Scribe on Art

SEEKING FAME through art is, to paraphrase the infamous and elusive graffiti artist Banksy, like going to a restaurant and ordering a meal because you want to have a shit. Instead, he argues fame is only deserved when one has made ‘something that means something’. Fame, then, is a by-product - the shit after the meal, if you will; something maybe predictable but not the initial intention. Whether one agrees with this (as I do) or not, this begs the question ‘what is it that is valuable about art?’. For some it is the effort and thus proportionate end result that makes art worthwhile. For others it is the fact that the art exists at all.

It has become fashionable of late to bludgeon the question ‘what is art, anyway?’ over the heads of art critics; amateur and professional alike. This form of nihilism and readiness to embrace relativism both alarms and annoys me. Whilst staying in Edinburgh with a friend I found myself embroiled in a heated and admittedly alcohol-fuelled debate on the definition and value of art. The young lady I was speaking to informed me she was studying art at College (giving her, in her mind no doubt, the trump card when it came to quality of opinion). Predictably we arrived at one controversial area; ‘what IS art?’.

It insults my intelligence to be told that something that the ‘artist’ spent little time and thought on actually has a deep meaning which goes part way to exploring the soul and nature of man. Or some such pretentious bollocks. In fact, I can’t decide which is worse; those appalling messes which take little time to produce, or those which have tens of thousands of pounds spent on them in research, ‘prototypes’ and sourcing. At least Artist A had the decency to only spend a few hours knocking together Untitled Waste of Space I and is now contentedly applying meaning to it, whereas Artist B spent nine months debating how to go about his work. In the end, of course, only to product Unoriginal Shite-Pile II. Artist A, after all, had the manners to get his artistic spewing over with quickly. On the other hand though, at least Artist B is tied up in his work for a fair while, and not free to run amok concocting other monstrosities within hours’ notice like his less-forward planning associate.

To be fair, the term ‘monstrosity’ is the wrong one to be using. Whilst I can fully understand and appreciate works of art which I find aesthetically distasteful, what is more distressing is viewing something—be it a sculpture, painting or amorphous mass of mouldy socks—which is actually pleasurable to behold yet means nothing. No matter how much the artist maintains it represents an ironic take on anti-capitalist post-war Scarbourgh. For me, the quality of art is usually, but not always, is in proportion to the time, effort and genuine skill that has gone into its production. Some modern works of art require little or no skill, yet critics of this ambiguous genre are made to feel intellectually lacking; as though they are somehow missing a deep point, and don't have to deepness of thought to appreciate a tent with names painted on, or, say, a bird on a stick (yes, Emin, this means you).

It would be fair, I think, for one to feel rather cheated if upon going to an art museum the art on show is so 'open to interpretation' that the onus is decidedly on the beholder to fill in the gaps, give meaning, and make entertainment. Theatre producers hardly develop a production which requires the audience to attend and provide sound effects, the odd line, decide upon the stage directions and maybe decide on just what the outcome is.

Oh dear... I fear may just have just given someone, somewhere, an embryonic-stage Turner Prize...