An Upskirt Caricaturist | Great Artists: Van Gogh

We are allies of the LGBT community. Great Artists (Part One) This episode of Fin vs History is brought to you by Surfshark. Secure your privacy with Surfshark! Enter coupon code FVH for an extra 4 months at https://surfshark.com/fvh The show for people who like history but don't care what actually happened.  For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening and early access to series, become a Truther and sign up to the Patreon ⁠⁠⁠patreon.com/fintaylor⁠⁠ Chapters: 00:00 - I Don’t Dream 05:30 - Edinburgh Whinge Festival 10:50 - French Upskirting 13:40 - A Difficult Pint 17:53 - He’s Binary 21:51 - He’s An Incel 25:07 - Not Today 28:47 - Fin’s School Trip 33:58 - Bullet Bullet Bullet 36:46 - Charlie’s Favourite Color 38:57 - It’s Crap 41:58 - Hitler’s Biopic 49:55 - He Can’t Even Kill Himself Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:12Speaker 00

  Welcome back to Finn vs History, folks. I'm joined by Horatio Gould.

• 0:18Speaker 00

  And today, we're talking about the great artists, specifically Vincent van Gogh.

• 0:24Speaker 01

  Yes. I'm completely at sea.

• 0:29Speaker 00

  I can't see land. I'm in an ice rink, surrounded by Spanish children whizzing past me, and I'm clinging on to the life raft of psychotic men.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  Well, you like reality. You don't like subtext. So as soon as we're getting on towards surrealism, it starts getting weirder and stranger, and you feel completely uncomfortable.

• 0:48Speaker 00

  I just think, why the fuck are you doing that?

• 0:51Speaker 00

  I've seen some paintings, and I'm like, why have you done that?

• 0:53Speaker 01

  See, I'm the opposite. I'm quite dyslexic, so I feel I emotionally connect with images much more than I would words.

• 0:58Speaker 00

  Text triggers you.

• 0:59Speaker 01

  Well, in many ways, the page looks like Starry Night.

• 1:02Speaker 00

  I see. Right.

• 1:04Speaker 01

  You know, if I'm reading a letter, to me, that's a psychedelic.

• 1:08Speaker 00

  But you read text the way I look at photos, like, what am I meant to do with this? Why have you done that?

• 1:15Speaker 01

  Charlie, are you more of a pictures guy or a words guy?

• 1:18Speaker 00

  He's a poet.

• 1:19Speaker 01

  You are. You're a words guy.

• 1:21Speaker 02

  I'm entirely word-based. I can't see.

• 1:23Speaker 01

  But you think visually? So I think incredibly visually.

• 1:27Speaker 02

  I have dreams.

• 1:28Speaker 00

  I don't really dream anymore.

• 1:31Speaker 00

  Why is that funny?

• 1:33Speaker 01

  So do you just turn off at night?

• 1:34Speaker 00

  Yes, hard reset, factory reset. Wake up, speak in Chinese.

• 1:39Speaker 00

  Hurrah! This will be in the morning, every morning.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, everything's as it is. There's nothing. And I guess you've also not done psychedelic drugs, so.

• 1:47Speaker 00

  No, well, I did.

• 1:49Speaker 01

  You should do some ayahuasca or something.

• 1:50Speaker 00

  Well, I did. No, no, no, no. I stayed with Daniel Sloss's lodger. When I stayed with Sloss the other week, he'd just done an ayahuasca trip.

• 1:59Speaker 01

  Well, he had like a Kato pool boy.

• 2:00Speaker 00

  He has got Kato. It's Ryan Cullen's got Kato. He's got Kato Kaling Pool Boy.

• 2:06Speaker 00

  He had just literally come back from an ayahuasca ceremony in Surbiton.

• 2:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, he lives in someone's pool, so of course he does it.

• 2:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was just Surbiton. And he was shaking, eating boiled chicken and rice, saying that he'd spent three days vomiting in a room full of 30 people, shitting in a bucket and vomiting. And he paid £800 for the privilege, and he felt brilliant, and like all his past.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  Did he say that he felt brilliant?

• 2:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, he said it's cured everything.

• 2:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:37Speaker 00

  And then I just think, I've just not ever really had a bad time.

• 2:44Speaker 00

  If I'm paying £800.

• 2:45Speaker 01

  But in Surbiton?

• 2:46Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 2:47Speaker 01

  I feel you've got to go jungles, right?

• 2:49Speaker 00

  Well, can't.

• 2:49Speaker 01

  I don't want to be on the green belt or like Zone 6 when I'm fucking coming up. I don't really come up on ayahuasca, do you?

• 2:57Speaker 00

  No, I think you just.

• 2:58Speaker 01

  Do you meet an alien dad, and then you ask him?

• 3:01Speaker 00

  What is it, Charlie?

• 3:01Speaker 02

  My mate did it, and he basically was next to this, apparently it's the most visual trip that exists, so he was just next to this massive vibrating pink cube of flesh. Flesh. And he cried with it. It started crying, and so did.

• 3:15Speaker 01

  Do you think you'd do it?

• 3:16Speaker 02

  I think it might be a bit much for me, to be honest.

• 3:18Speaker 01

  Bit rich? Mad enough without the gear?

• 3:20Speaker 02

  I think so.

• 3:21Speaker 00

  But you wouldn't do ayahuasca, would you?

• 3:23Speaker 01

  No, I am interested in that sort of stuff.

• 3:25Speaker 00

  Really?

• 3:26Speaker 01

  Anything visually that's a bit mad.

• 3:28Speaker 00

  I'll tell you what, being an ayahuasca cuck, I'd watch people doing it.

• 3:32Speaker 00

  I'd fucking love it.

• 3:33Speaker 01

  Or shitting and vomiting.

• 3:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, but what the fuck are you doing?

• 3:35Speaker 01

  I'm sorry, daddy. I'm sorry.

• 3:37Speaker 00

  Idiots, absolute morons. That's what I'd be doing. I'd be watching.

• 3:39Speaker 01

  You'd definitely think you'd take me out of it if you were stone cold sober and ayahuasca'd in a suit.

• 3:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, you don't want a sober guy next to you going, what the fuck? Wow, you're shitting in a bucket? Come on. Disgusting.

• 3:49Speaker 01

  Every time the shaman speaks.

• 3:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, all right, mate. Yeah, all right. Yeah, I'm going to see Emmy. I'll regret it, I'm going to be like, all right, boring.

• 3:58Speaker 01

  What paintings do you like?

• 4:00Speaker 00

  I like war photography.

• 4:04Speaker 00

  I like war photography.

• 4:06Speaker 01

  I'm very jealous of painters. I think as an artistic process, it feels like the most satisfying.

• 4:11Speaker 00

  No, I don't think it does. I think because it is never finished.

• 4:14Speaker 01

  And then you compare it to stand-up, and I'm looking at my miserable Google Doc, and it's like, that's kind of where.

• 4:19Speaker 00

  Do you write stuff down?

• 4:20Speaker 01

  What do you mean? What do you do?

• 4:21Speaker 00

  I just, I sort it in the.

• 4:23Speaker 01

  You don't write anything down?

• 4:24Speaker 00

  No, I'll write. On my notes on my phone, I'll have like.

• 4:27Speaker 01

  Bullet points?

• 4:28Speaker 00

  Epstein. You know, the three jokes, Epstein, Taliban, dildo. Those are the three jokes.

• 4:33Speaker 01

  Sometimes you'll do dildo, Taliban, Epstein.

• 4:36Speaker 00

  If it's a tough one, I'll open with dildo, Taliban, Epstein. Those are the three sort of jokes, really. Everyone knows. Those are the only three jokes. I think the Greeks said that. No, I don't really, you know, art, we did the Renaissance last year, and I found that quite tough. I guess I can't ever really get on. I still just think, why are you doing this?

• 4:56Speaker 00

  I am at my most Michael Owen when I'm in an art gallery.

• 4:59Speaker 01

  What does that mean, boring and stupid?

• 5:00Speaker 00

  Yeah. Or no, just most kind of like boorish, I guess.

• 5:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Well, he's only seen eight films. He's only seen eight paintings.

• 5:07Speaker 00

  I couldn't remember the paintings I've seen. I've seen the massive one in the National Gallery. That's brilliant. That the fucking, it's easy for me to appreciate when it's fucking massive.

• 5:15Speaker 01

  Because it's a lot of paint.

• 5:16Speaker 00

  I think, fuck me, that must take an age.

• 5:19Speaker 00

  Now, in the next episode, we'll be talking about Picasso, and I do, I get on board with Picasso. I think the art's more interesting than van Gogh, who we're talking about today.

• 5:27Speaker 01

  Really? Interesting?

• 5:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, I do. So let's get into, and you will have to be my life raft in this. The Impressionism is the big movement that sort of.

• 5:38Speaker 01

  So I think this is the best period of art.

• 5:39Speaker 00

  Just precedes van Gogh.

• 5:40Speaker 01

  I think this is like, before it got to the point where they're sellotaping a banana to the wall.

• 5:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:45Speaker 01

  And then after the point where they're just either doing super religious stuff or painting things as if it was a photo. This is like the perfect blend of modern, but still having the technique of the old craft.

• 5:57Speaker 00

  Right.

• 5:57Speaker 01

  Where it's, I think this is like the sweet spot. And basically, the Impressionist movement was probably started by Monet and people who were sick of the traditional way the art was done.

• 6:08Speaker 00

  And that traditional way is basically trying to be photorealistic, right?

• 6:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:11Speaker 00

  So like, you paint a king and make it look.

• 6:12Speaker 01

  The style will be photorealistic, but what you're painting would often be religious scenes, would be myths, would be huge landscapes, and.

• 6:21Speaker 00

  Fruit? Dutch guys painting fruit?

• 6:23Speaker 01

  Dutch guys painting still life. And it was all set by the Paris Salon, which was like, I guess, like the industry. What? The Paris Salon?

• 6:32Speaker 00

  Like gay Illuminati, yeah.

• 6:36Speaker 00

  The Paris Salon.

• 6:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, sort of like the Edinburgh Comedy Awards, but it meant something.

• 6:40Speaker 00

  Right, right, right.

• 6:44Speaker 00

  Edinburgh Winch Festival, yeah.

• 6:46Speaker 01

  But they moved away when they were basically trying to make painting more emotional. So you're not just capturing reality, you're capturing maybe a moment, maybe the way that light shimmers on a lake and that slightly surreal moment, it goes into your eyes, and it kind of all gets a bit hazy, try and capture that. And it's more trying to capture memories, dreams, nostalgia. So it kind of moves away from them. And also, at this point, this is like the 1870s.

• 7:12Speaker 00

  Slightly earlier, is it?

• 7:13Speaker 01

  1860s, 70s. This is just when photography's coming in, in France.

• 7:17Speaker 00

  Right.

• 7:17Speaker 01

  The first photo, I think, was in the 1850s.

• 7:20Speaker 00

  Right.

• 7:20Speaker 01

  Shit photo, by the way. If you get the first photo up, it's rubbish.

• 7:23Speaker 00

  I do, I feel like I relate more to that than I do any of the paintings we're about to.

• 7:29Speaker 01

  So now that photo's coming in, and you can sort of depict reality through photography, it means that art's role should be to illuminate.

• 7:36Speaker 00

  Be more expressive.

• 7:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, and the truth behind reality, I guess.

• 7:39Speaker 02

  How important do you think that photography is relative to painting in terms of the impact it can have on culture?

• 7:46Speaker 01

  Well, I don't know. I think photography now has been quite undermined because everyone's a photographer, right?

• 7:51Speaker 00

  Sorry. I think I'm on an ayahuasca trip, where Charlie's just asked a sincere question. So Monet, right, is he the kind of origin of?

• 8:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:03Speaker 00

  Or not?

• 8:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, of Impressionism, I guess. I don't know if you could say.

• 8:07Speaker 00

  And it's called Impressionism because people would criticize.

• 8:11Speaker 02

  Impressionism is a shit painter.

• 8:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, basically. You're not wrong.

• 8:15Speaker 02

  Impressionism is a bloody shit painter.

• 8:16Speaker 01

  But similar to suffragettes, it was what was used as an insult, they turned it into a positive thing.

• 8:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 8:21Speaker 01

  Re-taming the N-word.

• 8:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's the N-word. Yeah. Impressionism is the N-word. N-wordism, basically.

• 8:27Speaker 00

  So yeah, people said, oh, that's not a painting, that's an impression of a painting, and then they went, well, yeah.

• 8:31Speaker 01

  Something my impression is.

• 8:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 8:35Speaker 00

  They would use, and this is Monet, and then who's Manet?

• 8:38Speaker 01

  Did Manet do?

• 8:39Speaker 00

  It feels stupid that there's a guy called Monet, and then another guy called, it's like, well, I'll just call myself Manet. It's like, well, choose a different name.

• 8:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. So you see like that painting there, it's sort of, it's not depicted in reality as it is.

• 8:51Speaker 00

  Zoom in, zoom in.

• 8:51Speaker 01

  The brushstrokes, it's more of an impression of reality.

• 8:54Speaker 00

  Is the girl on the left meant to look fucked?

• 8:56Speaker 01

  I think she probably looked quite fucked in reality.

• 8:59Speaker 00

  Fine.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  But.

• 9:00Speaker 00

  It's an impression of someone who might be disabled. Now, nowadays, that's offensive.

• 9:05Speaker 01

  Offensive to.

• 9:06Speaker 00

  To draw a kind of, like an offense, like a sort of Impressionist painting of someone with a disability would always be like a caricature, wouldn't it?

• 9:13Speaker 01

  Well, I think now, if you see someone with an easel in public painting you, it's now starting to turn where you're like, I might get absolutely done over here.

• 9:20Speaker 02

  Easel.

• 9:24Speaker 00

  No.

• 9:25Speaker 01

  I don't know why we.

• 9:26Speaker 00

  You fart.

• 9:30Speaker 01

  But you know what I mean? Back in the day, someone was painting you, it's like, at least they're gonna depict what's really going on. But now with these freaks, and it's all about the inner truth, you have no idea what they're gonna.

• 9:38Speaker 00

  Oh, man. No, no one's doing you over more than a fucking Bosnian refugee by the Eiffel Tower. They are doing you over, man. Those Bosnians, they get right up.

• 9:50Speaker 01

  Ever had a caricature?

• 9:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 9:53Speaker 01

  Is it the nose? What's going on?

• 9:54Speaker 00

  Ears. Big ears. Big ears, big jowls, big fucking second circle tummy.

• 10:01Speaker 01

  It's funny to get really upset with a caricaturist.

• 10:03Speaker 00

  What the fuck? It would be funny to sign up for it and be like, and then start crying. That must have happened. There must be caricature artists where they're like, I'm so, I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to.

• 10:13Speaker 01

  I didn't, sorry.

• 10:14Speaker 00

  It's like, yes, you did. You're a caricature artist.

• 10:16Speaker 01

  Or if they don't caricature you, that would be rude.

• 10:19Speaker 00

  That would actually be the worst thing, wouldn't you?

• 10:21Speaker 01

  Because they're like.

• 10:22Speaker 00

  It's not funny. No, I can't remember.

• 10:27Speaker 00

  Actually, the best thing to do as a caricature artist would be someone sits down and just take a photo of it and go, yeah, look at that, you look fucked.

• 10:32Speaker 01

  Let's look at it. So there's the one of the bridge. Does this do anything for you? Click on that one. That one of the bridge.

• 10:37Speaker 00

  Looks like a nice bridge.

• 10:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:38Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's nice. It's, yeah, it's nice.

• 10:41Speaker 01

  Do you not find it evocative, the colours?

• 10:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, I guess, I guess.

• 10:44Speaker 01

  And the way it, it kind of renders, you can imagine, you can imagine.

• 10:47Speaker 00

  I see summer, I see summer.

• 10:48Speaker 01

  You see a memory of summer and the way that it captures life.

• 10:50Speaker 00

  I've not been there, but.

• 10:51Speaker 01

  No, but I know, but it must evoke past memories.

• 10:55Speaker 00

  Poos, plain poo sticks in the summer.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  Because I feel like if you think back to memories, they can, they seem a bit more impressionist, right?

• 11:01Speaker 00

  Yes, no, that's true. Yeah, I get that.

• 11:03Speaker 01

  Or you'll see like light hit the water at sunset and it might trigger other memories of that. And that's what I get from impressionism.

• 11:09Speaker 00

  Yeah. No, that's fair enough. So, so how are they doing this? They're using rap, more rapid brushstrokes?

• 11:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I guess it's less refined.

• 11:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  Uh, more expressive. Also impressionist, what they painted was they painted everyday life, which was seen as very radical because you're normally meant to paint stories from the Bible, Greek myths.

• 11:29Speaker 00

  Well, the Dutch, the Dutch cunts are doing fruit and windows and stuff.

• 11:33Speaker 01

  It's, it's, that's still life. That's not candid, right? That's people setting up for a painter.

• 11:37Speaker 00

  Upskirting.

• 11:38Speaker 01

  That's not upskirting. The French are upskirting.

• 11:40Speaker 00

  Well, of course.

• 11:41Speaker 01

  Impressionist upskirting. You're just like, like you're going underneath a car like a mechanic and you're just like.

• 11:46Speaker 00

  That would be very funny. Shit.

• 11:53Speaker 00

  Show it to the woman. It's like, oh, it's a memory. It's about how it smells, you know, about how it makes you feel.

• 11:59Speaker 01

  I think I probably want an impressionist vagina more than a photorealist one, I think.

• 12:03Speaker 00

  You're right, actually. I think so.

• 12:04Speaker 01

  Probably if I was gonna get a painting of one, you don't want a photorealist.

• 12:06Speaker 00

  No, but impression, impression of a penis would be quite, be quite tough, wouldn't it? Be like, ah, done, done. I'll take more time over it. Imagine a caricature upskirtist. Upskirt caricaturist.

• 12:18Speaker 01

  Huge clip.

• 12:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, making your fanny look as awful as possible.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  So go, um, go impressionist paintings.

• 12:24Speaker 00

  So this is, just for context, we're talking about Van Gogh, which we'll get to eventually, but Van Gogh is sort of, he, he's, this is the.

• 12:30Speaker 01

  He's very inspired by the impressionist.

• 12:31Speaker 00

  This is the artistic world that he kind of starts painting within, right? So impressionism is the big movement of the time.

• 12:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:36Speaker 00

  So, uh, but it seems to divide the art world in that.

• 12:40Speaker 01

  And it's very funny because I went to, the best museum for all of this is the Musée de Orsay in Paris. And it's very funny going around there. And I'm like, you'll read plaques and it'll be like, this sent Victorian society into complete shock. And it'll be like a faded drawing of a lamppost.

• 12:57Speaker 00

  Right.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  And it's like, it's so funny that that can like, people like throwing up, having diarrhea, screaming, what, you can't draw a boat like that. That, that only partly looks like a boat. Are you fucking crazy?

• 13:09Speaker 00

  But also crucially, uh, the tin paint tube was invented.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, this was really interesting. I didn't know this at all.

• 13:15Speaker 00

  Which means that after 1840s, people can paint outside. So they can paint, they can paint stuff that's going on rather than just.

• 13:24Speaker 01

  So they invented the handheld camera or even the AK-47. It means that you can have like a cheap way to get out.

• 13:30Speaker 00

  They were just going, oh, that was nothing. They just had a, they just had a burnt arrow. Oh, you know, and it looked weird. We should play. So when's Van Gogh born? Should we replace that? He's born in 1853.

• 13:42Speaker 01

  Okay, interesting.

• 13:43Speaker 00

  In Zundert.

• 13:43Speaker 01

  Well, the 1800s is your sort of speciality.

• 13:46Speaker 00

  Love this. Okay. So this is the 18, 1853. This is just before Charles Darwin publishes, uh, on the origin of species. After Ryan Metcharley.

• 13:58Speaker 02

  Before the origin of species.

• 14:00Speaker 01

  And after we were all little fishies.

• 14:03Speaker 00

  Nice. I'll take that. We're little fishies.

• 14:09Speaker 01

  Little fucking fishies.

• 14:10Speaker 00

  Little fucking fishies. That's a, that's a Greek guy who's temporarily having to run one of those, um, salons where people dip their feet in the.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  Right, yeah.

• 14:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, come and sit down, mate. You wanna dip your feet in little fucking fishies?

• 14:22Speaker 01

  Or he's trying to, he has to, he has to explain evolution to his kids.

• 14:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:25Speaker 01

  Uh, we used to be like a fucking, uh, we're all like little fucking fishies, you know?

• 14:31Speaker 00

  Little, then we're little fucking monkey man and then fucking.

• 14:37Speaker 00

  Fucking hell, we're hot today. Hot today. Um, so Van Gogh is born 1853 in Zundert. And obviously his dad is a strict Dutch, uh, Calvinist pastor.

• 14:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:52Speaker 00

  Pasta, not pasta.

• 14:53Speaker 01

  Pasta. I don't wanna eat Calvinist pasta.

• 14:56Speaker 00

  And his mother is, uh, minted and she, she's a real moody bitch.

• 15:01Speaker 01

  GBD baddie.

• 15:02Speaker 00

  Yeah. She's, uh, prone to intense bouts of grief. Does that mean that people are dying all the time or she's just sad?

• 15:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:08Speaker 00

  Just crying all the time.

• 15:09Speaker 01

  We can't know.

• 15:09Speaker 00

  Can't know. Um, now this is pretty, I think the story of Van Gogh is that he's basically one of, got to be one of the hardest, most difficult pints ever, I think.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  It's, it's kind of like, yeah, it's, it's a lifelong crash out, would you say?

• 15:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. He's, he's a fucking nightmare. Really. Yeah. I think probably one of the, one of the people I'd least like to be friends with or have in my circle.

• 15:32Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 15:32Speaker 00

  You're like, fuck, I gotta cut him loose, man. He's just dragging us down.

• 15:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:35Speaker 00

  But this is how grim.

• 15:36Speaker 01

  Can I bring my mate? Who is it? It's not Van Gogh, is it? Yeah.

• 15:39Speaker 00

  Yeah. So Vincent, right? He's born exactly a year to the day after a stillborn brother, right? Who had the exact same name. So every Sunday, Beethoven had to do this. Do you remember? Beethoven was taken regularly to walk past a gravestone to see, uh, his dead brother who had the same name as him.

• 16:00Speaker 01

  So maybe if you're trying to build a genius artist, just keep shoving their faces next to their dead sibling.

• 16:06Speaker 00

  That could have been you, mate. Yeah. Not that could have been you. He, he could have been you. You've got to do something great because.

• 16:11Speaker 01

  You've got to freak him out. It's just a morbidity. Introducing that at an early age means that maybe you have more developed artistic sensibilities.

• 16:18Speaker 00

  Also you had Beethoven's other brother.

• 16:21Speaker 00

  Sucks to be you, mate.

• 16:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's very smug that he's not the dead one.

• 16:25Speaker 00

  Well, that's it, isn't it?

• 16:27Speaker 01

  So much can handle it. Fell at the fucking first hurdle, mate.

• 16:30Speaker 00

  Alpha duck.

• 16:35Speaker 00

  So, um, family members describe Vincent as a thoughtful boy, but difficult to understand. And that never changes.

• 16:41Speaker 01

  No.

• 16:41Speaker 00

  So he doesn't really, he's not artistic at all. Uh, until about age 16, he starts working for an art dealer and then.

• 16:48Speaker 01

  Is this his uncle or his dad who is in the art world?

• 16:51Speaker 00

  Uncle Scent.

• 16:52Speaker 01

  Is an art dealer, right? Yeah. Not 50 Cent.

• 16:55Speaker 00

  Uncle Scent. Uh, his uncle's also called Vincent.

• 16:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, it didn't take off as well as 50 Cent.

• 16:59Speaker 00

  Is 50, is 50 Cent's real name Vincent?

• 17:01Speaker 02

  No, it's Curtis.

• 17:02Speaker 00

  Right. So his uncle, Uncle Vincent, nicknamed Uncle Scent, he is a wealthy international art dealer who mainly sells highly eroticised salon paintings. Now, can we get up some of that, Charlie? Just type in Uncle Scent, highly eroticised salon paintings. And I want you to type that in word for word because you're just gonna type in porn, aren't you?

• 17:23Speaker 02

  They're like shit.

• 17:25Speaker 01

  You don't like them?

• 17:26Speaker 02

  That's the worst thing I've, that's the worst painting I've seen today.

• 17:28Speaker 01

  You don't like them?

• 17:29Speaker 00

  I don't, I think that's quite good.

• 17:30Speaker 02

  No, it's like a poster.

• 17:31Speaker 01

  It's actually quite pre-Aphelios.

• 17:32Speaker 00

  Well, no, it's a poster of a painting. So these are, these are posters, uh, paintings that are adorning the walls of, uh, drinking establishments where there's probably some prostitution. Is that right?

• 17:42Speaker 01

  Or is it garages?

• 17:44Speaker 00

  Mechanics' garages, maybe. So, but then when he's working for Uncle Scent, he visits art galleries. He starts like, he then tries to be a preacher, like his father.

• 17:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:56Speaker 00

  But again, he can't ever really do something in a fun way.

• 18:00Speaker 01

  No.

• 18:01Speaker 00

  So.

• 18:02Speaker 01

  He's not a laugh.

• 18:03Speaker 00

  He's not a laugh. And that's my problem with artists, actually, is that they're not laughs. The better the art is, the worse the hang.

• 18:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure.

• 18:12Speaker 00

  Uh, and also they don't have any sense of humour about their art.

• 18:14Speaker 01

  No.

• 18:14Speaker 00

  You know, I have a sense of humour about my art.

• 18:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, yes.

• 18:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, you'd hope so.

• 18:19Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, you'd have to. Yeah. Imagine if we take it, I'm in a fucking role there.

• 18:22Speaker 01

  Excuse me?

• 18:23Speaker 00

  Excuse me. That's a deeply, deeply insightful routine about paedophilia and child porn, actually.

• 18:30Speaker 00

  It's deeply offensive that you say it's not adding anything to the cultural conversation.

• 18:35Speaker 00

  I wanna go on hard talk. I wanna be interviewed by Adel Yentob, talking about my routine about child porn.

• 18:42Speaker 00

  Imagine with Finn Taylor. Yeah, I think I first started writing jokes about paedophiles when I was probably 18 and I just found it so funny. That there are people out there who think that's all okay to do. I just never got over that.

• 18:54Speaker 01

  Obviously it's not though. It's very serious.

• 18:56Speaker 00

  No, it's fucking hilarious to be honest. Um, right. So anyway, so he takes, Vincent Van Gogh takes Christianity too, literally. So, um, he moves to a.

• 19:06Speaker 01

  Which feels like a quite surreal painter. It's quite funny.

• 19:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, maybe he's escape, I think it's escapism, isn't it? Uh, so he, he moves to a coal mining region. He, he gives all his possessions away. He sleeps on straw, starves himself because he thinks in a sort of medieval sense that holy men should suffer.

• 19:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:24Speaker 00

  Witnesses describe him as gaunt, dirty and feral.

• 19:27Speaker 01

  He's one of those people who's like, there's always a problem and it's always something else. It's always something different, but the consistent theme is clearly you.

• 19:34Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 19:35Speaker 01

  They always come in and there's always, it's always, I had the worst weekend ever. Oh, this happened. Oh, I'm just not feeling up to scratch. When have you ever been up to scratch?

• 19:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 19:42Speaker 01

  I'm getting sick of these people.

• 19:43Speaker 00

  Maybe it's something you're doing.

• 19:44Speaker 01

  How are you permanently on bad form? You can't always be on bad, that's the, that's the definition of form is it's temporary, right?

• 19:50Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 19:51Speaker 02

  If either of your sons.

• 19:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:53Speaker 02

  And hopefully you're gonna have many.

• 19:55Speaker 01

  Thanks, Charlie.

• 19:56Speaker 02

  Grew up to be like Vincent. How are you dealing with that? What's the sort of childcare?

• 20:02Speaker 01

  Cat in the bin.

• 20:08Speaker 00

  Monday night, getting a fuck off, right, go to the bin man. My son does love the bin man, he fucking loves it.

• 20:14Speaker 01

  Loves it, no?

• 20:14Speaker 00

  He loves it. Very strange, it's a strange age where he's ferociously trans. I mean, he's dressing up so...

• 20:21Speaker 01

  I was quite trans at that age.

• 20:23Speaker 00

  He's trying on my daughter, my daughter's birthday, she gets loads of tutus and like, you've got like a sort of samba jacket with feathers, straight to my son. He's having that, but then he's going out to the bin man and going, bin man, bin man, bins, bins. I was looking to the mechanic the other day, we had a flat tyre and he was watching it in a dress being like, tyre, change the tyre. And get me, I want to get under the car. And he's just in a full flowing ball gown. And I'm like, oh, I don't fuck, I don't, I don't know. He's going hard, he's binary.

• 20:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:48Speaker 00

  He's not, he's not non-binary, he's binary, but he's just both.

• 20:51Speaker 01

  Soon you'll have to leave London just because of this sort of metropolitan decay.

• 20:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is. It's too, it's indulgent. It's bourgeois perversion.

• 21:02Speaker 00

  But if, yeah, if Van Gogh is your son, and he, I don't, I don't know, man, I mean...

• 21:06Speaker 02

  You're just beating the shit out of him?

• 21:07Speaker 01

  I don't know that.

• 21:08Speaker 00

  I don't think that's gonna help, he'd probably like it, yeah. Daddy!

• 21:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:13Speaker 01

  I think it's just, you just have a most dad-son relationship where you speak like, twice a year and it's awkward.

• 21:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, is that his dad there? Yeah, I mean, I...

• 21:21Speaker 01

  That's a Protestant man right there.

• 21:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's some, there's some times where I look like that with my kids.

• 21:25Speaker 02

  What if you take a real interest in his paintings? Like, you could become like horrifically supportive?

• 21:30Speaker 01

  And then I think the paintings would collapse immediately. As soon as you start showing interest, the next painting does this complete crap.

• 21:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's the inside of his asshole, yeah. Because he needs to be, he needs to be problematic, I think.

• 21:41Speaker 02

  That's what I mean. Would loving his paintings make him stop painting?

• 21:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you've got to think, if it's someone who's like Van Gogh, who's, you know, you've got to think about the whole of human history, you've got to sacrifice your relationship for the good of the art.

• 21:50Speaker 00

  Anyway, the years he spends in Boronage, right, this coal mining region, they're the first indicators of this pattern that will continue throughout his life. A sort of self-destructive pattern of obsession, sacrifice, and ultimately collapse.

• 22:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:06Speaker 00

  He stops washing, he smears coal and mud all over his face in solidarity with the coal miners that he lives near.

• 22:12Speaker 01

  It's a classic story of a middle-class person trying to help poor people and all the poor people have been like...

• 22:17Speaker 00

  That's not actually helpful.

• 22:18Speaker 01

  You're just like a stinky, why is there another stinky bloke here? This is, how is this helping at all?

• 22:22Speaker 00

  Yes, it's London Labour voters. It's like, can you just wash and just...

• 22:26Speaker 01

  It's not solidarity that you're fucking here shitting all over the place and...

• 22:29Speaker 00

  Yeah. Fucking wipe your arse, Zach Polanski, come on. And his love life is obviously awful. He's desperate for intimacy and yet he's rubbing shit all over his face and he's stinky and feral.

• 22:40Speaker 01

  He's a nice guy who's finished last sort of incel.

• 22:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, yes, he is an incel. He's a total incel. Now, his cousin, he gets widowed, K. Voshtrecker, and then, and then fucking Vincent's like, cousin, cousin husband's died. Here we go.

• 22:57Speaker 00

  Here we fucking go.

• 22:59Speaker 01

  He like, he finally wipes his arse.

• 23:02Speaker 00

  Ooh, hang on, I'll buy some new trousers. Cousin's single again.

• 23:09Speaker 00

  Right? So then he's like brilliant cousin, right, here we go. He tries, he cracks on, and then she's like, the fuck are you doing? Right?

• 23:18Speaker 01

  Not only you're a fucking stinky weirdo.

• 23:20Speaker 00

  You're stinky, but we're cousins, right? She says, never, never do that again.

• 23:26Speaker 01

  She says, no, nay, never. Is that the quote?

• 23:29Speaker 00

  Is that dyslexia or the quote, Phoebe? Okay, sorry. No, nay, never, I'd pick one of them, I don't know. So she rejects him, and then what he does is he holds his hand over like a candle, over a flame in front of her, and he says, I'm gonna just keep it there until you go out with me.

• 23:46Speaker 01

  It's weird, Vincent.

• 23:47Speaker 00

  Vincent, that's not what girls want.

• 23:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's really pressuring.

• 23:49Speaker 00

  Ah, so yes, go out with me. And then they just blow the candle out and kick him out the house. Right, it's sad.

• 23:55Speaker 01

  Pathetic.

• 23:55Speaker 00

  Pathetic. And then he moves in with...

• 23:59Speaker 01

  Because sorry, the big narrative about Van Gogh is like, he was a misunderstood genius, everyone was so cruel to him. He was a fucking nightmare.

• 24:06Speaker 00

  Everyone understood what he was, he was a dirty little rat, he should be kicked out of the house. Fuck off.

• 24:11Speaker 01

  Fuck off, Vincent.

• 24:12Speaker 00

  Fuck off. He moved in with someone called Sien Hurnik, who's a pregnant alcoholic prostitute.

• 24:19Speaker 01

  Don't sack her off.

• 24:20Speaker 00

  Fucking triple threat.

• 24:23Speaker 00

  He tries to save her.

• 24:25Speaker 01

  Pregnant alcoholic prostitute, that's, yeah.

• 24:28Speaker 00

  Perfect woman.

• 24:30Speaker 01

  Dream woman.

• 24:31Speaker 00

  Tries to save her, but they both get syphilis. Fucking hell.

• 24:35Speaker 01

  Fucking hell.

• 24:37Speaker 00

  What I will say is, as we could carry on with Van Gogh's stuff, there's no redeem, there's no light at all.

• 24:41Speaker 01

  There's no light at all.

• 24:41Speaker 00

  Yeah. The best thing about him is the paintings.

• 24:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:44Speaker 00

  And I don't fucking understand what they are. He then, he eventually abandons the prostitute, which, you know, I get, I mean, I guess do your duty a bit, maybe.

• 24:54Speaker 01

  What was that?

• 24:54Speaker 00

  Stick by the pregnant alky prostitute.

• 24:56Speaker 01

  But did he impregnate her?

• 24:57Speaker 00

  No, no, no, no.

• 24:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I guess so.

• 24:59Speaker 00

  Who knows?

• 25:00Speaker 01

  What, you're saying that he thinks he's too good for her?

• 25:03Speaker 00

  Well, you know, have some self-esteem, I suppose. He also has this affair with an older neighbour called Margot Bergman.

• 25:13Speaker 00

  He's 31, she's 43.

• 25:23Speaker 00

  But her family, her family says, do, please do not go out with this man, he's horrible and he smells and he's awful.

• 25:29Speaker 01

  Fair enough.

• 25:30Speaker 00

  And then she attempts suicide. So he's obviously got, I mean, women do like fucking awful men, don't they?

• 25:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, sort of. This is a 43-year-old woman and a pregnant alcoholic prostitute. It's more like, no one else is going for them apart from this, this guy who's not wiping his arse.

• 25:45Speaker 00

  Right, so she's so desperate for the love.

• 25:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know if he's pulling a lot of women.

• 25:50Speaker 00

  Right, so he starts drawing in his late twenties and so...

• 25:53Speaker 01

  That's what's late.

• 25:54Speaker 00

  He sort of fails, he's like the opposite of Hitler, in that he fails as a preacher and starts becoming an artist.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 26:02Speaker 00

  So in 1880, decides to become an artist.

• 26:03Speaker 01

  And their lives cross over?

• 26:05Speaker 00

  They, their lives do cross over. Yeah, Hitler's born nine years after this.

• 26:10Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 26:11Speaker 00

  So...

• 26:12Speaker 01

  It would be a great, if they, you and them both talk about art, it would be a great conversation.

• 26:16Speaker 00

  I'd love that, yeah.

• 26:17Speaker 01

  Fascinating to hear what their two different views are.

• 26:19Speaker 00

  He's self-taught, obviously, and he likes sketching peasants and workers. And so his early works are all very dark.

• 26:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's a middle-class guy who's, who's a Corbynite.

• 26:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:30Speaker 01

  He's insecure about his wealth.

• 26:31Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 26:32Speaker 01

  And it's just all about, but then just drawing poor people feels a bit fucking creepy.

• 26:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, if I did that, I'd be quite fucking, caricatures, poor, sad, fat. Adolf Hitler made very few public comments about Vincent Van Gogh, but he reportedly saw reproduction of Van Gogh's sunflowers and complained to his former associate that the artist's colours are too loud.

• 26:50Speaker 01

  That's hilarious. There was, on the 250th anniversary of the National Gallery, they had a massive Van Gogh thing. This is probably my favourite one.

• 26:57Speaker 00

  Not today.

• 27:00Speaker 01

  That's pretty good, though, when you say. So for me, that's as good as it gets.

• 27:05Speaker 00

  Really?

• 27:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:06Speaker 00

  As good as it gets.

• 27:07Speaker 01

  And the colours there are amazing.

• 27:09Speaker 00

  Get the photo up of the American soldier in Vietnam staring at the camera.

• 27:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:13Speaker 00

  Because that's, for me, that's as good as it gets.

• 27:15Speaker 01

  Well, that compares the two then.

• 27:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, awesome. The thousand-yard stare, the reality of war, you see it all in his face. It's in profile, so you're imagining what's, where the camera is and what's happening there and what he's seen and what he's having to do. And he's also looks, his body is, is the, he's so fragile and yet he's so masculine at the same time. And it's kind of the, I think that the, if true effects of war had never been rendered better than in that photograph.

• 27:39Speaker 01

  I mean, this is Charlie when he's on a come-down.

• 27:41Speaker 00

  It's every, Charlie, Charlie every Monday.

• 27:43Speaker 02

  This is as good as it gets for me.

• 27:49Speaker 01

  Do you want to read that out, Charlie?

• 27:50Speaker 00

  Yes, I support LGBT. Just for people listening, just so you've got a meme up.

• 27:54Speaker 02

  This is as good as art gets. Yes, I support LGBT. Lager gear, beans toast.

• 28:02Speaker 01

  When you do sort of mean that as well.

• 28:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:04Speaker 01

  Do you know what? That is, that is a Charlie weekend right there. Lager gear, beans toast.

• 28:09Speaker 00

  Do you know what? If the National Gallery had a meme exhibition, I'd fucking go, I'd love that. If you went to the National Gallery and that was, massive photo of that, I'd be like, oh.

• 28:19Speaker 01

  Well, it's like Guernica, it takes a whole wall.

• 28:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, whole wall.

• 28:28Speaker 00

  Oh, where's that pride? Anyway, so come on, let's get into some of his paintings. So his early, he does a painting called The Potato Eaters.

• 28:37Speaker 01

  Sounds like a slur.

• 28:38Speaker 00

  It does sound like a slur.

• 28:38Speaker 01

  Let's see the potato eaters.

• 28:40Speaker 00

  Is that, is that, what, is he drawing Irish people, is he?

• 28:44Speaker 00

  Let's have a look. This is an early work of Van Gogh, The Potato Eaters.

• 28:48Speaker 01

  Yes, it's always about grim peasant life or like trying to romanticise.

• 28:52Speaker 00

  It's very dark, isn't it? So it's five people, five ugly people in a house eating potatoes. Fucking hell.

• 29:00Speaker 01

  I've never seen this before.

• 29:02Speaker 00

  The faces are slightly, um.

• 29:04Speaker 01

  He's still working his craft out though. He's in the open mic.

• 29:07Speaker 00

  You can see the effects of the racial science air he's breathing because I'd say the faces are now by today's standards. You know, if they're on a mural in East London and you're supporting it, you're getting kicked out, you know? Yeah. Okay. So again, there's a sort of, there's a, the noble poor, I guess, is his muse at the moment.

• 29:24Speaker 01

  Definitely, definitely.

• 29:26Speaker 00

  And as letters from this period reveal, this kind of messianic intensity where he's like, the more I become spent, ill, a broken picture, the more I am an artist. So would you say Van Gogh is the first like depressed artist?

• 29:39Speaker 01

  Well, he's probably.

• 29:40Speaker 00

  Is he the archetype of it?

• 29:41Speaker 01

  He's probably the archetype, right? And the idea of like, um, to make great art, you need to live a life of pain and being misunderstood.

• 29:49Speaker 00

  This is where this starts, would you say?

• 29:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'd say so. But I mean, his whole story about how the fact that he was misunderstood while he lived and all of the appreciation happened after he died, sort of probably has inspired a lot of shit artists.

• 30:02Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 30:03Speaker 01

  Who are like, no, I know that no one likes my stuff now. Everyone says it's crap and everyone calls me a pedo.

• 30:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:09Speaker 01

  But when I die.

• 30:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:11Speaker 01

  Whereas I think maybe we'll be the opposite.

• 30:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:13Speaker 01

  We'll really appreciate it while we live.

• 30:15Speaker 00

  And they're like, how the fuck they get away with that?

• 30:19Speaker 00

  How are they the biggest patron in the UK? They're just calling every historical figure a paedophile three times a week. How the fuck have they done that?

• 30:25Speaker 01

  This is rapping.

• 30:26Speaker 00

  This is absolute slurry. Is it because they're wearing suits? How on earth have they got away with that? Yeah. As soon as, as soon as, as soon as we die, this ends, they'll be like, fuck it. I don't know.

• 30:37Speaker 01

  I don't know what the fucking spell.

• 30:39Speaker 00

  A lot of men will go to their wives and go, I'm sorry, I don't know why I was so obsessed with that. I, I can't. Yeah. I mean, it is with, with Jimmy Savile's really. Yeah. Go fucking hell.

• 30:48Speaker 01

  I guess he is the reverse Van Gogh.

• 30:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was so obvious the whole time.

• 30:54Speaker 00

  Savile, Sir James Savile was never truly appreciated after he died. But thankfully he got to see all the appreciation while he lived.

• 31:02Speaker 01

  Got every inch of it. And once he'd, once he'd got all of it, it was like, perfect.

• 31:06Speaker 00

  You know, my plate is full. Dead. Die the happy man.

• 31:12Speaker 00

  God bless Sir James Savile.

• 31:13Speaker 01

  He died with a smile on his face.

• 31:15Speaker 00

  Yeah. Surrounded by his family. And not a skeleton in his closet.

• 31:22Speaker 00

  In 1886, Van Gogh moves to Paris. Now, this is probably your favourite era.

• 31:27Speaker 01

  I'd say so. I think the late 80s.

• 31:28Speaker 00

  Late 19th century, this is Fantasy Éclat Paris. This is, this is the Woody Allen film.

• 31:33Speaker 01

  This is Midnight Paris. Well, yeah, sort of.

• 31:35Speaker 00

  Well, so you say 1880s to 1920s, that, that period.

• 31:38Speaker 01

  I'd say so. And then it, it's their, their painting every day. It feels the most romantic to be an artist at this time.

• 31:44Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 31:45Speaker 01

  Where you can like lit, the, this is where like Absinthe on the rise, the fucking Bohemians. I have never had Absinthe.

• 31:51Speaker 00

  Oh, I have.

• 31:52Speaker 01

  And what, does it give you psychedelic?

• 31:54Speaker 00

  If you drink a lot of it, which Van Gogh does, right? Van Gogh gets really into Absinthe.

• 31:57Speaker 01

  This is the beginning of like, what is it? The Chateauneuf, the Bohemian sort of underground scene.

• 32:03Speaker 00

  Poster that single women in their 30s have on their wall.

• 32:06Speaker 01

  My BB for sure.

• 32:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:08Speaker 01

  We went to an immersive, so she got me a present, which was a present for her.

• 32:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:13Speaker 01

  Which was an immersive dining experience of the Chateauneuf.

• 32:17Speaker 00

  Fucking hell. Put a bullet in my head.

• 32:21Speaker 01

  What, just hearing that?

• 32:22Speaker 00

  Just hearing that?

• 32:23Speaker 01

  You weren't there though, so.

• 32:24Speaker 00

  I know, but I've got to listen to you talk about it in the next two minutes.

• 32:28Speaker 01

  You killed yourself.

• 32:29Speaker 00

  An immersive Chateauneuf. Fucking me.

• 32:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:34Speaker 00

  God, the people spend their money on things people spend. Sorry, go on.

• 32:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so it felt, Absinthe, I guess, was the, the gear of the day. They didn't have any packet to do.

• 32:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:45Speaker 01

  So I think it's 70% alcohol and you just drink enough and you start seeing things.

• 32:49Speaker 00

  It's green, it's got all these compounds. So I went to, on a, when I was, uh, must have been 17, 18, on a school trip to Paris.

• 32:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:55Speaker 00

  And me and my mates, uh, wild boys, we went to Pere Lachaise, which is the cemetery where Jim Morrison from The Doors is buried. We were quite into The Doors at the time. So we went and did a little like, you know, saw the grave and then went to the cafe next door and did the whole thing where you have like a sort of Statue of Liberty, but out of steel. And then you, the little cup, you pour the Absinthe on, then you have a sugar cube and it melts.

• 33:17Speaker 01

  I've sexed a teenager.

• 33:18Speaker 00

  Then you go fuck a teenager and you come back and you drink it.

• 33:22Speaker 00

  And yeah, so it caught, it can cause hallucinations and you have to drink quite a lot of it to get there. We just had like a set.

• 33:27Speaker 01

  Did you get that with like K cider?

• 33:29Speaker 00

  Uh, yes, it's a similar thing.

• 33:30Speaker 01

  I guess it's just the amount of alcohol.

• 33:31Speaker 00

  There's a ritual behind K cider. You go to the park, um, you wait till the sun goes down.

• 33:36Speaker 01

  What's Absinthe like then?

• 33:38Speaker 00

  It's.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  Did it make you a better artist?

• 33:41Speaker 00

  No, I still can't draw, but I tasted slightly of like mouthwash and my eyes began to hurt.

• 33:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 33:47Speaker 00

  It was kind of an instant headache. You know, it's like port.

• 33:50Speaker 01

  Hungover immediately.

• 33:51Speaker 00

  You drink port and you're like, why have I done that? I already have fast forwarded to tomorrow. This is awful. Anyway, so, but Van Gogh starts absolutely hoofing the stuff.

• 33:59Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 34:00Speaker 00

  Uh, he loves it. Um, and so some neurologists today believe that his use of yellows and swirls are a result of the chemical poisoning.

• 34:08Speaker 01

  Well, you said your eyes hurt.

• 34:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, they genuinely did.

• 34:11Speaker 01

  Maybe if you kept going down that, that road, you'd be a great artist.

• 34:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, because there's this thing called Xanthopsia. I don't know how the fuck I'm meant to say that. Xanthopsia, right? Which is in Absinthe, which makes everything appear tinged with yellow.

• 34:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 34:23Speaker 00

  Well, maybe it did work. Maybe it did work and that's why the set's like this.

• 34:28Speaker 00

  So, uh, he's in the, he's in the air of this Belle Epoque period. And he's, this is where, is this his like, is this the montage in the film of his life? This is where his best work is done, is it?

• 34:39Speaker 01

  I don't think it's where his best work, his best work's probably done in Arles when he goes down to the South Front.

• 34:43Speaker 00

  Okay. So this is.

• 34:44Speaker 01

  Because the problem with the Paris scene is it's almost too social.

• 34:47Speaker 00

  Right.

• 34:48Speaker 01

  Because the great artists of Paris and the Belle Epoque, there's this, it's this great coming together of artists. It's everyone's, every night they're discussing the theories of where art's going to be. And it's this like incredible metropolis. He doesn't really.

• 35:00Speaker 00

  Of anywhere I'd rather less be.

• 35:04Speaker 00

  In Paris, firstly, right? Listening to artists talk about art. Bullet, bullet, bullet.

• 35:12Speaker 01

  So you got the pair of shoes up. That's a, it was interesting.

• 35:16Speaker 00

  Fucking hell, chewed up old lesbian hiking boots.

• 35:18Speaker 01

  But there was an essay about the difference between modernist art and postmodern art, comparing those shoes to the Warhol shoes. And those shoes are, it's a peasant shoes that reflect a wider life, right? You see that it's a pair of peasant shoes and it, it evokes something.

• 35:33Speaker 00

  I would say that the, the use of the light in that painting, however he's done that is amazing.

• 35:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:41Speaker 00

  Because, yeah, I don't understand how I'd even get near to that.

• 35:44Speaker 01

  As a subject, someone's worn old shoes. It leads you to think certain things. It implies a life beyond it. That's modernist art in many ways.

• 35:50Speaker 00

  Chewed, chewed up old leather boots, never worn.

• 35:53Speaker 01

  Sure, fine.

• 35:54Speaker 00

  Sad story.

• 35:55Speaker 01

  And then he compared that, this is an essay I was reading, with Frederick, with Warhol's ballet shoes. So this is postmodern art, which he's basically saying postmodern art's crap.

• 36:06Speaker 00

  Which I would agree with.

• 36:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's from an ad and then he's just stripped them of its colour and, and reprocessed it. And all postmodern art really does is just recontextualise other forms of media. And that, he said, that's the kind of contrast between.

• 36:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, because there's no skill to Warhol's thing at all.

• 36:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's just recontextualising it. It's kind of playing on advertising, commercialism.

• 36:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:25Speaker 01

  Whereas modernist art, it's sort of like, it implies a world beyond it.

• 36:28Speaker 00

  I mean, now it's just doing a poo on the floor, isn't it?

• 36:30Speaker 01

  Now it is.

• 36:31Speaker 00

  That's art now.

• 36:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:33Speaker 01

  It, it, recontextualising poo.

• 36:35Speaker 00

  But Van Gogh is painting, painting a poo on the floor.

• 36:37Speaker 01

  But yeah, that would be the difference. He would paint a peasant's poo and you'd see from that poo a life lived.

• 36:44Speaker 00

  But this is where in Paris, he starts to get influenced by all the impressionist stuff. And he abandons all the dark colours. And this is where he discovers, basically discovers yellow.

• 36:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:54Speaker 00

  Right?

• 36:54Speaker 01

  Is there a change in the paints that are, that are available? Like, has egg white come in or something? It feels like the technology.

• 37:02Speaker 00

  The painting of the cafe with the big yellow warning.

• 37:05Speaker 01

  That's Arles.

• 37:06Speaker 00

  Oh, is that an Arles?

• 37:07Speaker 01

  You can go there now and it's now like a tourist trap. But they try to, yeah.

• 37:11Speaker 00

  Okay. So, but in Paris, he develops the big swirling, thick paint.

• 37:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that's in Arles, the South Front.

• 37:16Speaker 00

  And the bright colours. Um, so I guess is no one else doing bright colours? Why is he, why is he standing out from the crowd apart from the, he's a fucking mad cunt?

• 37:26Speaker 01

  I think his understanding of colour is so much more extraordinary than anyone else's in the whole history of art. I think that's why he stands out probably the most, is that his ability to depict scenes and his choice of colour and his way of mastering basically is kind of unparalleled, I'd probably say.

• 37:44Speaker 00

  But by colour, do you mean the impact it has on light?

• 37:47Speaker 01

  The impact it has on light, on emotion, on feeling, on just the, how, the colours he can get out of paint.

• 37:55Speaker 00

  So he just had more colours?

• 37:57Speaker 01

  I think the choice of colours, I guess.

• 38:00Speaker 00

  Right.

• 38:00Speaker 02

  What are your favourite colours?

• 38:02Speaker 01

  Well, that's a good question, actually, Charlie. To be fair, that's a good question. What is your favourite colour?

• 38:05Speaker 00

  Well, it depends. If it's to wear or to.

• 38:08Speaker 01

  I think just in the more childlike sense.

• 38:12Speaker 00

  Probably a really poppy kind of royal blue.

• 38:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, that makes sense. I see you go for the blue suits often.

• 38:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:19Speaker 01

  What's your favourite colour, Charlie?

• 38:20Speaker 02

  Red.

• 38:21Speaker 01

  Really? You don't strike me as a red.

• 38:23Speaker 00

  No, but you're very impulsive.

• 38:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:25Speaker 01

  But that's like first page of Pornhub colour. Red's the first colour. It's like a, it's like a two-year-old's colour.

• 38:31Speaker 00

  Black and orange are his favourite colours.

• 38:36Speaker 01

  My favourite colour is forest green, probably.

• 38:39Speaker 00

  Forest green rovers.

• 38:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. But red is funny because I feel no one says red past the age of two or for some reason.

• 38:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, I know.

• 38:48Speaker 01

  Do you know what I mean?

• 38:49Speaker 00

  Red's not, red's not.

• 38:49Speaker 01

  No one says red, because red's like the first one you choose and then you have to fight yourself against it.

• 38:55Speaker 00

  Grow up. In 1888, he leaves to go to the south of France.

• 38:59Speaker 01

  And this is probably his richest period.

• 39:00Speaker 00

  With a guy called Gauguin. Now, who's he? Is he another artist?

• 39:02Speaker 01

  He's another post-impressionist, I imagine.

• 39:05Speaker 00

  Right. And they both admired each other.

• 39:08Speaker 01

  Gauguin.

• 39:09Speaker 00

  So if he had sex with lots of people, it'd be a Gauguin, Gauguin, Gauguin, Gauguin.

• 39:15Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 39:16Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 39:16Speaker 01

  Yes, it would.

• 39:17Speaker 00

  Not David Goggins, Charlie. Come on.

• 39:19Speaker 01

  David Gauguin.

• 39:20Speaker 00

  David Goggins.

• 39:22Speaker 01

  Who's gonna carry the paintbrushes?

• 39:24Speaker 00

  At first, they admired each other.

• 39:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:26Speaker 00

  But soon, Van Gogh's personality comes out.

• 39:30Speaker 01

  Sorry, on Gauguin, did Gauguin end his life going as a sex tourist or was that someone else? So a lot of these French painters that...

• 39:38Speaker 00

  You either die a hero or live long enough to become a sex tourist.

• 39:40Speaker 01

  No, genuinely, because Van Gogh killed himself, so he didn't live long enough to go to... A lot of French painters, because you know they had a lot of Pacific islands, the French colonial empire at the time.

• 39:48Speaker 00

  Yes, French Polynesia, yeah.

• 39:49Speaker 01

  So they became fascinated with the kind of indigenous form. This is more your speed, actually.

• 39:54Speaker 00

  I'm listening, I'm listening.

• 39:55Speaker 01

  Where the Impressionist painter, as opposed to just depicting Victorians at the beach, they're like, we've got new faces and heads to draw. And so they'd move out to like French Polynesia, Tahiti, and then they'd fuck all the young girls out there and then...

• 40:08Speaker 00

  Fair enough. So in Arles, where they have this house, which Van Gogh wants to make like a...

• 40:13Speaker 01

  So it's sort of, it's kind of like artistic phrenology, in a way.

• 40:18Speaker 00

  But again, phrenology is a science.

• 40:20Speaker 01

  It is a science, but this is phrenology if it was an art.

• 40:23Speaker 00

  But it's not an art. It's a definite science and it has boundaries and it has rules and that's why I like it. Okay, so...

• 40:30Speaker 01

  I was trying to create, I was trying to create a bridge in Olive Branch, but...

• 40:34Speaker 00

  The problem is, is that you're bridging the humanities with the sciences. Phrenology is an exact science, okay?

• 40:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:40Speaker 00

  Anyway, this is where he paints the Yellow House, which is another famous one.

• 40:44Speaker 01

  Very famous, yeah.

• 40:45Speaker 00

  The only famous, the only one I know is the self-portrait in the Starry Night. Those are the two that I know.

• 40:48Speaker 01

  Sunflowers, you know?

• 40:50Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 40:50Speaker 01

  You know the bedroom?

• 40:52Speaker 00

  Well, the bedroom?

• 40:53Speaker 01

  You know Van Gogh's bedroom?

• 40:55Speaker 00

  I know.

• 40:55Speaker 01

  You do know. Look, that one, you know that one of his bed?

• 40:59Speaker 01

  You've seen that?

• 40:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, I have.

• 41:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, you've seen loads of them.

• 41:01Speaker 00

  I didn't think that was Van Gogh. I thought that was just like a kid who did that.

• 41:06Speaker 00

  I mean, that's not a million miles from the shit on my fridge, I'll be honest.

• 41:09Speaker 01

  No, that's, yeah.

• 41:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's crap.

• 41:11Speaker 00

  It is crap. That is crap.

• 41:14Speaker 01

  It's extraordinary.

• 41:15Speaker 00

  Why is it extraordinary?

• 41:16Speaker 01

  Look at that, the actual technique on show.

• 41:18Speaker 02

  You actually think, you don't need to pretend to think that. Do you actually think this is...

• 41:21Speaker 01

  Do you think that's crap?

• 41:22Speaker 00

  You're engaged. You don't need to fucking pretend like art.

• 41:25Speaker 01

  Ah, it's all bollocks, you're right.

• 41:25Speaker 00

  It's all bollocks.

• 41:26Speaker 01

  I'm getting married.

• 41:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, why are you pretending anymore? Why are you pretending?

• 41:29Speaker 01

  It's a load of fucking bollocks.

• 41:31Speaker 00

  You're just, you're not trying to fucking attract a French girl with a fucking heavily cut fringe.

• 41:35Speaker 01

  Until I'm divorced, I'm not gonna like art again.

• 41:37Speaker 00

  Exactly. And you don't have to like art when you're divorced, because you've got money, you can go to fucking Southeast Asia.

• 41:43Speaker 00

  No one in Southeast Asia is going, oh no, the ping pong shows here are really, really good, actually. No, the technique on show. Ah, come on. When he gets to Arles, this is kind of his most, his most mental period, you'd say. Also his most artistic.

• 41:55Speaker 01

  And he's putting loads out, because it was like the Beatles, he was only around for like, it was like 10 years and he made like thousands and thousands.

• 42:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, thousands of paintings, right. So Van Gogh in Arles has consistent hallucinations, insomnia, anxiety, depression. He does have anxiety, depression. Well, this is why I love sunflowers so much. Depression, violent emotional swings. Now, it's still debated what was actually going on in his head.

• 42:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:18Speaker 00

  But people nowadays would say he was possibly bipolar.

• 42:21Speaker 01

  Cunt-clapped.

• 42:22Speaker 00

  He had temporal lobe epilepsy, Meniere's disease, which is where you get tinnitus, I think. Schizophrenia, alcoholism and lead poisoning. Supposedly he would always keep a paintbrush in his mouth. People think he was just eating the paint.

• 42:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:35Speaker 00

  And the paint had lead in it and all sorts in it, so...

• 42:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. But in our traffic lights, the Fiverr's history traffic light system, I guess he's a yellow-red. He's a yellow turning into red, basically.

• 42:45Speaker 00

  But that's not a traffic light, that's a spectrum.

• 42:47Speaker 01

  Yes, I guess so.

• 42:48Speaker 00

  So he's yellow.

• 42:50Speaker 01

  But he, he might be transitioning into red.

• 42:53Speaker 00

  No, because red is Down syndrome.

• 42:55Speaker 01

  Basically. No, but Down syndrome, he's not far off.

• 42:58Speaker 00

  No, but he's not Down syndrome.

• 42:59Speaker 01

  He's not far off. At the end of his life, if you're on a mental asylum, you're cross-eyed and you don't know what day it is, I think you're kind of red.

• 43:07Speaker 00

  Okay, fair enough.

• 43:08Speaker 01

  So he's a man who through his life translates from a strong yellow to a red.

• 43:13Speaker 00

  Right. But he was never green.

• 43:15Speaker 01

  Never green, never once green.

• 43:17Speaker 00

  So people think that obviously, I mean, during all this painting, all he has is coffee, bread and tobacco. That's all he has.

• 43:25Speaker 01

  But forest, coffee.

• 43:27Speaker 00

  He writes letters to his brother. Is that his brother, Theo? He wrote a lot of letters, so there's a lot of actual evidence of his mental state. One of them says, quote, "I can say that as regards my mental state, the fear of madness has already passed considerably." So he's walking into it.

• 43:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:43Speaker 00

  He's open for it. But this is where he does all his great work.

• 43:46Speaker 01

  But this is what no pussy does to a man.

• 43:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:48Speaker 01

  Because he's not jacking.

• 43:49Speaker 00

  He's still not getting laid at all, is he?

• 43:51Speaker 01

  No.

• 43:51Speaker 00

  And he's, but he's trying.

• 43:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, he goes to a lot of brothels.

• 43:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:54Speaker 01

  But it's still not, his loneliness. So this is why he's doing this shit.

• 43:58Speaker 00

  The thing he's most known for, in December 1888, to just so listeners are aware, Hitler is in his mother's womb, okay?

• 44:08Speaker 01

  Just a twinkle.

• 44:09Speaker 00

  A Lois Hitler has busted the sperm that will turn into...

• 44:14Speaker 01

  Is that how you'd start the Hitler biopic?

• 44:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:18Speaker 01

  You'd have, you'd have a Lois Hitler going, "Oh!"

• 44:24Speaker 00

  You have a little tadpole with a little tash.

• 44:26Speaker 01

  And then the tadpole's like killing all, there's all these like, there's like Buddha, there's Christ.

• 44:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:33Speaker 01

  There's Greta Thunberg, there's all these...

• 44:36Speaker 00

  No, you'd see, you'd see the spirit of Woden leave Nietzsche. The spirit of Woden has left Nietzsche at this point.

• 44:41Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 44:42Speaker 00

  That's, that's how you start the film.

• 44:43Speaker 01

  He's in transit.

• 44:43Speaker 00

  You start the film with Nietzsche like that and then it kind of evaporates and then you...

• 44:48Speaker 01

  No, you have Hitler being cross-eyed with his sister charging and then it'd zoom into his cross-eyed eyes and then move out to his dad toe curling coming.

• 44:56Speaker 00

  Yeah. That's my Hitler biopic, which I, it's in development, it is in development, but we need more funding, okay? We need more funding. The tax breaks aren't there. Anyway, so Van Gogh is having weeks of tension with Gauguin Bang, David Goggins, and he pushes Vincent over the edge. And so Van Gogh, in this kind of mad rage, gets a fucking razor. Now, that must be a cut-toe razor in this day and age. This is pre Gillette, and severs his outer ear.

• 45:28Speaker 01

  The best a man can get.

• 45:31Speaker 00

  And then he wraps his ear.

• 45:32Speaker 01

  It'd be a great Gillette ad.

• 45:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, it would. He wraps his ear in a news, in some newspaper, like it's fish and chips, goes to the local brothel and give it to, gave it to a girl called Rachel and said, "Keep it careful, keep it carefully."

• 45:43Speaker 01

  So he's kind of like, he's probably, he's got zero riz, would you say? He's probably got the least riz.

• 45:47Speaker 00

  He's got the same amount of riz as a cat bringing a dead bird to the back of the, back of the house. What am I meant to do with that?

• 45:52Speaker 01

  He really doesn't know. He needs to watch videos of how to speak to women.

• 45:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, yes. So please, he then just goes back and just carries on bleeding.

• 46:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:00Speaker 00

  Police find him in bed and they take him to hospital. He doesn't remember any of this, but while he's recovering, he makes sunflowers.

• 46:10Speaker 01

  Sunflowers doesn't do much for me, to be fair.

• 46:12Speaker 00

  No.

• 46:13Speaker 01

  It's not my favourite one.

• 46:13Speaker 00

  I mean, it's not, I mean, I've, my kid can do flowers like that.

• 46:17Speaker 01

  That's such, that's such a stupid idiot thing to say.

• 46:19Speaker 00

  What do you mean, a stupid thing? You've not seen, you've not seen, you've not seen the tripe my kid brings back from nursery.

• 46:25Speaker 01

  Maybe, I've not seen what your kid paints, so maybe they're a genius that you can't see because you have such a low view of art.

• 46:30Speaker 00

  No, this is not, this is not genius. People at the time were right. They were trying to do us a favour. They were saying, "You're a fucking mad cunt who just keeps drawing yellow." Right? Just because people afterwards said, "Oh, romanticise his illness," you know, doesn't mean I'd get anything from that. That's someone who's run out of fucking other colours.

• 46:49Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, probably, he probably had run out of other colours. But if you only got yellow, that's a pretty good painting to, to do, I reckon.

• 46:56Speaker 00

  Look at those middle flowers.

• 46:57Speaker 01

  They're fucked, but that's part of the detail of the thing, is that...

• 47:00Speaker 00

  Well, if it's fucked, then everything my kid draws is good.

• 47:03Speaker 01

  No, the...

• 47:04Speaker 00

  My kid just scribbles and goes, "Daddy," and you're like, "Well, yeah, I guess so."

• 47:06Speaker 01

  Some of the sunflowers are fucked and that's an interesting state of the flower to depict, right? Because it's clearly his mental state. It's not all gleaming.

• 47:13Speaker 00

  You're giving him so much credit.

• 47:15Speaker 01

  What's it, what's...

• 47:16Speaker 00

  He's just really into it so much.

• 47:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's depressing.

• 47:18Speaker 00

  But what I mean is, because of the story of his life and he's just cut his ear off, people go, "Oh, he meant to draw it all fucked."

• 47:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, but this is not the only painting he's done. He's done about 2,000 paintings and they're all...

• 47:29Speaker 00

  They're all the same, though.

• 47:33Speaker 00

  Anyway, he draws the sunflower one and then after the ear thing, so he's recovering, but I guess is his ear just wrapped in newspaper the whole time?

• 47:42Speaker 01

  I guess so.

• 47:43Speaker 00

  So then-

• 47:44Speaker 01

  He paints his ear, doesn't he?

• 47:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, he then starts printing self-portraits. I mean, he does, he does look like a smelly cunt, doesn't he?

• 47:50Speaker 01

  That's good.

• 47:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, that is good. But then, if you're drawing yourself, why have you drawn your eyes so close together?

• 47:55Speaker 01

  Well, maybe his eyes were that close together. That's how he, that's in the truth, because he felt like his eyes were close together.

• 48:00Speaker 02

  Is it quite rock and roll to wrap your ear in like the daily style? Is that, is that quite cool?

• 48:04Speaker 01

  I think so.

• 48:05Speaker 02

  There is something quite cool about that.

• 48:06Speaker 01

  Do you like that painting, Charlie? That's a-

• 48:07Speaker 02

  The sunflower?

• 48:08Speaker 01

  No, the self-portrait, that, this one. You don't-

• 48:13Speaker 01

  Do you know what that's quite-

• 48:14Speaker 02

  No, he looks, he looks fucked. He's like cross-eyed.

• 48:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, but, yeah, but it doesn't-

• 48:17Speaker 02

  It's not like your ear beans toast.

• 48:19Speaker 01

  Fine.

• 48:19Speaker 00

  No, it's not like your ear beans toast. I agree with you on that. Right, so after, after the ear thing, the town is obviously like this cunt's mental.

• 48:28Speaker 01

  The whole town. That's when you know you're mental, is when the town-

• 48:30Speaker 00

  The town's like, you fuck off. So you get, the, but the town signs a petition to banish the red-headed madman.

• 48:36Speaker 01

  That's crazy.

• 48:37Speaker 00

  And the petition is successful, so the police lock him out of the house, and he's banned from the neighbourhood.

• 48:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:41Speaker 00

  He's basically like treated like he's on the sex offenders register. So he admits himself to an asylum, and it's in the asylum that he, from the bedroom window, that he draws Starry Night.

• 48:50Speaker 01

  His most famous painting, probably.

• 48:51Speaker 00

  Which I, yeah, I like Starry Night. I went to the Van Gogh interactive exhibition.

• 48:55Speaker 01

  Oh yeah? Who dragged you there?

• 48:56Speaker 00

  Well, the ki-, it was good for kids.

• 48:57Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 48:58Speaker 00

  Amanda booked it.

• 48:59Speaker 01

  It was said at this time, there was like a cosmic, like a hundred-year cosmic incident, so the-

• 49:05Speaker 00

  But then that makes me want to see a photo of the incident.

• 49:07Speaker 01

  Are you saying what?

• 49:09Speaker 00

  And also, I don't, I don't trust him, because he's cut his own ear off.

• 49:12Speaker 01

  But is it, the, the beauty of that is that he's gone, gone completely insane. He's looking out his window, and that's what he's seeing. And like, he's just seeing something that no one else is seeing.

• 49:21Speaker 00

  I don't know, it just makes me want to be sober. If I'm seeing that, I'd be like, fucking hell, I've got to sort my life out.

• 49:27Speaker 00

  I've got to get eight hours' sleep and fucking, you know, cold plunge.

• 49:33Speaker 00

  But he thinks it's a failure. That's interesting.

• 49:36Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, no one, no, everyone hates him, and no one's painted like this before.

• 49:40Speaker 00

  The one, the one with the yellow, with the cafe one, that is great.

• 49:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's evocative.

• 49:44Speaker 00

  That's very evocative.

• 49:45Speaker 01

  You can hear the noises of the people on the street.

• 49:47Speaker 00

  Makes me think it's, I'm on summer holidays, I'm on a city break, and the kids aren't there. I really like that.

• 49:54Speaker 00

  In the late 1880s, around the time of Hitler's birth, Van Gogh's neurological disease, they think, becomes neurosyphilis, which is not neurodivergence.

• 50:05Speaker 01

  It's a logical endpoint, maybe.

• 50:06Speaker 00

  I guess it is the logical endpoint, where you get a medal for having neurosyphilis. This is when syphilitic bacteria bores itself into the central nervous system, which causes auditory hallucinations and paranoia and sudden mania. So, July 1890, Vincent Van Gogh is finally thinking clearly and walks into a wheat field carrying a revolver.

• 50:29Speaker 01

  Fair play.

• 50:30Speaker 00

  Hours later, he comes back to his room clutching his stomach, which is bleeding out. And this is how unlucky and fucking incel he is. He tries to kill himself, but the bullet deflects off a rib, and so he just, he just lays dying while his wound goes septic.

• 50:43Speaker 01

  And there's nothing worse, is there? The being at the point of life where you're like, my life's so fucked, I need to kill myself. Because I'm such a loser, I'm so pathetic. And then you can't even do that.

• 50:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:52Speaker 01

  It just reiterates your point more so.

• 50:54Speaker 00

  But also, why are you shooting yourself in the tummy?

• 50:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know.

• 50:57Speaker 00

  I mean, help yourself, man.

• 50:59Speaker 02

  Maybe that's the point, though.

• 51:01Speaker 00

  Anyway. So, he basically just bleeds out over like two days, and his last words, fuck me, this is emo crap. His last words to his brother on his deathbed are, the sadness will last forever.

• 51:13Speaker 01

  Where are you?

• 51:14Speaker 02

  Fuck you, mum!

• 51:16Speaker 00

  It's basically his last words are fuck you, mum.

• 51:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:19Speaker 00

  And then at the funeral, his coffin's surrounded by sunflowers, which nowadays would be a huge statement if you did that. Someone who died, someone who's all-

• 51:26Speaker 01

  Few people attended.

• 51:28Speaker 00

  Francis Bourdieu dies, and everyone's just chucking sunflowers at the coffin.

• 51:31Speaker 01

  Chucking their lanyards on.

• 51:32Speaker 00

  No one return, no one attends it, and then, basically after Vincent kills himself-

• 51:37Speaker 01

  There's a lot of mental illness in the family, so it's not just he's been stuck in a plate, paint.

• 51:41Speaker 00

  And then Theo goes into a psychotic frenzy and attacks his newborn baby and wife, and then he's institutionalized, and then he becomes severely paralyzed, loses his mind, and dies in an asylum.

• 51:51Speaker 01

  And the thing about Theo is he couldn't fucking paint, so-

• 51:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, I guess.

• 51:55Speaker 01

  Do you know what I mean? He doesn't even get the upside. He's just mental.

• 51:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, he's just fucked. So, yeah, you're right, Van Gogh dies, what, aged 37?

• 52:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:04Speaker 00

  And so he only works as an artist for 10 years, but he produces nearly a thousand paintings and another thousand drawings. And basically, the only reason that he's, he's so well-known is that Theo's widow, Johann Van Gogh Bonger,

• 52:19Speaker 00

  she, basically, is similar to, I imagine, Custer's widow.

• 52:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:23Speaker 00

  Goes on a professional widow tour to try and, you know, drum up his legacy. So she organizes exhibitions and letters and promotes it.

• 52:31Speaker 01

  And when does he become like a, a star? How long after his death does he become? Because he's probably the most, probably the, considered widely in the art community, the GOAT, probably.

• 52:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, is he?

• 52:45Speaker 01

  I'd probably say so. Of all painters, he's probably the most famous.

• 52:49Speaker 00

  What paintings would we not have if it weren't for Van Gogh?

• 52:53Speaker 01

  I guess it, it's the transition from impressionism to modern art and surrealism and-

• 52:58Speaker 00

  So you wouldn't have Tracey Emin doing a pool on the floor, the National Gallery?

• 53:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:02Speaker 00

  Abstract expressionists. We wouldn't have abstract art.

• 53:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, basically.

• 53:05Speaker 00

  Wouldn't have Jackson Pollock without Van Gogh.

• 53:07Speaker 02

  What's the current one, then? Just modern?

• 53:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know what they would be called now. It's a lot more mixed media, I guess, which I-

• 53:15Speaker 00

  Mixed media, Christ.

• 53:16Speaker 01

  Which I really don't like.

• 53:17Speaker 00

  You must be really horny to go to a mixed media exhibition.

• 53:19Speaker 01

  Fuck me, damn bad.

• 53:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm, I'm so, I haven't had a fucking drip for 30, 30 days. God.

• 53:27Speaker 01

  I'm watching, I'm watching a naked Japanese man sit on balloons on an old telly.

• 53:30Speaker 00

  Yeah. God, I want to have sex with this girl that was, yes, Charlie.

• 53:33Speaker 02

  Is Van Gogh the kind of original tortured artist?

• 53:37Speaker 00

  Pretty sure we said that, we said that so often in this episode. Yeah. What are you doing back there?

• 53:44Speaker 01

  Getting FIFA Street up.

• 53:45Speaker 00

  Just like, just like you're, you're the original retarded producer.

• 53:49Speaker 01

  You'll be looked back on.

• 53:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, going like, oh, this producer who's-

• 53:52Speaker 01

  He's the archetype.

• 53:52Speaker 00

  He's the archetype. That disabled guy behind the screens on that, this podcast, that wouldn't exist without Charlie Milner. Yeah. So, to sum up, that's the life of Van Gogh.

• 54:05Speaker 00

  I guess thoughts on the paintings are, I like the colours, but it doesn't really, doesn't really do it. I mean, the cafe one, I like.

• 54:14Speaker 01

  I like the, the siesta painting, it's probably my favourite one.

• 54:17Speaker 00

  Can I do better? No, but I also, I think it'd be a waste of time.

• 54:21Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 54:23Speaker 00

  And that's kind of what I think about art in general.

• 54:26Speaker 02

  General.

• 54:27Speaker 00

  Next episode, we'll be talking about a, a, a friend of the pod, it must be said, Pablo Picasso, who I am very interested in.

• 54:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:37Speaker 00

  The way, not his art, the way he lived as a man.

• 54:38Speaker 01

  The woo heard around the world, my goodness.

• 54:40Speaker 00

  Pablo Picasso woo.

• 54:45Speaker 00

  And we'll be getting surrealism, Darley, we'll be into the 20th century, and we'll be joined by fiance of the pod's, the pod's fiance, BB Cave, Mrs. Horatio Gould.

• 54:59Speaker 01

  It's gonna be me in a week.

• 55:01Speaker 00

  And that episode's already on our Patreon, we're for £3 a month. I'm sure people share their art. I'd say it's more kind of like manifestos.

• 55:09Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 55:10Speaker 00

  And sort of suicide notes.

• 55:12Speaker 01

  Drawings of eagles.

• 55:13Speaker 00

  Yeah. Ah, AI drawings of eagles with guns.

• 55:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:17Speaker 00

  Anyway, that's on the Patreon, and on the Patreon this week, we'll be talking about some, I don't know, some fucking bollocks. What are we talking about on the Patreon?

• 55:23Speaker 01

  Some crap.

• 55:24Speaker 00

  Some crap. It's art week.

• 55:26Speaker 01

  Talking about pre-Raphaelite.

• 55:27Speaker 00

  Pre-Raphaelites. You heard it here first.

• 55:31Speaker 01

  You've got to eat your greens.

• 55:32Speaker 00

  Come on.

• 55:34Speaker 00

  Bit of spinach before we go back to Carpathio. Anyway, Mrs. Horatio Gould will be joining us next episode. Until then, see you, for all of us here, goodbye.

• 55:42Speaker 01

  Goodbye.