And so to Edition 18 of Laughing Stock. This week, Rich Walker abandons one vitriolic article and goes in a much more wholesome direction, to show how Claire Rousay & More Eaze’s An Afternoon Whine LP cover is a proper work of art.
You’re not meant to show what goes on behind the magic, but reader, this piece needs some context. I started writing about the monstrosity that is the Damien Hirst designed cover for Drake’s tedious behemoth of a new album Certified Lover Boy (CLB), deconstructing whether or not such a flippant, infantile, meme-able thing could be considered a work of art. Whether or not a piece, by a man last relevant somewhere in the late 90s, a man who rarely actually makes his own work, produced to adorn the cover of a very expensive treatise on being rich, having too many women, not having enough women, being from Toronto, and again on being rich, can be considered anything but vulgar and irrelevant. Yet whilst writing I was becoming more and more angry with the cover, with writing how fucking awful the thing is, that I started to annoy myself. Why give these two men more airtime, more internet words (even if they were turning out to be entertainingly vitriolic words). Why waste valuable time on something of so little worth, just to try and prove how little something is worth?
Whilst writing the initial piece I was listening to the gorgeous Claire Rousay & More Eaze album from earlier this year, the gloriously titled An Afternoon Whine. It struck me whilst listening to this and typing the words ‘a combination of toxic masculinity and acceptance of truth which is inevitably heartbreaking’ (which is the actual Drake penned bio of Certified Lover Boy found on Apple music, I shit you not), that writing a piece that was going to ask the fundamental, and fundamentally unanswerable question of ‘what is art’ in the context of a terrible piece of album artwork, would be better spent on the absolutely wonderful cover of An Afternoon Whine rather than the CLB clusterfuck. So a digital line was drawn through the Drake piece for something more wholesome, something to delight instead of dismay.
I’m no student of art, and I’m not going to pretend to have a grasp on fine art theory or aesthetics. But recently I’ve been fascinated by the question of ‘what is art?’, and I’m not entirely sure why. It seems like one of the most absurd questions to ask. What qualifies a person to answer it, who is anyone to define what is and isn’t art? Yet thousands of scholars, artists and theorists have tried their best to give an answer, a theory, a quest I can attest to having been time burgled by, through falling down many an internet rabbit hole chasing some kind of definitive answer. Absurd questions with a ridiculous amount of opinions are the best for rabbit hole-ing; alas, it turns out there is no definitive answer. Maybe, as with art itself, therein lies the beauty of it. ‘What is art’ has infinitive responses.
However, for the purpose of having some kind of framework, I’ve chosen this articulate response by paper engineer Matthew Shlian, from this fascinating article by Jessica Stewart, which to me seems to capture the essence of what art can be:
‘A piece of art needs to connect. It needs to have some element of truth to it that resonates with the viewer and leaves them something after they’ve left the piece. A good piece asks questions and teaches you something you didn’t know or shows you something you didn’t know you knew. It articulates something we’ve felt, and we connect to that thing in a way where words aren’t necessary. It's a feeling that's hard to describe but makes us feel less alone in a way - that someone else understands us and gives a voice to this thing inside us. A piece of art extends beyond its frame and becomes part of us.’
It’s safe to say that, even without the aid of a 1500 word opinion piece, it’s easy to draw the conclusion that Hirst’s CLB cover does not fulfill the above criteria. But cast your eyes on this thing of utter beauty:
I fell in love with this image the moment I clapped eyes on it as a tiny thumbnail on the Boomkat weekly email. I was drawn to the vibrant yellow of both the jumper and the drink, and even without reading the accompanying blurb I clicked on the small image in order to expand the magnificence. I wanted to experience the image in its full glory. As it blossomed before my eyes, I was transfixed. The way the arm draws your eyes down to the cigarette which becomes the focal point of the image (what brand is it? Where can I get some? Shouldn’t she have a receptacle to catch that ash before it ruins the pastel rug? Of course not, it would ruin the aesthetic). The bright yellow of the drink (what is it? Where can I get some? Surely it can’t be plain orange juice, it has to be, nay must be, a sophisticated afternoon cocktail) which matches the golden yolk of the jumper. And then! The triangle of pure, electrifying green grass in the top right, juxtaposed against the natural canvas of the rug. Simply sublime. I want to be on this rug, with my own cigarette and cocktail, the hazy sun caressing my skin, the faint smell of weed in the air, the stillness of our own patch of a buzzing city park.
Yet her arm is defensively crossed against her body. Is this a woman who has asked a friend to come to the park to lighten her burden, talk about something that is bothering her? Are the drinks and cigarettes an offering to ease the pain of the conversation - the album, after all, is titled ‘An Afternoon Whine’? We do not know, but we can infer because the seemingly simple image is thrown into ambiguity by that arm. There is hesitancy, there is conflict. There is a story that is tantalisingly out of our grasp.
It is a simple image, but it makes me feel. It connects deeply with me. I want to be there, I want to experience the moment and everything around it. It resonates deeply as an instantly gratifying image, but also as a little deeper as a puzzle. It is also an absolutely perfect accompaniment to the gentle, slightly pensive, delightful music contained within the LP casing. If art should ‘extend beyond its frame and become part of us’, then this image has taken up residency in my very being. Kant concluded that artistic beauty is subjective (in the eye of the beholder) and cannot scientifically be proven, so maybe there are people who believe that the Certified Lover Boy cover is beautiful, rendering it a work of art (indeed, maybe it is sublime, given that it provoked one of the most visceral reactions I’ve had to an album cover). And so, in the connection I feel to the glorious aesthetics of An Afternoon Whine, I declare this vibrant wonder a work of art, and anoint it as the greatest album art work of the year (sorry Joy O, you do come second though x).
Each week we will share some tracks that the contributors to Laughing Stock currently have on heavy rotation. You can follow the rolling playlist on Apple or Spotify.
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ICYMI: More from Laughing Stock
Edition 17: Connah Roberts on how venues remain good
Edition 16: Rich Walker on The Club satisfing Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
Edition 15 - Connah Roberts on fashion and music and butter
Edition 14 - Sam Hartford on anachronistic music in films
Edition 13 - Our Half Year Review 2021
Edition 12 - Will Palmer on lesser know football references in music
Edition 11 - Rich Walker on boring anniversary pieces
Edition 10 - Connah Roberts on culture wars, and Kes
Edition 9 - Rich Walker on trains, music, music on trains, and HS2
Edition 8 - Connah Roberts channeling Adiran Chiles on Karaoke
Edition 7 - Rich Walker on nihilism in music
Edition 6 - Connah Roberts on producers of imagination
Edition 5 - Sam Hartford on Spotify’s all seeing eye
Edition 4 - Rich Walker on how amazing organ music is
Edtion 3 - Will Palmer on Music as Muscle Memory
Edition 2 - Connah Roberts on Arctic Monkeys and Quantitative Easing
Edition 1 - Rich Walker on Dua Lipa and the new pop vanguard