A
Stuckist Manifesto The
Stuckists' critique of manifestos 1. Manifestos are pretentious and showing off. 2. If they're sincere, they're boring. If they're not sincere, they're not worth reading. 3. We decry manifestos. 4. Three year olds are very good at manifestos. 5. If you see an artist with a manifesto, they can't help it. 6. Manifestos litter history like cannonballs on a battlefield. 7. You have to be horribly arrogant, astonishingly self-effacing, sadly deluded, amazingly prophetic, extraordinarily clever or exceedingly stupid to write a manifesto. 8. The best manifestos have the worst ideas. 9. The purpose of a manifesto is to annoy people who need to be annoyed. 10. Long live the traction engine of fortitudinal contemplation. 11. Let us rejoice that elephants exist. You can't make omelettes without riding a bicycle. 12. If you don't study history, you should. 13. Sir Nicholas Serota, one of the worst directors of the Tate gallery, is remembered nowadays for rejecting a donation of 160 Stuckist paintings. He said, "We do not feel that the work is of sufficient quality in terms of accomplishment, innovation or originality of thought to warrant preservation in perpetuity in the national collection." 14. Of course it's possible to study history and still get it wrong. 15. People say, "Why do you spend all your time writing manifestos?" They don't seem to realise that manifestos only take five minutes. 16. People say, "Why do you spend all your time dong protests and not doing art?" - then spend all their time looking at our protests and not looking at our art. 17. We are all dependent on an unprecedentedly evolved, vast and complex social and economic structure simply in order to be able to buy a carrot. 18. We take most things for granted. There are other things to do in life. 19. Manifestos speak to tomorrow (which never comes). 20. A manifesto is something. Sometimes nothing is better than something, but mostly something is better than nothing. Charles
Thomson and The Stuckist Bureau of Enquiry Proposed
as Honorary Stuckists in addition to previous Honorary Stuckists:
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