Here comes yet another round in my ongoing grapple with the values of the contemporary art-world; this time the bell was sounded by the Victoria Miro Gallery's newsletter. Seconds out!
So, imagine this scenario: you've moved to a new house, and in the garden shed, or up in the loft, you find the painting above. It's on a canvas not much larger than a sheet of A4, just like the ones you can buy ready-stretched in any art store that caters to hobbyists. Do you think:
a). Wow! This is an amazing painting, and might even be worth a lot of money! We'd better decide whether to keep it – it would look great on the living room wall – or take it to an auction house for a valuation. What idiots, to leave something like this behind!
or
b). Bloody hell! Why won't people do something with their junk before they leave? Mind you, I'm not surprised they left this risible piece of crap behind. Somebody out there needs to find another hobby! I'll break it up and put it in the bin.
Your call. I think you can probably guess that I'm going with (b).
This particular painting is by an artist I had never come across before, Etel Adnan. It is just 24 x 30 cm (9.5" x 11.75"), so very small by today's standards; as I say, not much larger than a sheet of A4. Note the effusive puff to the right. If you can't read it, it says, "Etel Adnan juxtaposed brilliantly coloured geometric forms to evoke with bracing succinctness the eternal landscape verities of sun, sea and sky", and is signed by Christopher Riopelle, who happens to be curator of post-1800 paintings at the National Gallery, London. So someone who, let's be honest, ought to know a lot more about painting than you or me.
Here is how the gallery describes Atnan:
Etel Adnan was born in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1925 and died in Paris, France, in 2021. An acclaimed poet, novelist and artist, she began painting in her thirties and gained widespread recognition as a visual artist through her inclusion in Documenta 13 in 2012. Adnan developed a distinct visual language, one rooted in colour, form and intuition, as her abstract paintings sought to capture the essence of land, sea, sky and cosmos. She revered nature and believed that its power was revealed through colour. She described painting as an impulsive act, completing each work in a single sitting, working indoors and entirely from memory. Laying the stretched canvas flat, like a page on a table, she applied oil paint directly with a palette knife, creating planes of colour that convey a placeless landscape from afar and reveal a brilliant intensity upon close observation.
So here is yet another apparently notable figure whose name I, in my casually parochial way, had never come across before, but whose work looks to me, I'm afraid I have to say, like the efforts of some well-intentioned but cack-handed Sunday painter. A fuller account of her life and career can be read here, courtesy of the White Cube Gallery. It seems she is one of that populous diaspora of cosmopolitan, multilingual academics and artists who fled the Middle East at various junctures and found congenial new lives in Europe and the USA.
Now, it goes without saying that you don't get to exhibit in such upscale spaces as Miro and White Cube, where the prices are such that they're only available "on enquiry", without having made something of a reputation for yourself. How such reputations get made is an interesting subject, but one you could only really tackle at book length. Many are called, but few are chosen, and all the roads to a bankable reputation are treacherous. But it is revealing that, according to the White Cube biographical sketch:
It was not until her mid-thirties, while teaching Philosophy of Art and Aesthetics at Dominican College in San Rafael, California, that she started painting. The head of art, Ann O’Hanlan, asked how she could teach philosophy of art and not practice art herself. Adnan replied, 'Because my mother said that I was clumsy.' 'And you believed her?' At first she used crayons, scraping them flat over remnants of paper from the art department before using up the ends of oil tubes with a knife. This new language of spontaneous gesture, infused with Californian light, offered a liberation from the constraint of writing in the formal language of her upbringing. ‘I didn’t need to write in French any more’, she said, ‘I was going to paint in Arabic’. ’
So, in effect, Adnan was a Sunday painter, but one with a ready-made reputation in other fields. And it seems that being an academic and poet brings more cachet and more gravitas to your painting efforts than, say, being a Rolling Stone, a Beatle, or even a James Bond.
What strikes me more, though, is that her mother had a point. Paintings like these (and hers are all like this) are clumsy: an idea for an image has been transferred to canvas with no apparent regard for skill, or the subtler qualities of paint and mark-making. Talk of "spontaneous gestures" seems very far from the mark: this is graffiti by numbers. I am very much reminded of some work I came across back in June 2017, described in the post So Bad It's Bad.
Compare that painting with this print, say, by Richard Smith, to pick something pretty much at random from my digital scrapbook:
It follows that all judgements of whether a painting is "competent", "good", or even "excellent" are also supplied by the viewer, and clearly some viewers of greater influence and sophistication than me have supplied some very favourable judgements indeed when gazing upon the work of Etel Adnan. Obviously, we are all entitled to our strong views about the sort of thing we like, but it will always be people who have arrived at positions of aesthetic authority, like Christopher Riopelle, who will ultimately determine whose work is dismissed as derivative kitschy crap and whose gets elevated to a world-class contribution to culture.
To the typical art civilian, though, the difference between the two can seem ... confusing. Jeff Koons good, but Jack Vettriano bad? Huh... OK, if you say so... Few people who care about art have the confidence (or the ignorance) to be totally independent in their tastes, and if you are aware of what the cultural authorities think, then you may well realign your views accordingly, whether consciously or not. The story of "The Emperor's New Clothes" is so insightful in this regard. Except, in its contemporary version, the ending has been changed. The wisest, most art-savvy advisor to the Emperor says to the boy, "But of course he has no clothes! That's the whole point... Here, read the artist's statement!"
So if you, like me, admire Smith's "Sun Curtain" or Khan's "Time Present, Time Past" – I'd love to find one of those hiding in my loft – but consider Etel Adnan's "Untitled" canvas to be merely bin-worthy, then good for you. But our opinions do not matter, when it comes to the mysterious and distinctly undemocratic business of making artistic reputations. With the result that, whereas I think it's safe to say that anyone could easily knock out something similar, or indeed identical to an Adnan canvas, they would surely never be able to persuade anyone to buy it with the "wrong" name attached to it, never mind hand over however many thousands the "real" thing sells for. Unless... No, stop right now, don't even think about it. But the temptation must be there: bankable paintings as characterless and technically crude as this are surely any art forger's dream.
As a loosely-connected afterword, in the Guardian's review of David Hockney's latest show in London – a gigantic frieze of 100 joined-up iPad paintings – Ben Eastham makes an interesting observation:
Hockney’s work, for a decade after about 1963, should likewise be treasured for disproving the lie (maintained by those who prefer to read about paintings than look at them) that great art must be difficult to comprehend, despise the everyday world, and remain inaccessible to a wider public.
But then, lamentably, the critical sniping seemed to catch up with Hockney. Whether because he was anxious to be taken seriously or had run out of steam, an era-defining painter retreated into ill-advised historical dialogues with Picasso and Van Gogh, and started experimenting with media from set design to fax machines (with mixed results). And so our greatest pop artist entered his jazz phase.
"Those who prefer to read about paintings than look at them", "jazz phase": nicely put, I think. And, as someone very nearly said on BBC Radio 4's Front Row: Will somebody do us and Hockney a favour and hide that bloody iPad?
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