On the first visit, I’d come from the Bernard Jacobson Gallery, where I saw a painting by Robert Motherwell (an exhibition of his work is on view from October 15 through November 22). Some blue, some charcoal lines, and that was it. I looked at it with pleasure, frowning and squinting. The work’s owner came with me to White Cube. I said the Chapmans’ stuff obviously isn’t what Motherwell was about: his calm, high drama; his sensitivity and chance taking; his knowledgeable, elegant, experienced, pared-back visual forms. But, I said, it’s a worthy opponent to all that. They work like hell at their lowness.

The dealer thought that was a good way of putting it, and then after a few minutes, he said he’d had enough. But the structural point of Fucking Hell is that there’s never enough. It relates to the brothers’ proposal that violent fantasies are endless. Whatever horrible thing you just heard about, you can always think of something worse. In Fucking Hell, giant cows give birth to human corpses, men have skulls instead of heads, and vultures have the heads of men. Machines create death chemicals and somehow use mutilated human body parts as fuel. A Nazi skeleton surreally steps out of its covering of flesh, or maybe it’s Death stepping into a Nazi— we don’t know which way we’re going—atrocity is circular and endless. I looked again at the ordinary people on high-ish incomes staring at the scenes. I wondered if they thought the work was about mankind. Was it the new Seventh Seal? Or did they think it was about jazzing a market? Was it impressive because it did that so successfully?

Fucking Hell is far from Ingmar Bergman, far from the medieval dance of death, far from anything in art of the past that is substantial and important. But still, the Chapmans are great at what they do, which is a new kind of game, exemplified by the YBAs in the ’90s, in which you use art to focus on the uncertainty that the public has about value, but always stay somehow within the capabilities of an audience, which, up until this cultural moment, has had little to do with art.

The audience fails to develop, and that’s how the YBAs prefer it. So the Chapmans work with visual forms that the ignorant tend to like, such as Hollywood model making. Or obsolete high art forms, like etching and watercolor, the kitschy potential of which the Chapmans don’t at all undermine or challenge but deliberately exploit. They picture horror but in a pleasurable, if unrefined, way. They have their own refinement, their own original balance of skill, silliness, and wickedness, of hilarity, stamina, and focus.

When they reference art history (Goya, Brueghel, Bosch), it is only that: reference. Blind to anything profoundly visual, they demonstrate an interest in art’s simple literalism, a perspective that fits with culture’s present preoccupations. The kind of art that plays well generally now is engaged with a kind of punning, ironic exploration of a sort of multilayered, slightly aestheticized daily life—aestheticized only as much as is needed to get the idea across. The question is how to adjust to the new mind-set without acting stupid.

Society’s new fantasies about the artistic mind-set are part of the joke of Fucking Hell. Artists live on the edge. They dare to go “out there,” to zones the rest of us don’t dare think about, but we’re intrigued when artists bring back their psychic souvenirs. These are primitive Romantic thoughts, separated from anything believable that Romanticism has to say about the connection between the inner life and Nature. But also totally untrue in terms of what the global art scene is really like now, with its population of pampered artist-pets; worthy critics and curators with obedient, suburban imaginations; and Theory high priests, with their droning theology.

Hitler was an artist; tribes make tribal art; and when civilized people regress, they perhaps become tribal. And beneath the streamlined fakery of the consumer society is a lot of writhing caveman murderousness. Simple thoughts like these go into Fucking Hell and are realized in a profusion of engaging detail: humans and their gestures, their faces and poses, their relationship to objects and to landscape, and their interesting changeability as they individuate or as they merge into crowds.