Reformation

Genuine imitation Bonnard: £65

[Portentous voice]: Previously on Idiotic Hat:

I suppose a major factor in my liking for multiples is that, like so many of us from small-town backgrounds, I acquired my tastes in art from books, posters, magazines and colour supplements, and never saw many actual examples of the "real thing" until my late teens. The real thing, it turned out, was often disappointingly crude, compared to a good reproduction. Of course, the imperfections that might, to you or me, seem like "crudeness" in a painting – the layered corrections and brushstrokes, the reliance on easy but expressive effects, the poor finishing, and all those qualities that announce "made by hand" – are the very things that are admired by those who put a high value (aesthetic and monetary) on the uniqueness of a work of art. Some people, after all, like to drink their coffee from some bulbous, warty, stoneware mug bought from an artisan's stall, whereas I prefer the smooth, functional perfection of industrially-produced china.

I thought I might return to the question of the high value placed by some on the uniqueness of a work of art. Or perhaps "exclusivity" is the better choice of word.

I realise this is ground covered by one of the classics of "theory", Walter Benjamin's essay of 1936, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction". Many years ago (in 1976 – longer ago now, scarily, than 1936 was then) I was a postgraduate student enrolled in a Master's degree in Comparative Literature, and this was prominent in the list of required reading. Since then, thousands of students have dutifully read this seminal text and, it seems to me, most have failed to understand it. Unsurprising, as it's a tough read, and it's clear Benjamin's heart and head are not quite in the same place when it comes to the "proletarianization" of culture. I think much the same could be said about John Berger in Ways of Seeing, which to an extent is a popularisation of Benjamin's ideas about the significance of the mass availability of art in reproduction versus the "aura" of the unique, original work. It was clearly hard for Marx-influenced (Marxish?) art-lovers who had grown up worshipping the Old Masters and their modern inheritors to acknowledge that the objects of their adoration were, in some profound way, tainted and on the wrong side of history.

On the other hand, the farsightedness of old-school intellectuals writing at the very onset of modernity never ceases to amaze me. Consider this from Paul Valéry, as quoted in Benjamin's essay:

Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so shall we be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign.

Now that was written in 1928 ("The Conquest of Ubiquity"). Thirty years later, no doubt, it was taken as a foreshadowing of the exciting new medium of TV. Ninety years later, we can look back in some amusement and think: not so fast! Perhaps one reason we lack comparable futurological soothsayers today is our enhanced awareness of how quickly technological reality outstrips and wrong-foots imagination. Of course, once we introduce the internet into the picture, the whole "cheap(er) multiples" vs. "expensive one-offs" argument looks rather dated. Valéry was right: high quality images and sounds are now available to anyone with a broadband connection more or less on tap and at negligible cost, even compared to the very cheapest poster or print. And we won't even mention the daily inundation with yet more photographs.

But "original" art (and let's take paintings to represent all art) still sells, and sometimes at extraordinary prices. If we accept the risk of accusations of bean-counting philistinism, I think we are entitled to to ask some bluntly un-aesthetic questions. For a start, what is a painting – particularly one that costs a significant multiple of an average annual income – for? What need does it satisfy that something far cheaper like a print, or a good, mass-produced reproduction, or indeed a computer display does not satisfy? Mega-rich collectors aside (for whom a work of art represents not so much an aesthetic experience as a financial investment to be secured in a bank-vault – let's call them art-abductors) what can anyone do with such a painting in a domestic environment, other than hang it on the wall, occasionally admire it or show it off, but in the main ignore it as part of the furniture and background noise of day-to-day life?

In a way, you might say that – like any luxury item – what such a painting is for is pretty much to be as expensive as possible: it's a so-called Veblen good. In the scheme of things, a £500 painting is practically a giveaway, and even a £5,000 painting is still moderately cheap. But £50,000? Or £500,000? Now we're talking! Look, we've got loadsamoney! But why should any bit of canvas or board covered in paint-marks be worth more than a luxury car or even a typical family house?

To most people, I think, a high price is an implicit guarantee of high quality; in art this is further justified not so much by the high cost of labour, production, and materials as by the supposed scarcity of true talent. But the association of quality and/or talent with prices on the Veblen scale is secondary, and probably illusory; we're really talking about the association of price with status. And status need have nothing to do with quality. After all, a pair of plain but hand-made, bespoke leather shoes is going to cost you a lot of money. For all I know, they might even be worth it – I have very wide feet, and have terrible trouble finding comfortable shoes – but as a status object they'd be pretty unremarkable. But a pair of factory-made, ostentatiously "designer" trainers turned out in off-the-shelf sizes? High price, yes; status, yes; quality, no. Status is never an intrinsic or implicit property, it seems, and can only ever really exist in other people's eyes.

"High quality" is also not the same thing as "high aesthetic value". I choose my smooth, industrial china mug for its coffee-drinking qualities, which is not an aesthetic category, in the western mind, at least; it's a perfectly made object, but aesthetically rather marred by the, um, trite slogan perfectly printed on it. These things are obviously very subjective, but there can be no doubt that, for example, Michael Craig-Martin's "An Oak Tree" has been a highly influential work, even though its component parts are ready-made, cheap, and deliberately devoid of any sign of "craftsmanship". Its significance alone makes it a high status work of art, although I've no idea whether Craig-Martin ever had the chutzpah to offer it for sale, or at what price. By contrast, I remember visiting the workshop of furniture-maker John Makepeace at Parnham in Dorset about twenty years ago, and being shocked by the price of his extravagant re-interpretations of basic household items like tables and chairs. Sure, a lot of skilled handicraft had been applied to a lot of lovely wood, but who wants or needs a set of over-thought, over-wrought dining chairs at £5,000 each, when a set of perfectly attractive and functional chairs can be bought for rather less?

Well, we can imagine who. So, cards on the table: I do not believe anyone in guilt-free possession of a large fortune and an urge to spend it on hyper-priced, high-status objets d'art is truly capable of meaningful aesthetic judgement. There is an inherent ugliness in all de luxe articles produced for the exclusive delectation of the super-rich, isn't there? Like financial advice, the wealthy can hire in purveyors of "good taste", but their very condition prevents them from ever developing it themselves. This may sound harsh, and may even be untrue, but it is no more untrue than the idea that very poor people have no capacity to respond to the best in art or, worse, that they somehow deserve the quotidian bleakness that too often surrounds them. No: if we believe that no-one is free until everyone is free, then surely it follows that the rich cannot exculpate themselves from the systematic squalor their wealth has created, simply by spending improbably large sums of money on art. Which, you might say, is the 21st-century equivalent of buying indulgences from the mediaeval church.

Most art is not expensive, of course, and thus relatively status-free. In truth, most self-declared "artists" are really makers of crafts, turning out variations on much the same harmless, decorative still-lifes, landscapes, pots, and prints that have enlivened middle-class homes ever since the Bloomsbury crowd brought their soft-furnishings-friendly aesthetic to interior decoration. Such folk do not expect or want to lead a 1% lifestyle [1], and their price-tags reflect this: tens or a few hundreds of pounds, and rarely nudging the thousands. Their work usually shows some slight twist on a well-established genre, so that – even if "unique" – it is rarely original or significant in art-historical terms. But if you're after a crusty stoneware mug, a hand-made greetings card, or a watercolour to match the new sofa, you know where to look. In a paradoxical way, these works are often so similar that you could regard them as hand-crafted multiples, produced in small, distributed quantities like some pre-industrial cottage industry.

Even in the niche above the craft-folk, where artists of genuine accomplishment but modest worldly success reside, we don't generally get into the truly high-status, Veblen-scale territory. Some of these may be yesterday's stars, still plugging away in a studio somewhere, sustained by the success of their early years, perhaps hoping for a retrospective or an upturn in their reputation. Some will be relative unknowns, earning their living by teaching, or some other day job which threatens perpetually to displace any actual art-making. Others will be creative dynamos, simply too busy making stuff to think about anything else; an assistant, a spouse, or a gallery will be handling the business end, such as it is, and they probably have no idea how much or how little cash goes into the bank (or is diverted into the gallery's account). Their prices can be surprisingly modest, particularly when it comes to those genuinely hand-crafted multiples, prints. You can get a signed, limited edition print from Tom Phillips's Humument series for a few hundred pounds, for example. Although you might even consider that a bit steep, considering you can get an entire hardback book of the final edition of A Humument, brand new, for less than £20. Now that's a multiple. It's even available as an inexpensive app for the iPad.

But then there are the few, the internationally-acclaimed, platinum-plated art superstars, with teams of assistants and a place seemingly pre-booked in the art histories, if only in the chapter entitled "Whatever Were We Thinking?". Such artists – who presumably hoped all along to be joining the ranks of the wealthy – are marketed by exclusive galleries as, essentially, one-person luxury brands. They – or rather, their products – are pure status, or will be for as long as their brand stays in fashion. A distinctive, easily-recognised trademark style is essential, which is presumably why Damien Hirst is prepared to take legal action against anyone using "his" coloured spots. Plus, of course, there needs to be the crucial endorsement and reassurance provided to the anxious customer by that Veblen-scale price-tag, falling in a range denoted by the old quip: "if you have to ask how much it is, you can't afford it". Which galleries tend to rephrase as POA: "price on application" [2].

So why should the work of these latter types be worth quite so much more money than anyone else's? I suppose that's really a question only a silver-tongued gallerist or a very wealthy art-buyer could answer. I certainly don't know, other than to say that art by bankable names seems a pretty solid way of laundering investing very large sums of money at any time, but especially when interest rates are approaching ever closer to zero. So long, of course, as they remain "bankable". There is clearly a corresponding need to limit the supply of celebrity artists, who embody whatever it is wealthy people and their advisors currently think art is all about. Determining who these are is the essential mystery of the high-end art market, but there is clearly something fundamentally wrong, not to say corrupt, going on in that world. Contemporary art by here today, gone tomorrow art celebrities can surely never actually be worth that kind of money. Unlike land, not only are they still making it, but it gets made in ever greater quantities: it is certainly not a shortage of art that is driving prices ever upwards.

Now, I don't want to get into hand-wavy arguments about the value of art, or its relative importance compared to, say, professional sport or medical research. So, let's be bold, let's point a finger straight at the naked emperor's arse, and make the provocative proposal that paintings have very little intrinsic value at all. Practically none. All it would take is a change in the aesthetic weather to render your multi-million pound canvas covered in scribbles, dribbles, and smears worthless. Whatever magic is embedded within those paint-marks is at least 50% a product of the viewer's personal psychology, like a Rorschach inkblot, with a healthy dealer's percentage of hocus pocus and wishful thinking thrown in. As Michael Craig-Martin demonstrated decades ago, for the purposes of art a glass of water on a high shelf is an oak tree. Just believe!

Of course, celebrity culture affects everything, at all levels, these days. I was following an online fund-raising "secret postcard" auction at the Royal West of England Academy recently, for which RWA fellows and guest artists had been invited to submit anonymous, postcard-sized works, signed on the back. Bids started at £50, with the slightly disingenuous promise that you might end up with the work of a famous artist at a bargain price. There were some very attractive pieces on offer, but there was also a surprising amount of awful "phoned-in" tat. It was transparent, however, to anyone who follows contemporary art with even half an eye that certain pieces were by Antony Gormley, Grayson Perry, and a few other Big Names. In the end, most pieces achieved a modest price somewhere between £50 and £500 – I made a bid myself on what was clearly a Susan Derges print, but was outbid almost instantly – but, inevitably, these few celebrity-artist postcards attracted the most attention and went for far more: several thousands each. Which was nice for the RWA, obviously – over £100K was raised in total – but a bit of an indictment of our collective susceptibility to celeb-culture. I mean, seriously? £4,500 for a postcard-sized, felt-pen drawing – a cartoon, really – of a tranny in stack heels on a BMX bike, simply because it was so obviously by Grayson Perry? I suppose a charitable interpretation might be that it was Perry himself who bought it (or perhaps it was his gallery), pushing up the price to keep his market value buoyant, whilst adding generously to the finances of the RWA. Otherwise, some fool somewhere will soon be suffering an acute case of buyer's remorse.

Paintings are great, I really enjoy looking at them, but I do not believe in art as a sort of quasi-religion, in which some higher reality is mediated to us via its anointed priestly practitioners, and which we can only get really close to by immersing ourselves in the "aura" of the Real Presence, preferably by constructing our own private chapel at enormous expense. Particularly when the sermons of the most fashionable contemporary preachers turn out to be all about art about art. In fact, I take the ultra-protestant line that art is best thought of as a verb, not a noun: it's about the "doing and viewing", not a message to be conveyed, or a product to be bought and sold. Perhaps the most profound lesson of photography is that, with properly-adjusted eyes, just looking at the world can be more than enough "art" for anybody. Which doesn't mean you can't look at art: it's part of the world, too.

So, down with indulgences! Down with priests! Down with simony! [3] Some sort of Reformation in art is long overdue. To paraphrase Diderot, humanity will not be free until the last private art-abductor has been strangled with the entrails of the last art-dealer. But here's a thought: if I were to be put in charge of such things, I would introduce a law – the Idiotic Art Reformation Act – that said that no single work of art, ancient or modern, could be sold or resold at a value above, say, the average annual salary of a state secondary school headteacher. And any work achieving that valuation would automatically have to be offered to a public gallery or national collection at that same price for first refusal. Can I get a witness?

Look! The truth is out there... (Uffizi Gallery, 2016)

1. Although it is striking how many craft-artists live comfortable lives in highly-desirable rural locations. It is also striking how many are married to high-earning professionals... Whether and how anyone should expect to make an independent living from making art is an interesting question, but one for another time.

2. I have occasionally bothered to follow up a POA invitation on the phone, if only to give myself (and the gallery) the satisfaction of gasping, "HOW much?? You cannot be serious!" 

3. I refuse to make a joke along the lines of "And down with Garfunkely, too!". This is serious stuff! Oh, go on then...