The news element in this article comes to you courtesy of a well known contemporary artist and
his various brushes with that vague thing called humanity. A dead shark, ₤111 million worth of sales, and the overall inference of riding the waves of ignorance are this guy’s claims to fame.
This wonderful person/cost centre highlights many issues in Contemporary Art. I thought I’d use him as an introduction to the basic dichotomy of art and its market.
Contemporary art, whether anyone likes it or not, is an industry. It has all the howling spiritual sincerity of a fast food chain. Even the fountains of verbal futility in the art world are essentially marketing exercises. This is art, as preached, and as soaked up, by the market. If you’re in the trade, and you’ve ever encountered a Conspicuous Art Lover with the vocabulary of a macro, you’ll know the problem.
(I’m scattering links around like confetti in the text in this piece to show some of the things called Contemporary Art, and making a point of not giving publicity to those who don’t need it. Think of it as rhythm with hyperlinks… )
It takes about three seconds to discover the Conspicuous Art Lover has no concept of art, and unless having the art translated to it, never will. The Tyrannical Artistic Pedant is better informed, and able to bore most forms of drainage to death. The Wispy Quasi Poetic Gargoyle is articulate, informed, and makes art almost as sexy as death.
The raison d’etre of art has moved a long way from
the passionate, to the purposeful. Sadly, it’s also moved to the very predictable. Contemporary art is running on rails. Whatever the
artistic values, the social values are now buried in cultural innuendo with price tags.
This is a question which shouldn’t be rhetorical: What does art do?
There’s a lineage to this question. In the old days, before the world was destroyed by visual spam, art
really was an event to the beholder. People didn’t see great art every day. If they saw a floral design on a tablecloth, they were aesthetically ahead of the game. When Willow Pattern china was first introduced, it was a craze among the rich and eventually the lower classes, a real excitement that met people's
need for interesting images.
In the 19th century, they added Turner and the Impressionists to the mix, and the world was actually stunned. Human culture didn’t recover from the revelation of imagery that they produced. It prospered.
Before the Second World War, there were real schools of art. Even the Expressionists, lazy sods that they were, and Max Ernst, my hardworking idol, could legitimately claim to be individualists. The Beat Generation artists, who will be unfairly remembered as the ancestors of modern contemporary art, were perhaps the last real school, so nebulous and diverse they were never really defined except as Modern Art.
Whether or not art does ]things like that to culture now is debatable. Art is literally a splash of color to interior designers, and a milch cow to galleries. Publicity is the defining factor. Its relevance to anything is strictly nominal.
The definition of Contemporary Art now covers anything and everything. No art critic is going to be forced to wake up and interrupt their spiritual enemas to invent a description. Does this mean there’s nothing to talk about, just the opportunity to stare in a bovine haze at images?
What does Contemporary Art do?
Is the world ablaze with new concepts as a result of it? Not noticeably.
Are wild eyed art students stalking the streets intent on visual justice for the oppressed? Nope.
Are generations of inspired visionaries creating new cultural concepts? Guess.
What Contemporary Art does is to produce materials and stick a price tag on them. As a social and cultural force, it’s non-existent. Like the music industry, it’s so harmless you could grow spuds in it. Maybe some unambitious daisies.
Does Contemporary Art set standards of artistic achievement and excellence?
In theory, but in practice it mainly produces feature items and nasty little press releases about incredibly rich artists being brats.
The unspeakably uninteresting Piss Christ is a case in point. This hideous repayment of an artistic theme which kept artists in work for thousands of years is an icon. It slavishly produces each element of Shock Art, like Shock Jocks on radio.
“Create a controversy and you’ll be a good little artist”. You’d think even these Contemporary Cretins would know when they’re being patronized, or at least by whom. The formula for Piss Christ is a common equation: Content, nil. Meaning, nil. Market appeal: 100%. It got more coverage than the Rwandan genocide. It represented the sort of thing that people know how to market. The publicity did the work. All that was required was a religion, a full bladder, and a publicist. It’s very noticeable that the thousands of words painted apparently don’t induce the industry to shut up on the subject of any form of visual art, however mediocre. “The uglier the better” seems to be the quality control.
These high profile, low brow, works dominate Contemporary Art. That’s a real pity, because there are, in their millions, a lot of contemporary artists, and some are pretty damn good. They get no space in the markets, because they don’t fit the script.
Artists can and do still starve in garrets, in fact many would consider that a luxury. Being ignored by the art world is still compulsory, but it’s also a sign of authenticity. Thankfully, digitization has been a real boon to artists, who’ve adapted to the better economics and reach of the new media very well. It is at least possible to believe you can make a living as an artist.
To be revived, art has to have these ingenues, the believers, the real enthusiasts who will work for months on a single image because it matters to them.
Can’t help thinking there’s some poor innocent picture, only a few days old, still the Great Achievement of some poor bastard who thinks the world loves artists.
Good luck to you, whoever you are, and don’t take any wooden sharks.
