Blobs and Gobs

Scourge of people who know things about things, former Minister for More Rah-Rah in Our Schools, and non-contributing signatory of the Authorised Version, the jabbering homunculus that is Michael Gove has now weighed in, with all his blowflyweight intellectual heft, over the Turner Prize. It is unclear whether the jabbering homunculus knows any more about modern art than he does about (to take a random example) teaching; but, as with teaching, what he does know he doesn't like. The jabbering homunculus dislikes the Turner Prize for celebrating the "tragic emptiness of now", a phrase of such vacuous journalistic pomposity that one might almost think Gove a mere Murdoch drone, if one did not know better. The jabbering homunculus finds modern art too ugly and nihilistic; which is understandable enough in someone who found the Blackadder representation of the First World War insufficiently clean and cheerful. Some political colleagues of the jabbering homunculus recently tried to remove art history from the A level curriculum, on the grounds that genuinely hard-working proles will have no time for such fripperies; but it would of course be absurd, as well as unkind, to suggest that Gove has been vengefully deployed as a squeaky pink rubber attack hamster.