Substance Abuse:Michael Bracewell and New Order.

"Nothing in this world can touch the music that I heard when I woke up this morning. It put the sun into my life, it cut my heartbeat with a knife, it was like no other morning" - Dream Attack, New Order.

Dream Attack is a wonderful, understated, New Order song, Temptation is a disco banger fizzing with existential despair, Love Vigilantes is a catchy as hell anti-war anthem, and Blue Monday is a behemoth of a tune that reimagined what used to be called alternative music and put a firework under the way that music was both made and listened to.

So it's a crying shame that Michael Bracewell's New Order:Art, Product, Image 1976 - 1995 is none of those things. Put quite frankly, it's a crushing disappointment. A band as culturally important, as insouciant, and yet as vital as New Order deserve much much better. Following 2017's Hounded by External Events at the Maureen Paley, I'm beginning to suspect that Bracewell is nothing more than a chancer who's lucked out. I'd be happy for someone to prove me wrong.

Karen Knorr/Oliver Richon - Punks (1976-1977)

Behind the reception desk there's a photograph of Sarah Lucas reading the NME from where a door leads you into a room with four video screens standing like monoliths and showing short films by Angus Fairhurst, Gary Hume, Damien Hirst, and Sam Taylor-Johnson. Gillian Wearing's Dancing in Peckham is in the basement.

Fairhurst prances around in an ill fitting gorilla suit before being joined by Hirst to dress up as cannibals and scoff a clown ("does this taste funny to you?"), Hume is trying to make some obscure point about King Cnut, and Taylor-Johnson's film features a naked man with his cock out swaying around to some light classical.

Gary Hume - Me As King Cnut (1993)

Sam Taylor-Johnson - Brontosaurus (1995)

Unlike New Order's music, the art of these YBAs has not aged well at all. It's just dull. It's cold. It's boring. It says nothing about New Order, where they came from, or the cultural milieu they operated in. In fact it says nothing about anything whatsoever except these artists' own limitless capacity for self regard. 

We may be, politically, in a far greater mess now than we were in the nineties but I can't help suspect that it was the promotion of this dreadful style over substance art in the nineties that helped breed this culture of distrust of institutions. If mediocre artists can reach the top just by dint of having lots of money and shouting louder than more talented artists then why shouldn't politicians adopt the same tactics.

To look at Karen Knorr's dispiriting photographs of Belgravia from forty years back is to suggest that this process was hardly new in the nineties. Each photograph is subtitled with a vague and meaningless line or two of text which we're to assume came from the mouths of the overprivilegd, vacuous, and morally bankrupt sitters.

Karen Knorr - Belgravia (1979-81)

Karen Knorr - Belgravia (1979-81)

Karen Knorr - Belgravia (1979-81)

Karen Knorr - Belgravia (1979-81)

Napoleon, Metternich, Dutch masters, and contempt for lentils were the takeaway messages I got from this section - as well as an increased sympathy towards Class War. These children of Thatcher are, of course - or at least one would assume, included to show us what New Order, and the punk movement that birthed Joy Division and New Order, was up against. But, the punks on show appear equally vapid. For the most part identikit oiks kitted out in their punk uniforms and proudly showing off their swastikas.

Famously, Joy Division and New Order both took their names from the Nazis so I'd be on shaky ground to suggest that there weren't a fair amount of punks who fetishised fascistic imagery and even though there were a handful who probably moved over to genuinely hateful far right ideology, for the most part this was a simple and effective way that  these teenagers could shock their parents and grandparents. People who could actually remember the war and the revelations of the holocaust.

Peter Saville - Blue Monday (1983)

Richard Hamilton - Diab DS-101 computer (1985-89)

You'd like to think the fight against the Nazis (both in the music scene and in our wider culture) had been won and that, as That Mitchell and Webb Look memorably reminded us, they were "the bad guys". But as we've come to realise in recent years that's not the case. This is a fight that will most likely outlive us all and it's not one we'll necessarily win.

So I'd proffer we need an art that asks difficult questions about the role of politics in music and the role of music in politics and how that all ties up with what art is for and what our role in society is. Where are we all going? How are we going to get there? Who can we trust?

This show was empthatically not that. Peter Saville's iconic sleeve for Blue Monday was the best thing in the entire exhibition (and the only thing that directly related to New Order) and you don't need to go to Mayfair to see that. Remembering some of New Order's comments about London in general, they'd almost definitely rather you did not.

Damien Hirst - Satellite (1989-2010)

For all the words about post-modernism, alienation, the "atmosphere of requiem", and sociology that pepper the leaflet you can pick up on entering this exhibition the feeling you will most likely experience during your visit will be disappointment, closely followed by bewilderment, and the feeling you will most likely experience after departing will be relief.

New Order were a phenomenal, seminal band whose music gave joy to millions and whose gigs provided nights out that will go down in history (I hark back to a Glastonbury performance in 1987 when the opening notes of Sunrise were so deep my drunken teenage body nearly collapsed) and whose impact on great lake of British popular music was so profound that the ripples are still being felt at the shore now.

This show, however, was a waste of time. If it said anything about then and if it said anything about now and if it said anything about what's happened between then and now what it said was that, despite great art being made, the art world and the world of politics and business is still over populated with grifters and moneyed mountebanks and that cold hard cash still speaks louder than talent and shouts down love. The true message of punk, and the true message of New Order, was surely much much greater than that. Tell me now, how should I feel?

Karen Knorr/Oliver Richon - Punks (1976-1977)

Karen Knorr/Oliver Richon - Punks (1976-1977)