Jake and Dinos Chapman have remade Hell, their funny “sculpture” consisting of 30,000 little plastic Nazis torturing each other, which was created in 2000 and destroyed in a warehouse fire four years later. Entitled Fucking Hell, the “newer, improved, bigger, and brighter” (the Chapmans’ words) remake was commissioned for a fee of $15 million by François Pinault. Pinault owns the biggest collection of contemporary art in the world and is 34th from the top on the latest list of world billionaires. His motivations can be summed up in two words: attention seeking. Not that he should be condemned, or that condemning him would say anything important about Fucking Hell.

In England, the middle-class art audience knows the Chapmans well. They are survivors from the early waves of 1990s Young British Artists. Transgression merchants. Shockers. Their success and their first class existence, the respect they enjoy—their status as iconic figures— has a lot to do with the readable, literal content of their art. But also with sections of the mass media in England being willing to tune in to art and exploit it. So between art and the media, a kind of contest of unreal shocks is played out for a public that is used to grappling with a feeling of unreality generally, because of fast-moving social changes.

The insider audience mostly reveres the brothers (although there is a sanctimonious subsection who deplore their irresponsibility and lack of obvious worthiness). I like them too, because of their intelligence. But they can be preposterous. One of them, Jake, is in the habit of giving interviews to curator-mandarins. He spouts a lot of stuff about transgression, trying to get on top of the clichés of the Bataille discourse while at the same allowing himself to get hopelessly buried beneath them in a sort of conflicted attempt to be obedient and original simultaneously.

What this says is that the Chapmans want to be taken seriously. They don’t really want to violate the law; they want to please solemnity. And it must really hurt that on the whole, it’s only lightweights who fall for their strained intellectualese (Tate curators) and not higher-up Wizards of Oz like Rosalind Krauss or Thierry de Duve or Hal Foster.

On the other hand, I don’t think a bit of posturing in interviews counts against the success of Fucking Hell. At White Cube, nine metal and glass vitrines were arranged in the form of a swastika. An epic journey was described within: many individually modeled humanoid creatures emerge from a kind of volcano hole or giant anus and start torturing and killing each other, while at the same time traveling over rope bridges across deep valleys (the landscape changing from rural to industrial, northern to tropical), heading for some kind of reprocessing endpoint where the torture can start up all over again. A horror cycle.

The figures are full of comic animation, pursuing their nutty riffs on the death drive in an environment that is part Nazi death camp (huts, barbed wire, and burial pits) and part Apocalypse Now (foliage, rivers, and heads on sticks). Plus, since many of the figures seem to be skeletons, there’s a definite element of Ray Harryhausen’s charming 1963 movie Jason and the Argonauts.

I looked at the work twice, once alone except for an art dealer who’d come with me, and once with the gallery filled with visitors. On the second trip, I was struck by the audience’s social type, which was middle-class, educated, but not arty or intellectual. They didn’t seem an ironic crowd. They were earnest, amazed by the detail— which was amazing—but also made thoughtful by the idea of what they were seeing.

In the piece, Nazi torturers make decorative arrangements of mutilated body parts: long necklaces of heads; or severed human arms atrophied in right angles and stuck together to form a swastika. Skullhead Nazi zombies form a semicircle around Hitler, who stands at an artist’s easel on the edge of a deep valley filled with bodies and carrion, painting a happy picture. One death zombie regards Hitler’s canvas with a quizzical expression, head cocked in thoughtful, focused concentration, as if he’s imitating an art critic—a perfect joke on aestheticism.