Sebastian Horsley at Soho’s Union Club

A simple announcement is made by tonight’s compere: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Sebastian Horsley.’ It is a quiet and humble opening, quite at odds with the figure now strutting into the gentleman’s club and taking his place before the assembled audience.

This is no meek character but Sebastian Horsley, the writer, artist and in his own words, ‘a failed suicide.’ He is the author of the work: Dandy in the Underworld, a memoir that recounts his prolific drug use and encounters with prostitutes. He tried to crucify himself in the Philippines in 2008 and was deported from the United States on the grounds of moral turpitude.

Tonight he is dressed in the clothes befitting the dandy he declares himself to be. It’s all there; a top hat, a bright pink tie and a shimmering belt around his waist. Yet these are not the most important part of his get-up. What crowns his costume is the attitude with which he saunters around the room and addresses the audience. It is not the fact that he believes others to be beneath him but that he expects them to be delighted by his sheer presence.

He is flamboyant, aloof and crude. Reading from his autobiography and pontificating on subjects as diverse as art, morality and prostitution, the evening promises much from this sprightly and lurid character.

Except that it is not in any way interesting at all. Horsley promotes himself as a bohemian figure, someone who is above the petty Judeo-Christian moral structure that pervades Western society. He declares himself to be talentless and sets about attacking preconceptions about the value of art. He revels in the notoriety that comes with his admissions of soliciting prostitutes and the opprobrium he draws for his choice of lifestyle.

Yet everything about Horsley is an artifice. Not only can most of his aphorisms about beauty, art and morality be sourced back to Kurt Vonnegut, Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde amongst others, but he fails to convince on any level, bringing about a painfully dull spectacle. He reads off printed-out pages and needs to refer back to particular passages in his book. This would be fine for any other author giving a recital but having set himself up as a carefree dilettante and ne’er-do-well, his thumbing through the particular notes he has made completely destroys any credibility in what he is trying to project.

In short, Sebastian Horsley is a bore. He has nothing original to say and tries to cover up his borrowing from others by defending the thievery as an art in itself, which is a recourse well known to all hacks and grade-A mediocrities. His carefully constructed image as a dissolute character falls at the slightest investigation. He is like a drag queen, not dressed up in women’s clothes but those from the 18th century.

The most depressing aspect of the evening is how eagerly all this trite affectation is lapped up by the audience who coo and gasp in the familiar pantomime way. The irony is that although Sebastian Horsley resents mediocrity and has a disdain for the drab and conventional, through his unwillingness to commit to anything profound, he ends up substantiating everything he professes to despise.

The Union Club
50 Greek Street
Soho W1D 4EQ

Image by PunkyScudMonkey courtesy of Flickr