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Each month, we invite élite art critic Braithwaite Merriweather to appraise the box art of the latest game releases. In between his time spent wandering the corridors of culture, Merriweather writes on a freelance basis for various publications, including Snitters and Nuneaton à la Carte. If you are unaware of his prowess, rest assured; he’s on a crusade to educate the unwashed. Put simply, he’s a man that needs no introduction.
After my ghoulish run in with a plumber last month, I have taken refuge at the house of an errant aunt, on the Côte d’Azur. She is away with whatever fanciful business aunts find themselves ceaselessly engaging in. I am attempting to recover from the numbing deluge of London, of faulty pipes, and of unappreciative attendees at the Venice Biennale. I ask you: who, other than a fusty board of bureaucrats, says one can’t simply exhibit one’s wares wherever one likes? Especially when one brings one’s own trestle table with adjustable height rungs… Alas the meek have not only inherited the Earth, but they’re running it into the ground with red tape, the jabbering bastards.
But enough of that. Who has time for such concerns? Just as I was banishing such thoughts from my brain and relaxing in the sun, I received this month’s crop of box art samples. What better way to escape and rejuvenate than to redouble one’s efforts and focus on the art? It’s with mild devastation that I saw, plastered across one of the boxes, a pair of plumbers. Is this venerable website trying to kill me? Must they poke me out of comfort by having me consider these contemptible figures two months running? It’s all I can do not to collapse into a fit of despair, but I am honour-bound to get to the desk and to the work.
Super Mario Maker 2
The sight of these smiling dopes triggers the need to tamp down the foaming rage and ill will I feel inside. Two plumbers loom over a landscape of pipes; their sickly yellow hats and clothes are girdled by a sky of graph paper. It seems as if staring too closely at this work – something I’m not inclined to do, quite frankly – could take an eye out. So kaleidoscopic is its rainbow-vomit style that it seems like a Dada spin on Two Plumbers, by Norman Rockwell. Which is a work, and an artist, that I’ve long felt in need of taking down a few dozen pegs!
Rockwell, in his attempts at delivering the wholesome warmth of the American everyday, managed precisely the opposite – he exposed the hollow-hearted nature of life. And the two plumbers in his work are not dissimilar to the two plumbers in ‘Super Mario Maker 2’ (a title that’s as amusing and catchy as influenza). They aren’t working; they’ve thieving, fooling about, leeching from ordinary, decent folk. Whilst you might feel the urge to laud a piece of box art for paying homage to a celebrated 20th century artist, I urge you not to when said artist is as bereft as Rockwell and when said game is complicit in the same smugness. Talk about plumbing the depths.
Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled
I’m quite convinced that the editor of this illustrious website is trying to provoke me, and so I have contacted him to let him know that I won’t be discussing the front cover of ‘Crash Nitro Kart.’ The reason I gave is that, after the retinal violation of ‘Super Mario Maker 2,’ I was certainly in no fit state to deal with this rabid lunatic piece of trash filth skullduggery. If indeed it can be called art – which it can’t – then it’s surely a partial self-portrait; the slavering dog, or whatever it is, in the centre is surely the architect of this monstrosity. It’s evidently a vain and vile beast, and I’ll have no part in its work. Who on earth commissioned such a gutter-living lump of nastiness? The thugs at the Venice Biennale see fit to tear down my work, and yet this depraved piece of trash adorns a box that shall be shipped to millions.
Judgment
Ah, there’s always one. Thank goodness I am to pass judgement on Judgment, a piece of box art that sees fit to present me with the floating shards of a mirror, in which are reflected a flood of delicious influences. The figure that stands at the heart of the image seems resolute; he has been captured mid-stride, his focus on us and unwavering. But then, like a thousand deeply naughty betrayals, his visage is reflected in the glass, with a finger pressed against the lips. What does this black-leathered figure want from us? What does he wish to say? My mind is afloat on an ocean of possibility.
My initial bursting excitement at this fine work gave way to a gradual swell of appreciation. It is the work of Picasso that is mirrored in these wonderful shards. The Weeping Woman (which, for a long time, I was unable to look at without vividly recalling my ex-wife, and which now, mercifully, I am seeing in a new light) springs to mind, with her torrents of emotion bound in broken glass fragments. Then, a second Picasso creeps into the mind’s eye. It’s the Portrait of Ambroise Vollard that perfectly sums up the art for ‘Judgment’ – the fragments of a man, caught in a glass menagerie, as unknowable in a thousand reflections as he is head-on.
If I am as gushing as a broken pipe, then it’s perhaps because I’m so glad to escape the plumbers and the lunatic kart-driving dogs. But it is also because I’ve been moved. Now I am off to nap in the sun. I was up in the early hours last night – kept awake by an irritating dripping coming from one of the antique taps in the guest bedroom’s ensuite.
