Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War) by Salvador Dali. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
Although I don't know of any scientific evidence to verify this observation, I feel confident in asserting that apart from Bob Marley toking on a spliff, Salvador Dali's 1931 image, the Persistence of Memory is the most popular piece of decoration in college dorm rooms today.
Dali's painting has always struck me as the perfect illustration of what people who don't know about art think is art. It has accessibly recognizable representational elements, is obviously and inarguably the work of a skilled hand, and yet is super-trippy. Its trippiness makes it appear profound, or at least cool, to kids who use the word "surreal" to mean anything weird.
So after it has won over the frat boy faction, should it be surprising that surrealism has become mainstream enough that Selfridges and the V&A are now collaborating on "surreal" window displays?
Despite the many instances of superficial surrealism, the frat boys have a point - surrealism can be art in its purest and most interesting form. Within the last year, there have been a number of inspired exhibitions grappling with the murkiness and symbolic substance of an art movement methodologically devoted to the expression of our buried desires and subconscious yearning.
The Hans Bellmer exhibition at The Whitechapel gallery and Undercover Surrealism, the insightful exhibition putting in context pages from Documents, Georges Bataille's Surrealism magazine, powerfully demonstrated surrealism's significance as a truly transgressive movement which awakened self-awareness and broke the boundaries of sexual, social, political, artistic and intellectual norms. Significantly, surrealism was never intended to be a fanciful break from reality. As some noted academics have understood, the surrealist movement was a pointed reaction to science and society, not a whimsical fancy produced by artists who were merely attempting to entertain the masses.
Even the well-documented forerunners to contemporary marriages between fashion and images removed from logic, such as the collaborations between Elsa Schiaparelli and Salvador DalÌ or Man Ray's erotic fashion photography, playfully upset notions of beauty, theatricality and wearability. There are artists whose surrealist garments or fashion photographs unnerve viewers by upsetting their logical expectations, but most surrealist fashion seems to be trying too hard - and there is nothing less stylish than over-reaching.
In the same way, most mainstream attempts by curators or commercial window-dressers to draw upon surrealist aesthetics are destined to be counter-productive. When surrealism has merely become a common synonym for "surprising", or simply "strange," delving into the subconscious of corporate sponsors like Selfridges will likely unearth little more behind the flamboyant strangeness than creative laziness and a realistic assessment of market attitudes. Maybe next season Selfridges will stick to what's really safe and do a Bob Marley display instead.
