Germaine Greer on Gilbert and George

That's enough alliteration-Ed.

Blogging for the Guardian, Germaine Greer paints a grim picture of life in Britain's most famous artistic double act:

Gilbert Proesch apparently still has Italian nationality, but every word spoken or written by Gilbert and George is in English, which Gilbert still cannot speak fluently. What did Gilbert know of Flanagan and Allen before George had him singing Underneath the Arches in 1970? Before he came to England, Gilbert's education at three different colleges of art was all in German; English is likely to be not his second language but his fourth, after Ladinian, Italian and German. For 40 years, he has been condemned to replicate the narrow range of George's English habits, to drink what he drinks, eat what he eats, wear what he wears. George has not learned or replicated a single behaviour of Gilbert's, as far as we can tell. If it were to become known that Gilbert Proesch and his friend George Passmore occasionally escape from the gloom of Fournier Street to go yodelling and langlaufing through the Gadertal, I for one would find their art less disturbing. Something about their scaled-down life and rigid routine reads like a suicide pact.

Ladinian, incidentally, turns out to be a minority language spoken in the Italian Alps.