Teetering between brilliance and bollocks ... Vivienne Westwood. Photograph: Miguel Villagran/AP
Vivienne Westwood is, for me, the non-conformist par excellence. Her risk-taking, groundbreaking designs, her creative fizz, her otherworldly, Elizabethan looks; the fact that she's an English eccentric who, as a working class woman, even manages to go against the grain of eccentrics. Counter-cultural and yet honoured by the Queen, she turned up to Buckingham Palace but made sure everyone knew she wasn't wearing any knickers. If nothing else, you have to admire her chutzpah.
On the other hand, she has all the glaring deficiencies of genius. She is, apparently, a nightmare to work with, disorganised and emotionally distant. And she takes herself really, really seriously. Her latest foray into "activism" is an attempt to persuade everyone to stop watching television and look at paintings. It's presented as a kind of Socratic dialogue involving Alice and Wonderland and Pinocchio. Westwood has always teetered on the line that separates brilliance from bollocks - but has she finally crossed it?
Westwood's innovations in fashion and her role at the birth of punk mean that her place in history is assured. However, she has also long considered herself an intellectual. At some point during the 1970s, she met Gary Ness, who was to become her mentor. He gave her a reading list and acted as a kind of philosopher-therapist, with Westwood paying for weekly supervisions. She's described Ness, a bit unrealistically, as "the last guru of the western world", and most of her ideas - that quality in art is objective and that culture "had its swansong in the last half of the 19th century, in France" - have been nurtured by him. Ness' influence is strong in her Active Resistance to Propaganda project, which debuted to very mixed reviews at this year's Hay Festival. Now Westwood's bringing it to the home of French art in London, the Wallace Collection. Members of the public have been invited to try out for the various parts in her long-winded, bizarre, incoherent script.
Looking at the manifesto, it seems like Westwood is basically trying to say that society would be better if we paid more attention to books, went to the theatre lots and didn't spend so much money on crap. Hard to disagree with, really. But the message is accompanied by so much flummery it becomes impossible to follow, a pretentious mess.
In fashion Westwood has often used constraint to remind us of our bodies, creating outlandish, sexy clothes - here she lets all the intellectual flab hang out and the result is a monumental turn-off. People took the mickey out of her mini-crini and those heels. This is much more embarrassing.
