  No talent required Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond's urlLink The Manual is now rightly viewed as a seminal and much-adhered to template on how to have a number one the easy way.
The following is a section (written in 1996) from the Stewart Home-edited anthology urlLink Mind Invaders (Serpent's Tail, 1997). While there's an air of Malcolm McLaren monologue about it, eight years on it was disturbingly prescient and author(s) Luther Blissett later achieved urlLink infamy in their own right ...
TEN POINT GUIDE TO BEING A CULT ARTIST Contemporary art knows it's the new rock and roll. Successful young British artists like Damien Hirst crop up everywhere - from society gossip columns to the feature pages of Hello! magazine. So if you fancy attending upmarket social gatherings and being driven around in a limo, then why not try your hand at cultural terrorism? Becoming a nouveau is easy. It certainly doesn't require any talent. Here's how to do it. 1.
RECOGNITION: It's your image that sells the product. This is the ultimate form of branding. Gilbert and George are famous as the artists who wear business suits. Create a visual look and stick with it. 2. PLAGIARISM: Originality is for losers. Don't waste time on researching and developing new ideas - let others do this for you. Famous artists are inspired by their less successful peers, the ones who starve in garrets. Necessity might be the mother of invention, but there's no point in going hungry when you could be funding meals in expensive restaurants through acts of cultural theft.
Cindy Sherman is famous for making photographic versions of Old Masters. 3. NUDITY: Former stockbroker turned art superstar Jeff Koons married the Italian porn queen Cicciolina and then used her as a model in his work. Everyone is interested in sex, which is why tits and bums are favourite subject matter of great artists.
So don't waste your time with 'deep' subjects. Everything seedy is grist to the cult artist's mill. Since they've no experience of street life, rich art patrons are always attracted to decadent, debasing and degenerate subject matter. Select topics that are considered taboo. 4. EGOISM: If you don't believe in yourself, then nobody else will. You must make extravagant claims for your work. Sow confusion, so that even professional critics doubt their ability to correctly judge the value of the things you do.
Modern art is like the Emperor who had no clothes, as long as its unfounded claims about giving access to a higher realm of experience remain unchallenged, the rich and gullible will continue to invest money in stuffed sharks and houses filled with concrete. The highly successful Danish painter Asger Jorn once claimed that 'artistic research is identical to human science, which for us means concerned science, not purely historical science'. 5. PUBLICITY: Most successful artists begin their careers by praising their own work under a variety of pen name. While homages of this type rarely make it into the national press, the letters pages of obscure art journals are filled with them. As you become increasingly successful, your sheer financial clout will force critics to pay attention to your work. The glossy catalogue accompanying the recent exhibition Chaos II by Scandinavian artist Jens Jorgan Thorsen was filled with over-the-top praise from art critics.
In fact, Thorsen was responsible for all the writing in the catalogue, which included an essay entitled Jens Jorgen Thorsen's Paintings Defy The Laws of Gravity. 6. ADDICTION: Heroin, crack and other hard drugs do nothing to aid the creative process, but the general public likes to believe that the 'genius' has no control over his or her creative outpourings. Therefore, it is necessary to cultivate the image of addiction without actually becoming an addict. All sorts of ruses can be used, from having needle marks tattooed up your arms to pouring gallons of whiskey down the sink and then littering your studio with the empty bottles.
7. INCITE THE YOUNG AGAINST THE OLD: Art lovers are mainly old and rich; if you bad-mouth them in public, they will shower you with money and gifts. Your abusive words feed their delusion that it's possible to buy into the culture of the young and hip. However, do make sure that you know how to hold a knife and fork correctly. You must be on your best behaviour when spending the weekend at the family seat of important patrons.
The works of the futurist group are collected by museums precisely because F.T.Marinetti, the leader of the movement, wrote that futurism 'will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind. ' 8. DON'T GET YOUR HANDS DIRTY: Andy Warhol, the most successful artist of the post-war period, had a huge entourage of assistants to help ease the tedium of the creative process. So pay someone else to make your work. A successful artist is a middle-class professional, not an artisan. The cult artist is only interested in the bottom line. 9. MARRY MONEY: There are two kinds of capital: financial and cultural.
The cult artist wants both. The successful artist exploits the old maxim that fools and their money are easily parted. Selling a work of art is a one-off transaction. If someone wealthy is rash enough to marry you, then you can make them pay through the nose for their folly. The English painter Ralph Rumney was big news in the late fifties. After he married into the art-loving and super-rich Guggenheim family, his painting became something of a hobby.
10. DEATH: Great artists are perceived as being immortal. Nevertheless, if the value of your work suddenly erodes, then death is often the smartest career move. Faking your own suicide then disappearing is relatively painless; doing it for real requires the kind of commitment that exposes your assimilation into the haute-bourgeoisie as having been, at best, partial. It is the cult artist's output, and not the artist, that is supposed to be vulgar. New York artist Jean-Michel Basquiat was a hot property in the mid-eighties; when it all went wrong he topped himself and a retrospective show of all his paintings is currently on at the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gore.
Perhaps the time is right for a TEN POINT GUIDE TO BEING A CULT AUTHOR ? 
