I don't usually want to get into unanswerable questions like "What is Art?"; it's not something most of us give a second thought to, even if art interests us a great deal. After all, what sports fan needs to ask "What is sport?" (although someone should probably be asking this about "breaking" and skateboarding, recently included in the Olympics). You know it when you see it. But here are two extracts from some things I read recently that, in their different ways, together offer an interesting perspective on the nature of the artistic enterprise:
It’s not that I don’t want to be understood, but I can’t, like Spielberg, say, make a film for the general public—I’d be mortified if I discovered I could. If you want to reach a general audience, you have to make films like Star Wars and Superman which have nothing to do with art. This doesn’t mean I treat the public like idiots, but I certainly don’t take pains to please them. Andrei Tarkovsky (Sight and Sound, Winter 1982-1983)
I love literary fiction, but there are ways and means of getting away with a mediocre literary fiction book where there isn’t a way of getting away with a mediocre mainstream book. Richard Osman, from a conversation between Lee Child and Richard Osman (Guardian, 14 September 2024)
Put another way, not all pictures are "art", but – certainly on the evidence of most recent exhibitions – it is a lot easier to get away with poorly-crafted pictures when they are touted as art. In fact, an affectation of artlessness seems to have become a desirable characteristic of art. [1] Which has also had implications for photography, I think. Be patient, and we'll get there eventually.
I don't think it's controversial to suggest that at some point in the history of the West (as in, the inheritors of the legacy of European culture) "art" levanted [2] from its long-term partnership with "craft" and set up shop as a separate category of endeavour in its own right. The point of departure is generally located by art historians somewhere in the eighteenth century, but the parting of the ways only really got going in the nineteenth and early twentieth, when artists – it's often said in reaction to the invention of photography – began to ascribe to themselves and their work various intangible properties, formerly the preserve of religion, and sought to raise their efforts to a level above those of former partner, craft, as well as the mere verisimilitude of that upstart contender, photography.
The creative life has always been a gamble, but making paint-marks on a piece of canvas came to be regarded by some as a quasi-sacramental act, worth enduring poverty and hunger, and which required total commitment to a life outside conventional society – even conventional artistic society – like the desert hermits of the early Christian centuries. See Van Gogh; see Gauguin. Others were able to monetize this mystification of the act of painting – see Monet; see Picasso – and lived the comfortable life of bohemian aristocrats.
Since then, the art that excites the auction halls and attracts deep-pocketed art-abductors [3] has become the equivalent of a share certificate: worthless in itself – just some paint on a canvas – but a token promising a potentially enormous monetary return (or loss...) to its possessor. Or perhaps it's more like a cheque (remember those?) drawn on a bank with a famous name but which may or may not already have gone out of business. That bank being wherever those self-ascribed, intangible, quasi-religious properties are kept; the woo-woo reserves of art, you might say.
But I went over this ground fairly thoroughly a few years ago in the post Reformation (still worth a read, I think). What I really wanted to say is that art seems to have been having its belated revenge on photography. How? Well, let's start by stating the obvious, the "why". Whatever did photography do to painting in the first place?
So somewhere around 1840, the painter Paul Delaroche saw a daguerreotype, and is alleged to have exclaimed, "From today, painting is dead!" (although in French, obviously: «La peinture est morte, à dater de ce jour!»). If you've ever seen a good daguerreotype – they really are far more impressive than any photograph on paper – you'll understand how he felt. They are spellbinding, like little magic windows onto an exquisitely precise re-rendering of reality, far beyond what anyone could achieve with traditional art materials and techniques, no matter how talented. Which is why there has been no painting at all ever since, and why artists have been spoiling for revenge.
Well, not exactly. But something major did happen. Very few painters since then have bothered to acquire the complex set of skills, passed down from master to apprentice for centuries, that were needed to become even a third-rate painter of the sort of work that fills the most boring rooms in every major gallery. How far photography was responsible for this is debatable; the invention of paint in portable tubes around the same time also played a big part in this change. Not to mention the rise of the bourgeoisie, the decline of the church and aristocracy as patrons of the arts, blah, blah, blah... But you already know all this.
But let's blame photography. Upshot: painting was transformed from the painstaking reproduction of the way things and people look (when painted, anyway) into the extravagantly colourful and free making of marks. Bold self-expression was elevated over the careful disciplines of craft, which was not necessarily a good thing (ask any conservator) or a pretty sight; some delved selves are downright unpleasant. Suddenly, massive deposits were being paid into those woo-woo reserves of art, in the form of competing manifestos and declarations of artistic intent and independence. And how we have all loved those Fauvists, Impressionists, Expressionists, Cubists, and Whatever-else-ists, ever since! They are the benchmark of what most of us regard as art. But when we want reliable, indexical representations of how the world actually looked at any given moment, unadorned and uninterpreted, then we turn to photography, not "art".
At some point in the later twentieth century this lively orgy of impish bubble-bursting had cooled into an austere, black-polo-necked orthodoxy that disapproved of displays of self-expression and craft skill as reactionary hand-waving, a view which found a congenial home in many of the art schools. As with atonal music, the more baffling the general public found their art, the better the polo-neck crowd liked it. Like Tarkovsky's quotation above, this didn’t mean they were treating the public like idiots, but they certainly weren’t taking any pains to please us. Any appeal to popularity such as the creation of colourful confections relying on the deeply suspect appeal of "beauty" was just plain embarrassing. What, you still want to paint like the Expressionists? Puh-lease! Didn't you get the memo?
Ideas were the thing, not craft or self-expression. Life-drawing and other venerable survivals of the painterly skill-set were banished, and conceptual art, installations, video, and – yes! – photography took their place. But this photography was not photography as understood by, um, photographers.
Ah, photographers... How badly so many of us want our work to be acknowledged not just as photography, but as art. And yet so few of us follow any medium other than photography, or inform ourselves about actual contemporary art practices and concerns, or even visit exhibitions or buy books of photography that is acknowledged as art. But the thing is, the attraction of the camera for academy-trained "artists using photography" is that it is a mechanical tool which enables them to pull off the cake-and-eat-it trick of deploying "indexical" representation, but without those embarrassingly démodé taints of craft skill or – yuk – "beauty" (unless self-evidently ironic). So the more drably hands-off and uncompromised by any suspect expressive baggage their photographs are the better. Which, obviously, is precisely the opposite of what is valued and vaunted by self-declared, craft-worshipping "fine art" photographers, with their calendar-ready landscapes, "painterly" abstracts, and overcooked "surrealism". So last century... Do keep up, guys!
Now, the fact is that most wannabe artists, whether academy-trained or amateur, are not brainiac intellectuals, endowed with the capacity for original thought, much less era-defining artistic talents, but simply dedicated followers of fashion. So when those affectless, bleak, and faux-naïve photographs started to seep out of the art schools, mainly in the form of expensive books from prestigious publishers, certain ambitious photographers took note – so that's where it's at now! – and followed suit. Advanced skills, personal style, beauty? No thanks! We get it now: the world is sad and disenchanted and we're all doomed, so grey is the colour, and prosaic is the word. These may look like barely competent, humdrum snapshots, but that's because they are art, see? There is no craft, no self-expression, none of that "beauty" nonsense here, but that's all on purpose... Which makes all the difference. And where they led, others followed. So that's where it's at now!
And Art laughed in triumph. The long game had paid off: revenge at last... Now, where did I hide those brushes and paints?
1. See, for example, the work of Rose Wylie or Humphrey Ocean, both Royal Academicians.
2. My favourite new word, acquired from Language Hat (no relation).
3. What we should call those who buy artworks and imprison them in vaults, never to be seen in public again.
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