Jimmy Carr Destroys Art, Channel 4 review — grim and unedifying

It was always going to be a grim, unedifying spectacle. A show built around the acquisition of a painting by Adolf Hitler and the question of whether or not to rip it to shreds on television didn’t exactly scream nuance, consideration and meaningful discourse.

Jimmy Carr Destroys Art, the giddy title of this hour-long Channel 4 special — in which a studio audience is asked to vote on whether to preserve or expunge “problematic” artwork — also wasn’t an auspicious sign. The choice of the controversy-hungry comedian as presenter, months after he made a painfully crass Holocaust joke, removed any doubt that this was going to be something other than a limp, limpid (and inevitably successful) play for attention by a broadcaster facing various existential threats in its 40th year.

Still. This grim and unedifying? It’s bad enough that the thorny (if increasingly tired) discussion about the separation of a creator and their work is packaged as a kind of late-night panel show in which asinine one-liners are thrown around. Bad enough that the programme largely hinges on pseudo-transgressive empty gestures directed at prints or works by culturally, canonically insignificant “artists” such as Rolf Harris, Rachel Dolezal and indeed Hitler. But this woefully misguided programme goes so far as actually to gamify the “debate”.

Here audiences are presented with two tenuously comparable works — say photographer Sally Mann’s nude portrait of her daughter and a copy of Marcus Harvey’s “Myra” — and then given a choice as to which one to have destroyed on the basis of a five-minute, often glib argument. One work that “loses” the vote, by Eric Gill (a self-confessed paedophile), is burnt by flame-thrower, another is torn apart by a paintball firing squad.

This egregious theatre of punishment, as Michel Foucault might have called it, only serves to distract from some genuinely worthwhile points mentioned by the more serious participants about why discomfort isn’t a sufficient reason for destruction, or about the importance of works that depict and reveal ugly prejudices. Most of the time, however, we’re subjected to a barrage of false equivalencies and enough straw men to keep the country crow-free for a while.

Every time we think we’ve reached the nadir, like the trivialising mock-catharsis of shredding a Hitler sketch, another one appears. An argument made in favour of smashing a sculpture by Pablo Picasso because of the artist’s abusive streak and his cultural appropriation is not just a low point for the show, but for television this year.

In truth, it would be no great loss if one day this witless programme was to be removed from the Channel 4 archives. No need to get Carr in to do the honours though.

★☆☆☆☆

Available to stream on All4

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