Back in the early days of the internet, a troll was someone who would lurk on a messageboard and try to disrupt the conversation or provoke the other users .
Nowadays, some people have elevated trolling to an art-form.
Take Ellie Harrison, the artist behind the Glasgow Effect, project who returns to her day job as a lecturer at Duncan of Jordanstone today.
Ellie wangled £15,000 public money from Creative Scotland to take a year’s Sabbatical from the art college in order to do something or another in her hometown of Glasgow.
Part of her grand artistic statement was, she claimed, to explore what life would be like if she could not leave the confines of her home city.
It’s the sort of pseudo-intellectual waffle that gives pseudo-intellectual wafflers like myself a bad name.
There may, at a stretch, be some merit in seeing if an artist can survive in some distant backwater, but Glasgow?
Scotland’s largest city where every possible convenience is on the doorstep of her home in the West End? Home of a thriving art scene? The hardship must have been nigh on unbearable.
To rub salt in the wounds, Ellie then took to the airwaves last week to explain she hadn’t really needed the money but had to apply for a grant in order to keep her job at the university.
Even better, she said she had only spent little over half of her £15,000 free money on livings costs which will, at the very least, make her next request for a pay increase at Duncan of Jordanstone an interesting conversation.
Amazingly, she then justified accepting the money because, she claimed, it showed how those in a position of privilege have access to more opportunities than those who are disadvantaged.
The end result has been nothing more than an exercise in attention-seeking, or trolling if you will.
If that was Ellie’s intent, then she has been wonderfully successful..
She is now one of Scotland’s most recognisable artists, even if The Glasgow Effect is barely recognisable as art.
But it hasn’t challenged our concept of what art is or should be, it hasn’t elevated our understanding of the world one iota.
It has been as empty as the bluster of any online troll who enjoys wallowing in their own notoriety.