies, but actually we’re best mates.” Johnathan says.
“Jonathan, stop shitting on me. We are enemies. We are dualists, each of us carrying a uzi filled with 7.62 magnum armor-piercing rounds, fighting for the future of Art in this country.” I say, taking a final hit from the blunt before docking it out in a glass of champagne.
“What?”
“Draw.” I yelled, pulling a gun from my inner pocket and pointing it at his forehead.
“I don’t have a gun!” he yells.
“Neither do I.” I say, gesturing to the so-called gun in my hand. It was actually a dried lobster, spray painted black. “I’m just fucking with you.”
Jonathan Jones Journalist laughs.
“Now that’s what I call punk!” he says, flipping his fingers into the Devil Horns.
It turns out all along, me and my worst enemy had a lot in common. We spent the next few hours comparing scars, aligning tattoos. I read his palms under a waxing moon. As the sun crept up behind the hills, we were listening to Thelonious Monk and sharing a bottle of Jacob’s Creek. We felt like explorers.
In quite a stunning moment, Jonathan Jones Art Critic Guardian stood upon a dry stone wall with the first beams of the morning lighting his face. He then delivered the following speech:
“Brothers of this foul nation! The sons of a fetid Pentecost. We rise up, our mouths open and ready to bite at our enemies. Ultimate guerilla warfare is to act like fast zombies, chasing people down and eating them. Like, literally.” he said. I clapped a few times, listening to the morning birds wake around us. Sometimes it was worth going to see art after all.
