Mick Hartley: CRAP

Jeanette Winterson has this to say about Tracey Emin:

Tracey’s success is not in her showmanship, it is in the curious fact of her alchemy; she has been able to turn her own private world into one that speaks clearly to people all over the world.
There are millions of people with unmade beds and obsessive notebooks filled with sketches and jottings. Tracey is different because she has transformed the personal into the public. This is no mean feat. It is not typical. Not anyone can do it. Very few people can do it. Art is not a democracy. Much as we might not like it, Tracey is something special. She is not the tabloid hype. She is the real thing.

It's something of a dialogue of the deaf, this controversy over BritArt/the Turner Prize/conceptual art. On the one side are those, like Jeanette Winterson here, who see artists struggling to express themselves in the face of a largely philistine public, and on the other side are those, like me (and Scott at the Daily Ablution) for whom it's quite obvious that much of the modern art world has disappeared up its own backside.

"The curious fact of her alchemy" - well yes, Tracey Emin has indeed transformed the personal into the public, though I would dispute that her art "speaks clearly to people all over the world". So what exactly is my problem?

Grayson Perry, 2003 Turner Prize winner and transvestite potter, thinks it's because we new philistines (to borrow Scott's phrase) haven't caught up with the latest rules:

People who....perhaps think that contemporary art is the emperor’s new clothes may judge a work purely for its technical skill or traditional realism. Having been embedded in this fundamentalist bohemian sect all my adult life, to me the rules seem more arcane. They want perhaps to be given a clean empirical way of measuring artistic merit, just as teenagers need a brand to reassure themselves that their trainers look good. To them I say that it takes time to feel comfortable with the slippery language of contemporary art, which is different from the received pronunciation used to intone about Old Master paintings.

So we're still floundering around somewhere in the 19th Century: if a work of art doesn't involve technical expertise ("a child of six could do that!") then we dismiss it. In the face of this type of argument, all one can do is assert that, on the contrary, plenty of new philistines appreciate much modern art, whether technically proficient or not. For myself, for instance, I much prefer the child-like paintings of Joan Miro over his fellow Catalan Salvador Dali. Dali is undeniably the more accomplished draughtsman, but for me his work is little more than an arid display of showmanship. Or again, the work of art I most enjoyed in a gallery this year was by Yves Klein, at the Barbican's recent "Colour After Klein" exhibition. It was just pure blue: a bright, brilliant, blue, on a surface which made it impossible to focus precisely, giving the effect of a patch of intense pure colour. No draughtsmanship there at all.

Then there's the bohemian angle. Artists, part of a "fundamentalist bohemian sect", like tweeking the sensibilities of us bourgeois nine-to-five drudges, trying to open up our dismal lives to some excitement, put some colour into our drab semi-detached sensibilities. But by now, one hundred years after Duchamp's urinal, this is such a cliche that's it's hard to believe that it still has any purchase. Yet the latest catalogues continue to talk excitedly of transgressive works, which will subvert our notions of art, and challenge our preconceptions. As though we're all going to rush for our smelling salts every time we're confronted with a work of art which doesn't conform to our chocolate-box prejudices, still, after all the Piss-Christs, and piles of bricks, and Madonnas with Elephant Dung - as though, nowadays, we don't have to struggle to find an exhibition which doesn't aim to challenge our boring middle-class preconceptions.

So what are we left with? As Grayson Perry admits, art nowadays is basically whatever the artist decides. So, if Tracey Emin wants to call her unmade bed art, or Stanley Brouwn fills a grey filing-drawer with 1,000 blank index-cards and gets the Tate to pay £15,000 for it, who are we to complain? But we do, of course, because there's a part of the equation that's missing. Art isn't a term that can just be co-opted like that. It has connotations. There's more to it than simply a term for what artists do, as journalism, say, is a term for what journalists do. To call something a work of art is to praise it in some way. Clearly we're not going to able to reach an agreement that satisfies everyone as to what exactly those connotations might be - something to do with skill, personal vision, beauty, passion maybe - but the bottom line is that art is something that people will want to go and see, and find in some way inspiring. The connotations, in short, are positive. And confronted with Tracey's bed, or Stanley Braun's filing-drawer, the reaction, at least from us new philistines, is, I'm sorry, this may be Art, but it isn't art. This is a con. This is a game which certain people have learnt to play, and certain other people for their own reasons claim to appreciate, but it's got nothing to do with the business of human creativity which is what we understand to be implicit in the term art. Come up with a new term - call it Concept Realisation for Art Professionals, maybe - and we could all agree, yes, Tracey's bed is a classic piece of CRAP; the filing-draw is another piece of CRAP....but art? No. Art isn't a term that's there for redefining. We all own it.

There's another side to this: the artist's ego. For Jeanette Winterson, there are "millions of people with unmade beds and obsessive notebooks filled with sketches and jottings. Tracey is different because she has transformed the personal into the public." Well yes, but what's so special about that? Why is the idea of exhibiting your unmade bed such a breakthrough? Most people wouldn't have thought of it - didn't think of it - not because they lacked artistic vision, but because they failed to see why anyone could possibly be interested in their unmade bed, and in what possible sense it could be seen as art. It takes a remarkable level of self-obsession to present the detritus of your life as a work of art.

I posted a while back on the Joseph Beuys exhibition at Tate Modern. He was one of the founders of conceptual art, "one of the most influential artists of the 20th Century", to quote the exhibition catalogue. I argued then that his appeal could only be understood as a sort of cult - the cult of the artist. His works were of interest only because they were made by him, by Beuys, by a self-proclaimed genius. In the absence of any agreed criteria for great art, this is what we're left with: those who shout the loudest are the ones who get heard.

It's all beginning to fall apart, though. If even the art critics are starting to see through it, the days of CRAP are coming to an end.

Comments

"The Days of CRAP"
Years ago I lived next door to the curator of Modern Art at the ****. One Sunday lunch he said to me, "Matthew, all modern art is crap".
20 years on nothing has changed.

Posted by: matthew | October 24, 2005 at 07:04 PM

And what if our Trace had painted a canvas of the bed? Art then? Perhaps a carved relief, a woodcut or similar engraving. Even better, a casting. Is it the form of her art that distresses? Or only the content? Maybe the fact she's a woman & working class at that; that used to distress so many people when there were acknowledged standards. The artist's ego...ummm! Who could want a pic of an old sot who probably stinks of his own piss. Some ego Rembrandt van Rijn. "All modern art is crap". All of it? And where would the reign of modern art begin then? And where will I find the philosophy & theory of aesthetics that give me the judging tools whereby I can sift the crap from the wholesome? One of the wonderful things about living in the first decade of this century is that we all can find art we cherish & which sustain us in ways we can't articulate. Stuff you don't like? Just move on.

Posted by: JBH | October 24, 2005 at 07:43 PM

"Stuff you don't like? Just move on." So no art criticism is permissible, is that what you're saying? - or just art criticism of working-class women?

Posted by: Mick H | October 24, 2005 at 08:17 PM

"All modern art is crap" & "Stuff you don't like? Just move on" are two sides of the same approach to art. Neither statement is art criticism & represents an unpreparedness to engage in an important debate about how it is no longer possible to apply the criteria of fifty years ago to art that is being made today. I believe that Grayson Perry is right; any set of standards by which you might judge whether art is art simply because the artist says it is or that it's art because it meets certain definite requirements no longer works for what is being produced now. The 'lost' standards were also accompanied by a catalogue of class, gender & race bias as well as preferences re. the instruments that were used for art making, the methods of presentation & the house in which art was shown. Art is now made cheaply, by more people formerly excluded from acknowledgment, displayed as the artist wishes & in places as random as preferred. There's also more of it & it is no longer possible, I believe, to have universal knowledge of what art is being made & apply common ways of judging to it all.

Posted by: john | October 25, 2005 at 01:05 PM

tim noble and sue webster are true lazy cash grabbers. Life style do nothings. pose and think. sell an idea to a moneyed prat and crawl into an art dump.

Posted by: albie | January 09, 2008 at 12:36 PM