ART FOR WHOSE SAKE?
Like many things I discovered the pleasures of the visual arts in my late teens. In all the years I spent at school I never recall visiting a public art gallery once. Sometime in the early seventies I fell in love, I’m tempted to say of course, with the Impressionists, with Manet, Degas Renoir, Toulouse Lautrec. It was sometime later when sitting in the Hayward that I experienced the powerful, stimulating, curious and even numinous interaction that can take place when faced with a great painting.
Like most people I am not as knowledgeable about the visual arts as I would like, but I do know that deprived of the incredible and intense experience that great painting and sculpture can induce life would be immeasurably poorer. Unfortunately in this culture it is all too common for the arts to be viewed as an elitist interest not for the ‘ordinary’ people.
Which brings me to the Turner Prize; now I cannot remember how many years ago it is that the prize was awarded to a stack, one must admit of perfectly symmetrical, bricks, a choice viewed with incredulity by many and widely mocked. However the fear among your average would be intellectual of being accused of philistinism being great I attempted to understand the aesthetic of the piece. However despite reading a number of ‘informed’ articles I was none the wiser. I did however have a relationship, albeit somewhat fleeting, with bricks. For brief periods in the early seventies I had worked cash in hand, on a number of building sites. On one particular Saturday stacking bricks, I have to say my own efforts were less than symmetrical, what I do remember is it cut my hands to bits, the aesthetic of my own work however seems to have passed me by.
It is possible that someone somewhere feels a shudder of pleasure, of insight or alternative possibilities when surveying a pile of bricks, that I am too dense, just don’t get it. Alternatively there is the possibility that the King is not wearing any clothes, that if it dressed up like piffle, looks like piffle, sounds like piffle, it is just possibly piffle.
It is not possible to understand the development of 20th Century art without understanding Dada. The movement itself was fleeting, lasting a mere few years after the 1st World War, its impact however was out of all proportion to its size. Famously in 1917 Marcel Duchamp submitted a signed urinal entitled Fountain as an art exhibit; though his anti ‘art’ joke backfired posthumously when in 2004 Fountain came top of a poll of 500 art experts in the run-up to that year's Turner Prize. I quote:-
“ ….it reflects the dynamic nature of art today and the idea that the creative process that goes into a work of art is the most important thing - the work itself can be made of anything and can take any form."
It was I think Tom Lehrer who said of Henry Kissinger being awarded the nobel peace prize that it was the day that satire died. Perhaps the art eqivalant was the auctioning of Fountain by Marcel Dauchamp, the day that irony in art perished.
Of more concern in all of this is the fact that the more art retreats into a tiny self selecting clique, speaking a closed and excluding language, the more it removes itself from the lives of the majority, the poorer society as a whole becomes. Art, of course has always been a minority pursuit; however one necessarily rooted in the society out of which it emerges. The greater the strain placed upon this connection the more art looses its relevance and authenticity. Moreover in an age when serious art requires public subsidy the more this contempt for public opinion threatens the whole project of an engaged and relevant art that asks serious and occasionally frivolous questions. As I say whatever the truth I do not intend to be intimidated by the charge of philistinism from engaging in the debate.
Like most people I am not as knowledgeable about the visual arts as I would like, but I do know that deprived of the incredible and intense experience that great painting and sculpture can induce life would be immeasurably poorer. Unfortunately in this culture it is all too common for the arts to be viewed as an elitist interest not for the ‘ordinary’ people.
Which brings me to the Turner Prize; now I cannot remember how many years ago it is that the prize was awarded to a stack, one must admit of perfectly symmetrical, bricks, a choice viewed with incredulity by many and widely mocked. However the fear among your average would be intellectual of being accused of philistinism being great I attempted to understand the aesthetic of the piece. However despite reading a number of ‘informed’ articles I was none the wiser. I did however have a relationship, albeit somewhat fleeting, with bricks. For brief periods in the early seventies I had worked cash in hand, on a number of building sites. On one particular Saturday stacking bricks, I have to say my own efforts were less than symmetrical, what I do remember is it cut my hands to bits, the aesthetic of my own work however seems to have passed me by.
It is possible that someone somewhere feels a shudder of pleasure, of insight or alternative possibilities when surveying a pile of bricks, that I am too dense, just don’t get it. Alternatively there is the possibility that the King is not wearing any clothes, that if it dressed up like piffle, looks like piffle, sounds like piffle, it is just possibly piffle.
It is not possible to understand the development of 20th Century art without understanding Dada. The movement itself was fleeting, lasting a mere few years after the 1st World War, its impact however was out of all proportion to its size. Famously in 1917 Marcel Duchamp submitted a signed urinal entitled Fountain as an art exhibit; though his anti ‘art’ joke backfired posthumously when in 2004 Fountain came top of a poll of 500 art experts in the run-up to that year's Turner Prize. I quote:-
“ ….it reflects the dynamic nature of art today and the idea that the creative process that goes into a work of art is the most important thing - the work itself can be made of anything and can take any form."
It was I think Tom Lehrer who said of Henry Kissinger being awarded the nobel peace prize that it was the day that satire died. Perhaps the art eqivalant was the auctioning of Fountain by Marcel Dauchamp, the day that irony in art perished.
Of more concern in all of this is the fact that the more art retreats into a tiny self selecting clique, speaking a closed and excluding language, the more it removes itself from the lives of the majority, the poorer society as a whole becomes. Art, of course has always been a minority pursuit; however one necessarily rooted in the society out of which it emerges. The greater the strain placed upon this connection the more art looses its relevance and authenticity. Moreover in an age when serious art requires public subsidy the more this contempt for public opinion threatens the whole project of an engaged and relevant art that asks serious and occasionally frivolous questions. As I say whatever the truth I do not intend to be intimidated by the charge of philistinism from engaging in the debate.
