We went to Central Saint Martins College
of Art and Design – the pre-eminent art institution in the United Kingdom
and reputed to be one of the worlds leading art colleges.
By observation, we confirmed what
we already feared. We have sacrificed art
to mediocrity. The commercialisation of art means that the self publicist is
more likely to be renowned for the notoriety of their creative output than they
are for any meagre talent they may possess. 30 years ago I attended a posh
first viewing at a Modern Art Gallery of what at its most polite was descriptively
misdiagnosed as ‘naïve’ or ‘primitive’ art – it was not in the tradition of
Henri Rousseau, my 5 year old son could as easily have mastered and therefore
duplicated the canvases on display.
Art and poetry co-exists
magically through the enunciation of light and colour, shade and silhouettes
through the interpretation of images. But so much of modern art is pretentious
nonsense devoid of artistic merit. Art must have more than the ingredients of a
contemporary soap opera and a catchy title. So much eloquence to describe a
simple canvas appears to be one of the symptoms of our art today. It is as if
to paraphrase Disraeli, the exuberance of the critics’ verbosity is needed to
mask the paucity and the poverty of the artistic offering. Linguistic hyperbole
is good, but like a cordon bleu meal it soon loses its freshness in spite of
its inflated purchase price. What shocks one generation bores the next and only
longevity can make for great art. In
fact, the test of time is really the only honest predicator of greatness and
because of this the con artist is able to sell his or her wares to a gullible
public that is desperate to share fame with an identifiable and charismatic,
even visionary figure. In a world of individuals made fabulously wealthy
through the stock markets and technology, smart ideas and clever merchandising;
even the wealthy art buyer can be sucked into the vortex of instant art by
talentless hacks whose salesmanship is
their art.
Art has always been controversial
but the essence of excellence demands that it is not enough to be creative. Any
conman or con-woman can create a blank canvas and a black line running
diagonally across its virgin surface. What defines a great work of Art is
inspiration, technical ability and skill. I cannot create art. With practise I could perhaps achieve a minimum
level of technical ability but even with my acute observational powers I will
never be Picasso or Rembrandt, Hiroshige or Leach. An example of what it takes
to be an artist could be provided by LS Lowry. We could observe his factory
workers and note his technical skill but before a distinctive, muted style
became his recognisable signature his skill proved that he was more than a
pedestrian doodler. The same applied to Picasso. His output at the start of the
20th Century was monochromatic, it displayed a sombre elegance that made
it essentially unpopular because you could look at his painting and feel as
depressed as Picasso himself must have felt at that time.
And that is the essence of great
art – it not only conveys it also infects.
I viewed the Honours Course Degree
Show held at Central Saint Martins – there were two, perhaps three artists who
appeared to possess any artistic ability.
We knew one young person who had attended Saint Martins for four years
and he seemed to have regressed in his capacity to produce a work of art.
And art can take many forms but
it usually expresses something which while it may not necessarily be
aesthetically pleasing, its nature is by its creation an act willing us to remember
it.
We have categorised and in our
cleverness destroyed what makes art so important to us. Art celebrates the
aesthetic achievements of Civilisation. In an era of global communications,
video art can be fun and it can also be viewed on the internet at any
time. But it is on the same level as
installation art: Tracey Emins’ bed and the Tate Moderns elephant droppings
(lumps of clay decorously splattered across the floor at the end of one
gallery). None of it expresses the technical skill of genius nor does it
provide a hint to our human endeavours.
Much of contemporary art is a cop out by people devoid of individuality
and lacking the discipline or the inclination either to study or to observe.
The Emperor’s new clothes
syndrome, fear of being ridiculed; it could explain the dire straights to which
the art world has been sucked in if it were not for the extent to which the
learned professors in their colleges have dictated the fashion.
Film should be taught in a school
of movie making. Fashion, clothing
design and furniture making are craft disciplines but at least they require an
appreciation of the physical. The issue
becomes politicised when we exclude the decorative arts from fine art. Decorative
art is classified as belonging to applied art. It is an unnatural Western
differentiation between visual, non functional art and what is inevitably
functional, culturally significant art (such as pottery, glassware, jewellery
design, metal working and textile design).
Perhaps we need a third category;
that which is instantaneous, spontaneous or randomly created. A more appropriate demarcation between Fine
and Applied art on the one side and our third, aforementioned category is that
the latter is usually transient in nature and requires little of either
imagination or talent to produce and of more importance, can be copied by any
third rate mimic. While it is unfair to
include all film, all photography and all theatre in this bucket of slops it
has been forced upon us by society’s insistence on catering to the lowest
common denominator in Art. There can never be an absolute distinction in Art
but by forcing us to define what is and what is not ‘art’ in a modern sense we
have opened up a monstrous Pandora’s box to charlatans and charismatic clowns,
none of whom have anything to say about real art.
Every day objects do become part
of culture when they become an expression of the spiritual journey of the
nation. If art represents the sum of human expression then it is also the
marriage of art and culture. For example
a Japanese sword is imbued with the philosophy and the art of its society. A portable Buddhist shrine, a Benin bronze or, a magnificent Etruscan Cauldron
created in the 7th century BCE; artefacts from Oceania and Africa, these all represent design and art but also
culture, the physical representation of the spiritual.
I do not object to the veneration
of the material world. To aspire to be better or to aspire to create something
that ridicules our inadequacies as it slaughters our pretensions, expresses the
essence of what it means to be human just as to create an object of beauty is
to capture the divine. Art is one of the driving forces behind human
development. But conquest, domination and unbridled greed are also drivers
behind the development of humanity and from humble survival based instincts
they have developed their own moral code justifying every wrong we as a species
are capable of inflicting on others. Not
everything we produce is beautiful but to represent an ‘essence’ is to
influence and inspire.
Honest workmanship produces
craftsmanship but it requires years of study, and one must internalise the
techniques employed by the great artists that came before us. All of this can be
found in the great museums and art galleries of the world. The art I have been
witness to seems to have been generated in one of Stalinism’s academies for
social submission and artistic irrelevance.
Self absorbed talentless hacks slap together a hodgepodge (I believe
that the correct art term refers to a pastiche) of incomprehensible mediocrity
devoid of talent or precision of purpose.
The self possessed hedonist may
enjoy his or her moment of artistic fame but if politics and fashion is all our
art colleges are capable of churning out then instead of world class art, we
now have mediocrity from which we must draw our individual and collective
inspiration. To aspire to be great we
must strive to produce great art and while great art may share the stage with
mediocrity it is to our extinction that it beckons.
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