There is a definite reminder in the work of the great casts of characters in medieval paintings of the Last Judgment, all the detailed weirdness of medieval hell. But although the Chapmans do have their own sense of form, there is nothing in their approach that recalls the medieval eye for pattern and arrangement—hell’s former sublime musicality. (This is Motherwell’s area.)

What is the power of medieval religious art, anyway? When you’re looking at the Isenheim altarpiece (Grünewald is a hangover of medievalism into the Northern Renaissance), you’re not looking at horror and disgust but at a monumental, distanced, grand staging of these emotions, an animation involving realism and symbolism that is simultaneously playful and of the greatest seriousness. You’re looking at a staggering buildup of abstract values—the whole range of visually compelling effects of which an art form at the peak of its development is capable.

This all sounds as though the Chapmans deserve a good whipping. But hang on. They compensate for their lack of interest in transcendent visual experience—or visual ideas, even—with jokes, an element often present in artistic expressions of biblical hell, but not paramount. But they also compensate with something else, something that Bosch, Brueghel, or Grünewald, or even Motherwell, who died in 1991, can never offer: contemporaneity, creative mainlining into Now.

After all, Fucking Hell isn’t really about hell or evil. It’s not as if the dark side of human nature were really being explored. The work is about taboos, contemporary people’s fascination with seemingly evershifting lines between what society finds acceptable and what it doesn’t: the Chapmans have something real and original to contribute to this discussion.

A notoriously conservative art critic, Brian Sewell, wrote in his regular Evening Standard column (on June 6, 2008) that Fucking Hell is so important, so indisputably connected to the greatest art and culture that’s ever existed (he says he sees in the work the “digested influence” of Rubens, Ingres, Goya, Greek antiquity, the Pergamon altar, Roman triumphs, medieval art, Altdorfer, Brueghel, Bosch, and Michelangelo), that in the future the Chapmans will be “the only artists of their generation to deserve more than a wry footnote in the history of art.” Sewell is wrong about there being any real or important connection back to old art, but even so, the Chapmans have got something.

The argument against them from the worthy brigade in art academia in England (summed up in the books of art historian Julian Stallabrass) goes something like this: the aesthetic heights can’t be in the cards for art right now, because of problems of elitism and so on, not to mention the impossibility of inhabiting old artistic mind-sets originally produced by defunct social structures. You have various options instead. One is the Chapmans’ strategy, which is the wrong option; to do a kind of ersatz old-fashioned type of art just for the sake of entertainment, for lulling the middle class or pandering to this class’s hypocrisy and delusion. (Sewell’s farty trumpeting of the brothers’ genius falls into the hands of this argument.) The more correct artistic thing to do, the worthy argument goes, is to help society by making art using democratic forms (especially the Internet), which have a wide currency and appeal, with the aim of changing consciousness and bringing to light invisible structures of regression and injustice.

Stallabrass’s errors are to assume that (a) the Chapmans ape high art and (b) that their shocks are of the same nature as the shocks in movies such as Hostel and Saw, or (especially in their earlier works featuring distorted child mannequins) the English tabloid newspapers’ double-standards treatment of stories combining sensationalist stimulation with virtuous hunting-down of pedophiles.

In fact, the Chapmans are sophisticated in their unsophistication— they dumb down their forms, but they don’t suck up to contemporary piety. They offer a critique of hypocrisy that involves imaginative new takes on despair and futility, but without the expected easy moral homilies that go with pop-culture movies and tabloid stories. Their achievement is all in their refusals. The Chapmans are sophistocated in their unsophistocation—they dumb down their forms but don't suck up to contemporary piety. Their critique of hypocrisy involves imaginitive new takes on despair and futility, without the expected easy morals and homilies.