Rococco by Christos Tsiolkas

I read Christos Tsiolkas's short story Rococco in the September 2010 Edition of Overland.  It's a brilliant piece of writing but for the life of me I can't even begin to work out what's going on inside the author's head.  Well worth a read, the story starts in this way (and maintains the conceit throughout)

"The auction of the painting A Lady Escorted into the Garden by the minor eighteenth-century Portuguese artist Alfonso Rigas de la Guerra created a significant stir in art circles when it was recently sold for €3.2 million (see ‘Unknown Work Sets Art World’s Hearts Racing’, Guardian, 17 May 2006). Though the price itself was relatively insignificant when compared to the astronomical sums fetched by more famous works, it nevertheless was an astonishing sum for a painting that has little, if any, international profile. It is not my intention here to comment on the workings of the international art industry. But I do believe it is necessary to make the one following observation before I begin: since the 1980s, any belief in the ‘revolutionary’ potential imbued in the traditional high arts can no longer be a tenable critical position, if for no other reason than the more democratic digital media technologies allow for a dispersal of message and image that would have been unimaginable to an artist of even a half-century before. But it is not only the internet that has exposed the elitism of art practice. Artists are neither a ‘proletariat’ nor a ‘vanguard’, and they do not make successful ‘revolutionaries’. If they have been, it has only been for a moment before the firing squad or the gulag or the concentration camp has seen to their ignoble demise."
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Jean-Honore Fragonard, The Swing (1767)

Yinka Shonibare MBE, The Swing (2004)

I googled Rococo (when in doubt Wiki will do).  One of the images presented as an example is Fragonard's The Swing painted in 1767, six or seven years after the invented painting of the short story.  Fragonard's painting was the inspiration for a sculpture by the British artist Yinka Shonibare MBE, which we saw when his exhibition filled the Museum of Contemporary Art last year.

Shonibare, like the fictional de la Guerra, is interested in racism, identity, colonialism (and much more no doubt).  Christos Tsiolkas might be too.  He's certainly an intelligent writer who can make you think even as he so spectacularly pulls the wool over your eyes.