Jimmy Carr has never previously displayed much interest in art — aside, obviously, from the art of tax evasion. But he does know a few things about “cancel culture” after widespread condemnation of jokes he’s made down the years about Travellers, the Holocaust and Limerick (city of his birth). Which makes the stand-up half-qualified to host a contrived shockfest in which art by dreadful people (plus problematic art by non-dreadful people) is torched, paintballed and chucked from a height.
The deeper purpose behind Jimmy Carr Destroys Art (Channel 4, Tuesday, 9.15pm) is to debate cancel/consequence culture and the argument about whether we can separate great art from loathsome individuals. Or, in the case of the Hitler watercolour shredded in front of the cameras, terrible art from fascist degenerates.
It’s all massively silly and juvenile. What C4 has served up is a surface-level exploration of what “cancellation” means, which leaves little room for nuance but features Carr tossing from a balcony a bust by Rachel Dolezal, an advocate for African-American rights who turned out to be white.
The one-off film is part of Channel 4′s lurid season of commemorative telly marking its 40th anniversary. Other birthday one-offs have included a revival of Ben Elton’s Friday Night Live and a documentary called My Massive C***, which is about as charming as it sounds.
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These shows celebrate the broadcaster’s tradition of “iconoclasm and irreverence”, says director of programming, Ian Katz. But Channel 4 also gave the world froth such as The Word and TGI Friday. And that is the baying, bawling tradition in which Jimmy Carr Destroys Art follows. It features an excitable studio audience and the host cracking the joke that those who favour mulching the Hitler watercolour should stand “to the right — the far right”.
Not everyone sees the funny side. It’s telling that many of the talking heads wheeled out to argue for and against the destruction of the various pieces of art are dubious, to put it mildly, about the project. That is the note struck by Dom Jolly, debating the relative merits of work by Rolf Harris, the entertainer jailed for child sex crimes, and Eric Gill, the British artist and designer, lauded by the establishment, who was revealed after his death to have sexually abused his own daughters. In the end, Joly argues in favour of ripping up the Rolf Harris piece — on the basis that it’s simply a horrendous painting.
A similar queasiness is expressed by the Irish author and academic Emma Dabiri when it is proposed to destroy a racist cartoon by the 19th-century artist John Leech, who portrayed black people as bestial and the Irish as apes wearing suits. Erasing the Leech would be to wave away the racist history in which he is embedded. “We need to understand that history,” says Dabiri.
The most potent point, made as the room votes to tear to tatters the Hitler painting, comes from the actor and writer Jolyon Rubinstein, who has described himself as “culturally Jewish” and reminds us that, when it came to destroying art, Hitler was all for it. That is a warning from history to which we should all pay attention — in particular, Channel 4 and Jimmy Carr.
