Art, Yellowists and Rothko

Yesterday Wlodzimierz Umaniec was jailed for two years for defacing a painting by the late Russian-American artist Mark Rothko (1903-70). The painting, 'Black on Maroon', was in the Tate Gallery in London and was valued at between $8m - $15m. Umaniec had written on it 'a potential piece of yellowism'.

In Yellowism, according to its manifesto, written by Umaniec and his colleague Marcin Lodyga, 'all interpretations possible in the context of art are reduced to one, are equalized, flattened, to yellow'. Part of this is the belief that art is taking what others have done and developing it.

This and the rest of the rambling manifesto, is either pretentious pseudo-philosophy and not worth bothering with, or it is taking modern art to its logical conclusion (or of course it could be both). And most movements do not like being taken to a logical conclusion. The troublesome eccentric who takes hold of a fashionable principle and pushes it just a little bit further than is socially acceptable, is regarded as a nuisance, a troublemaker, and in this case, a criminal. His real crime apart from concepts of criminal damage, is to expose the pretentiousness of the artistic status quo for what it is. A little boy has cried out 'but the emperor is not wearing any clothes'.

Is the Yellowist idea of art, after all, nonsense as it may be, anything other than the logical extension of the principle at the heart of much modern art - that art is ultimately a way of looking at anything? It is not so much what a thing is objectively, as what the subject thinks of it.

Speaking of which, I thought Rothko with a bit of Yellowist scribble was a lot more interesting than Rothko as Rothko. But then, that is just a way of looking at it.