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imomusThe Frieze Art Fair opens in London's Regents Park today and runs until Monday. A day pass will cost you £15, which makes it more expensive to visit than the Venice Biennale (€15), despite significant subsidy from Deutsche Bank. Unlike the Venice Biennale, the Frieze is a commercial art fair, and uncurated (although I believe there is some complex backdoor curation system by which curators nominate galleries, and there are talks, like the one in the photo below, a presentation by Austrian artists Gelatin at the 2003 fair). In other words, it's a lot of tented booths in which individual galleries and dealers are trying to sell their wares and make industry contacts, a bit like the Frankfurt Book Fair (which continues until Sunday).
The Guardian has two pieces on contemporary art in today's edition. One covers the Frieze fair, focusing very much on investment opportunities, and telling us that the fair is "an indicator of how the arts scene in Britain has been commercialised along American and European lines. Fifteen years ago, there were only about five commercial galleries dealing in contemporary art in London. Now there are 10 times as many." I find that very hard to believe; I lived in London 15 years ago, and there seemed to be five commercial contemporary galleries on Cork Street alone. I suppose it depends how narrowly you define "contemporary". But it's certainly true that art has boomed in Britain in an amazing way in the last decade. In fact, when I came back to London from Paris in 1997, contemporary art seemed like the only reason to be back. I certainly wasn't coming back to enjoy the rat's tail of Britpop; whatever polemicists like Julian Stallabrass were saying in books like High Art Lite, the British art world's warmed-up pop art, minimalist and conceptual tropes were, to me at least, fresher than Britpop's warmed-up Kinks and T.Rex riffs.
It's nice to see The Guardian devoting more space to contemporary art, and it seems appropriate in a nation in which more people now attend culture events than see live professional sports. But much of the coverage, even in supposedly liberal papers like The Guardian, still has a depressingly anti-art tone to it, reminding us exactly why it took Britain so long to catch its artworld up with Europe and the USA. A particularly fusty note is struck by political correspondent Simon Jenkins in the other art-related article today, Skip the secular rituals of the Turner Prize for a real radical. This article is weird in a lot of ways. First of all, why unleash a political correspondent on art exhibitions in the first place? Does The Guardian send their wine correspondent to cover boxing matches? Secondly, why send an outsider to bash somebody else's domain? Does the education correspondent get sent to the City to bash the stock market? Thirdly, that title: skip secularism? What, you mean become religious? Is Simon Jenkins telling politicians to skip secularism too? Of course not! So why's he suggesting it in his amateur arts coverage?
Unfortunately, there's quite a tradition of this kind of thing in the British papers, and it's usually related to the Turner Prize, which makes a lot of people who aren't directly concerned with the art world angry because they have to pay attention to it. A few years ago The Observer sent the BBC's political editor Andrew Marr to review the Turner show, and got a piece in which Marr told the world he "hated" the contemporary art audience. "They are in their twenties, probably lovers, certainly unmarried," he stereotyped (with a somewhat weird interest in marital status). "He wears a thin grey jersey and leather trousers, with carefully maintained stubble and wraparound shades, despite the dim light. She is Japanese, dressed in a bright plastic jacket, child colours, unsmiling. They are standing among a scattering of domestic electric detritus on a polished floor. They exchange a look, impossible to interpret. The man mutters and they move on, glancing at a book he holds... All around there are people like them, all part of a modern tribe, a vast nomadic group, mostly young, urban, clever, a little intimidating, given to expensive hodden clothes and rimless glasses." Kick these people out of the art galleries, Marr concluded, and let's fill them up with "the rest of us" (meaning, presumably, some alliance of public school Oxbridge types like himself and "the masses").
Jenkins is in a venerable English tradition that links Tony Hancock's art satire The Rebel with the values of the Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition. He loves Samuel Palmer's paintings (currently on display at the British Museum) but says "I do not share Palmer's religious vision or his reactionary politics. His opposition to the 1832 Reform Act and his view that England should revert to a medieval idyll of rustic shepherds, toiling farmers and fruitful hillsides was silly." Palmer's idyll would, of course, reverse economic growth, so Jenkins' head tells him it's "silly". But, like a suburbanite who wants to live in the country but still be able to catch the 8 o'clock train to the City, he keeps the Romantic vision in his heart.
Today, though, that distinction between heart and head is unsustainable: artists have a deplorable tendency to realism. "Artists no longer create," Jenkins complains, "but "raise issues round..."; they "ask questions about modern consumerism" and "concern themselves within the encounter between viewer and work." This week a bicycle with a rocket taped to its wheel "caught the attention of the judges". A contestant does not paint but "interrogates". This distancing of art from the public is sure sign of a culture that has lost its way." Jenkins laments the fact that Jim Lambie's Turner installation (my tip for the prize) will go into a skip when it's finished. (The other article, the one about art as a mere investment in objects which can sometimes triple their value in a year, might alert Jenkins to why such uncollectability is a virtue in art. But he'd probably agree with the art-as-investment man from Deutsche Bank, who says that non-material art is a 70s phenomenon, and that its artists are forgotten.... Isn't he aware that Joseph Beuys—a performance artist—is generally considered Germany's most important post-war artist?)
Jenkins calls the Turner event "one of the greatest confidence tricks in history". Tate director Nick Serota (one of the most hated men in Britain, if you read the UK newspapers, and yet responsible for the huge success of Tate Modern) gets away with this, Jenkins tells us, only because he has his hand "rammed deep enough in the taxpayer's pocket." Implication: the market would sort him out, and erase all this silly "art" stuff quickly enough.
Jenkins might well be right about that: curator Philippe Vergne says, in an interview with Eyeteeth:
"Art provides a social contract—with audiences, with artists, with content, whether it’s coming from visual art or music or philosophy or films—that doesn’t find an obvious channel in everyday life. An art center provides a venue for something that won’t be on television, won’t be carried by major music distributors. Look at [Ellsworth] Kelly’s work. It’s tough. What justifies Kelly in a culture informed by the market, by entertainment, by a logic of efficiency? You have to work on that, you have to create an ideal space to promote and support that... What justifies Ellsworth Kelly or Matthew Barney or Kara Walker, or artists in general, is that they’re anomalies in a culture run by Cartesian logic — therefore, they are absolutely necessary. They create the unnameable, and if you don’t make a place for it, the coefficient of civilization goes down."
The Guardian has two pieces on contemporary art in today's edition. One covers the Frieze fair, focusing very much on investment opportunities, and telling us that the fair is "an indicator of how the arts scene in Britain has been commercialised along American and European lines. Fifteen years ago, there were only about five commercial galleries dealing in contemporary art in London. Now there are 10 times as many." I find that very hard to believe; I lived in London 15 years ago, and there seemed to be five commercial contemporary galleries on Cork Street alone. I suppose it depends how narrowly you define "contemporary". But it's certainly true that art has boomed in Britain in an amazing way in the last decade. In fact, when I came back to London from Paris in 1997, contemporary art seemed like the only reason to be back. I certainly wasn't coming back to enjoy the rat's tail of Britpop; whatever polemicists like Julian Stallabrass were saying in books like High Art Lite, the British art world's warmed-up pop art, minimalist and conceptual tropes were, to me at least, fresher than Britpop's warmed-up Kinks and T.Rex riffs.It's nice to see The Guardian devoting more space to contemporary art, and it seems appropriate in a nation in which more people now attend culture events than see live professional sports. But much of the coverage, even in supposedly liberal papers like The Guardian, still has a depressingly anti-art tone to it, reminding us exactly why it took Britain so long to catch its artworld up with Europe and the USA. A particularly fusty note is struck by political correspondent Simon Jenkins in the other art-related article today, Skip the secular rituals of the Turner Prize for a real radical. This article is weird in a lot of ways. First of all, why unleash a political correspondent on art exhibitions in the first place? Does The Guardian send their wine correspondent to cover boxing matches? Secondly, why send an outsider to bash somebody else's domain? Does the education correspondent get sent to the City to bash the stock market? Thirdly, that title: skip secularism? What, you mean become religious? Is Simon Jenkins telling politicians to skip secularism too? Of course not! So why's he suggesting it in his amateur arts coverage?
Unfortunately, there's quite a tradition of this kind of thing in the British papers, and it's usually related to the Turner Prize, which makes a lot of people who aren't directly concerned with the art world angry because they have to pay attention to it. A few years ago The Observer sent the BBC's political editor Andrew Marr to review the Turner show, and got a piece in which Marr told the world he "hated" the contemporary art audience. "They are in their twenties, probably lovers, certainly unmarried," he stereotyped (with a somewhat weird interest in marital status). "He wears a thin grey jersey and leather trousers, with carefully maintained stubble and wraparound shades, despite the dim light. She is Japanese, dressed in a bright plastic jacket, child colours, unsmiling. They are standing among a scattering of domestic electric detritus on a polished floor. They exchange a look, impossible to interpret. The man mutters and they move on, glancing at a book he holds... All around there are people like them, all part of a modern tribe, a vast nomadic group, mostly young, urban, clever, a little intimidating, given to expensive hodden clothes and rimless glasses." Kick these people out of the art galleries, Marr concluded, and let's fill them up with "the rest of us" (meaning, presumably, some alliance of public school Oxbridge types like himself and "the masses").
Jenkins is in a venerable English tradition that links Tony Hancock's art satire The Rebel with the values of the Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition. He loves Samuel Palmer's paintings (currently on display at the British Museum) but says "I do not share Palmer's religious vision or his reactionary politics. His opposition to the 1832 Reform Act and his view that England should revert to a medieval idyll of rustic shepherds, toiling farmers and fruitful hillsides was silly." Palmer's idyll would, of course, reverse economic growth, so Jenkins' head tells him it's "silly". But, like a suburbanite who wants to live in the country but still be able to catch the 8 o'clock train to the City, he keeps the Romantic vision in his heart.Today, though, that distinction between heart and head is unsustainable: artists have a deplorable tendency to realism. "Artists no longer create," Jenkins complains, "but "raise issues round..."; they "ask questions about modern consumerism" and "concern themselves within the encounter between viewer and work." This week a bicycle with a rocket taped to its wheel "caught the attention of the judges". A contestant does not paint but "interrogates". This distancing of art from the public is sure sign of a culture that has lost its way." Jenkins laments the fact that Jim Lambie's Turner installation (my tip for the prize) will go into a skip when it's finished. (The other article, the one about art as a mere investment in objects which can sometimes triple their value in a year, might alert Jenkins to why such uncollectability is a virtue in art. But he'd probably agree with the art-as-investment man from Deutsche Bank, who says that non-material art is a 70s phenomenon, and that its artists are forgotten.... Isn't he aware that Joseph Beuys—a performance artist—is generally considered Germany's most important post-war artist?)
Jenkins calls the Turner event "one of the greatest confidence tricks in history". Tate director Nick Serota (one of the most hated men in Britain, if you read the UK newspapers, and yet responsible for the huge success of Tate Modern) gets away with this, Jenkins tells us, only because he has his hand "rammed deep enough in the taxpayer's pocket." Implication: the market would sort him out, and erase all this silly "art" stuff quickly enough.
Jenkins might well be right about that: curator Philippe Vergne says, in an interview with Eyeteeth:
"Art provides a social contract—with audiences, with artists, with content, whether it’s coming from visual art or music or philosophy or films—that doesn’t find an obvious channel in everyday life. An art center provides a venue for something that won’t be on television, won’t be carried by major music distributors. Look at [Ellsworth] Kelly’s work. It’s tough. What justifies Kelly in a culture informed by the market, by entertainment, by a logic of efficiency? You have to work on that, you have to create an ideal space to promote and support that... What justifies Ellsworth Kelly or Matthew Barney or Kara Walker, or artists in general, is that they’re anomalies in a culture run by Cartesian logic — therefore, they are absolutely necessary. They create the unnameable, and if you don’t make a place for it, the coefficient of civilization goes down."
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(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-21 10:45 am (UTC)The art world's grip on Irony is what sets these old codgers off. 'Art isn't supposed to be funny...' they sniff. Bullshit. I have often said that in order to be culturally relevant, art must embrace the culture it is attempting to be relevant to. How are Damien Hirst's pieces any more offensive than the latest rap track on radio1?
"I don't know much about art, but I know what I like" = "I'll take that Currier & Ives print there"
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-21 10:52 am (UTC)Compare coverage of the Frankfurt Book Fair or the Booker Prize: there might be comments about the general quality of books in any given year, but nobody ever says the book world is "a culture that's lost its way" or "a confidence trick".
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-21 11:35 am (UTC)Now, British society doesn't mind ritual if it's the Queen opening parliament, or whatever. It also doesn't feel threatened by rituals if they fit with commerce; a ritual (like the Frieze Art Fair) which has a clear, clean bottom line in the form of profit for someone is an irrationality which has attained all the rationality an Englishman could desire. But when something is tribal, clique-ish, ritualistic etc but doesn't earn someone lots of money, it becomes suspect. And I believe this is due to the fact that, unlike the French political class, the British political class has no concept of what Bourdieu called "cultural capital". Only capital capital—money—can make artworld ritual "rational" in any acceptable way.
We need a culture minister like Gilberto Gil (http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1591933,00.html) in the UK, someone who's willing to take more anti-capitalist stances. (See Gil's stance on copyright, for instance.) But it will never happen.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-21 11:57 am (UTC)I get the same sense of America's political class (particularly in the further-right party's attempts to kill all state funding for the arts by associating such funding with the works of Serrano, Mapplethorpe and Finley). Could it be that this is a more general problem of the Anglosphere?
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-21 12:05 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-21 12:37 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-21 01:17 pm (UTC)Now, of course the opposing argument couches itself in humanitarian terms. We must stop subsidy and open up European markets to food from developing countries. This "would bring economic benefits worth $100bn (£60bn) a year, including for developing countries". But it would also open up European markets to dumping of processed, industrial, containerised American food at the low prices we see in the US. There just happens to be a convergence of the two things that Tony Blair, for example, loves: free market economics and the interests of poor, developing nations.
At the same time, if food is seen as culture, and if this means less reliance on locally-produced food, the French are right to protest.
This issue came up in my Wired article from Venice, where the people from Cittadellarte said they weren't too worried by globalization, because what mattered wasn't where something was produced, but how it was produced, ie ethically or not. And they produced the paradox that since renaissance Italy represented diversity, any product which showed diversity was somehow Italian in spirit. Well, that begins to get into very shaky territory. Sure, I can eat a Yoshinoya beef bowl made with American beef and it still tastes Japanese. But just how much more globalisation is desireable, when we're already containerizing everything? And isn't it a sort of capitalist Platonism to say that the "spirit" of food has nothing to do with its "body", ie its roots in the physical place where it's grown and prepared and eaten? Just as "Italian-ness" or "French-ness" become global brands, they lose touch with any actual French or Italian ingredients or know-how.
I see the "accept CAP reform" argument as "romantic", in the sense that it's basically saying "Accept these refridgerated food containers in your port now, Frenchies, or these poor, suffering third world farmers get it!"
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-21 01:59 pm (UTC)The French may indeed see food as some sort of transcendental, but you're being starry-eyed about the influence that has on French trade policy. For complicated reasons the farming industry constitutes a very powerful lobby in France, and one that governments find hard to ignore. On top of that, CAP is much more of a gravy train for the French than for the British, since the agricultural sector there is more than double the size of the UK's.
The danger of being flooded by American foodstuffs is a total red herring. CAP is not aimed at a superpower with vast economic resources, but at the countries that can't fight back. In any case, I wouldn't want to argue for a neo-liberal laissez-faire agenda. Weaker, developing economies should be able to protect their markets, I think, and powerful economies should likewise aid those poorer countries by allowing access to their markets. Your romantic worldview isn't necessarily wrong, but you're misinterpreting CAP if you think it accords with that worldview.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-22 10:36 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-21 01:13 pm (UTC)He isn't a sketch-writer, and didn't he write those books about the 1000 best churches and 1000 best houses?
And the political clout of the farming lobby in France is obscene.
I agree, though, perhaps the worst thing about the UK is that we have a philistine cabinet and Tessa Jowell generaly ignores culture, meddles with the media and focuses all her attention and funds on sport.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-21 01:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-21 01:22 pm (UTC)Here You Are (a ramble)
Date: 2005-10-21 02:47 pm (UTC)Re: Here You Are (a ramble)
Date: 2005-10-22 10:03 pm (UTC)My mind just spins when I read such poetic, evokative words!
I'm just left once again with impressions..perhaps that was all I needed to understand.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-21 04:09 pm (UTC)Contemporary art: "confidence trick" or "necessary anomaly"?
Date: 2005-10-22 12:37 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-22 10:22 am (UTC)Population pressures in the early 19th Century were already mounting. Reverting to Palmer's rustic idyll would not only have reversed economic growth, and also possibly sent Britain down Ireland's path, towards eventual famine, death, and finally mass emigration. "Silly" us too light a word to describe the idea.