INFANTILISATION OF ART, ARTIST< AUDIENCE AND GALLERY SPACE

LEGITIMISED BY THE ART JOURNALIST

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OCTOBER 3, 2017 by Rachel Spence

https://www.ft.com/content/bff11858-a838-11e7-ab66-21cc87a2edde

 

Here is our latest pick and example of how spectacularly stupid art journalism -this time in the Financial Times- legitimises the infantilisation of art, artist and audience, turning the gallery into a literal playground. The fact that the author of this article compares the metal bars around the swings with doorways in Hammershoi paintings, that she sees the stripes on the cosy carpet for the visitors to lie on as a subtle hint to sterling notes - and gets away with it - beggars belief. We are even told that '[...] the “collective power”used to set the swing in motion can “potentially change the world”.

 

Superflex's Hyundai commission in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall

 

[...] At intervals, the bars morph into doorway-like openings whose presence sounds a deeper note. From Renaissance Annunciations to the mysterious interiors of Danish 19th-century painter Vilhelm Hammershøi, thresholds in art always possess a numinous quality. Here, they remind me of lines by the American poet and activist Adrienne Rich, when she wrote: “The fact of a doorframe/means there is something to hold/on to with both hands” in a poem which goes on to lament the suffering of the dispossessed and powerless. [...] social conscience is the presiding anima of Superflex’s work.

 

“One Two Three Swing!” is more than just a playground. It is a metaphor for the collective endeavour that is essential if we are to build a happier, healthier world.

 

It’s no coincidence that the swings, though they do soar upwards if you are a sole rider, are designed for three people: a number which demands a genuine spirit of co-operation.

 

'The carpet’s joyful stripes are woven out of the same hues as those found on sterling notes. This mischievous nod to the UK’s isolationist tendency" [...] quiet insistence on the importance of joint effort. '

 

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'[...] a gentler, more imaginative approach to social equilibrium, one that acknowledges our interdependency without turning it into a justification for the persecution of those who do not fit in, feels welcome.'

 

For me, however, the enduring memory will be of visiting Tate Modern the day before the commission officially opened. Standing on the bridge, I looked down to where workers in high-vis jackets were assembling the swings. But the lure of flight proved too strong. Several operatives were soaring up in the air with wide grins. Playground, social project or power station, Tate Modern promises to be a warming refuge in the winter to come. To April 2, tate.org.uk

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"Cornelia Parker named as official artist of 2017 general election- Turner-nominated RA member, who will produce work of art about election, is first woman to take on role created in 2001"         

full article: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/may/01/cornelia-parker-2017-general-election-official-artist

 

Are we at artistunderground the only people who shudder at reading this? To quote Gerhard Richter: "Hostility to art is nothing new; it is, and has always been, part and parcel of all societies. If in Poland the Writer’s Union is banned, and artists - as in all dictatorships- are persecuted, this only represents the more brutal and direct side of the hostility that art has the capacity to provoke. 

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Our free democratic system has other ways of showing its hostility to art. Instead of banning art, the politicians and the state promote it on a gigantic scale, devoting vast resources to official art administration in museums, exhibition buildings, arts associations, giant exhibitions, festivals and congresses, and through an unconscionable deluge of publications - not to speak of the positively criminal subvention of the theatre. By these and countless other measures, art is warped, crippled, buried and murdered, replaced by mammoth quantities and mammoth sums of money.

 

Hosts of artists trained in this way work for a system wholly dedicated to administration and entertainment; it is they, more than anyone, who help to prevent and destroy art.”

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Gerhard Richter, Notes, 1984 [!]

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“Trying to make sense of his new surroundings, [the artist Do-Ho-Suh] attached GoPro cameras to his baby daughter’s stroller and filmed as he pushed her through the city’s parks. “We’re exploring the neighbourhood, and my daughter is exploring a whole new world.” Suh also filmed their walks on visits to his native Seoul, but it took him a few years to figure out how to turn the footage into an artwork. The solution was a three-channel video, ‘Passage/s: Pram Project.’”

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Julie L Belcove, Financial Times

https://www.ft.com/content/a187c15e-e287-11e6-9645-c9357a75844a

http://artdaily.com/news/93533/Do-Ho-Suh-s-first-exhibition-at-Victoria-Miro-on-view-in-London#.WJ2F0baLS35

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It beggars belief that there is a need to point out that this kind of 'work' and the way the Financial Times journalist reports on it without even the faintest hint of cynicism or criticism is NOT ok. We are not surprised that it took the artist five years to work out how to turn the pram footage into an 'artwork' - it should have taken him an eternity as there simply is no ground and foundation from which to make anything.  But this kind of work - desperate, vacuous, bored, stupid and infantile - buoyed by uncritical media coverage, is now part and parcel of the new norm of what art is, and is propagated in major galleries and museums worldwide. The critical silence is deafening.

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As an example for particularly low-level example of art journalism we would like to especially point out Jonathan Jones, art critic, writing for The Guardian. We have decided to select only three examples of this extremely low-level art journalism, which represent the countless he has written in the past and will continue to write. 

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On Wednesday 12 April 2017 in The Guardian; ( the article can currently be accessed here:

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2017/apr/12/jeff-koons-louis-vuitton-bags-fashion-fragonard-rubens-titian) Jonathan Jones writes under the heading 

 

"Jeff Koons' Louis Vuitton bags: a joyous art history lesson" :

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"High art needs all the friends it can get." [?! What exactly does this mean? 'High art' - presumably art of the past - being weak, consequently it needs support. Mr. Jones does not enlighten us as to how this apparent weakening of something in the past has occurred, nor does he suggest that something 'strong' should follow the 'high art'. Instead he suggest the effort must be put in to somehow recycle and prop up the art of the past. Next sentence:]"Museum attendance is dropping all over the world, and earnest attempts to court the young and identify with the new are clearly not working. " [The news that museum attendance is apparently dropping is something we read with a sense of hope - perhaps, after all, not everyone is willing to continue to buy what is sold to us as art? But somehow this is not what Mr Jones is aiming at. He also does not tell us what those 'earnest attempts' are and by whom. Any idea, anyone? So 'the young' seem to be flocking in smaller numbers to museums - which fills us again with some hope. But NO! Here is the correct response to this phenomenon: ] 

"Something more eloquent is needed: unequivocal enthusiasm for great art in a language people in the 21st century understand. 

 

['more eloquent' - than what?! Than 'high art' itself? So this weak 'high art' needs to be translated into an veeeery simple language as the 21st century audience is clearly deemed to be not very intelligent. Consequently:]  

 

"How about a Louis Vuitton bag with RUBENS written on it in big gold letters over a reproduction of that 17th-century painter’s violent, exuberant and gorgeous work Tiger, Lion and the Leopard Hunt? I can’t think of a simpler way to put great art at the forefront of modern minds."

 

[Me neither! So, to sum up so far: the audience is presumed to have no questions or thoughts of their own, no knowledge of art history, nor any intelligence. Jones does not demand ambitious new art, but declares that best and only ambition is to keep contemporary art SIMPLE and as one-dimensional as possible, so that everybody can get it - i.e. buy it.]

[still ... nobody screams...] 

 

"Koons has turned the old masters into fashion must-haves (if you can afford them – prices range up to $4,000).

 

[ Mrs Jones explicitly promotes the total emulation of art and fashion industry without the slightest hint of anything but enthusiasm.]

 

"These luxury objects look to me like heartfelt homages to great art. Koons clearly has an erudite and passionate love of oil painting [...] for while his bags touting the Mona Lisa and Van Gogh’s Wheat Field With Cypresses may be easy on our brains, he is also bravely educating us by insisting on the glamour of Rubens, Titian and Fragonard."

 

[ this last part of the sentence has to repeated to be fully appreciated: "may be easy on our brains", [which is sidelined as a minor inconvenience] "but he is also bravely educating us by insisting on the glamour of Rubens, Titian and Fragonard." 

 

[Where does the bravery come in exactly? And 'educating'? "Insisting on glamour" is the "education" we need in the 21st century?!?? [Glamour is hailed as the last link that contemporary art can make to the great history of art. This does read like a description of the apocalypse.] 

 

"Koons has put his sensual painterly genius [!???!!!] into the heart of the fashion world with a bag decorated with his 1770 painting Girl With a Dog,[!], [...] his appetite for blurring the line between art and pornography. Notice this, and you see Jeff Koons in a different way.

 

[Just WHAT is he saying?! ??? One can indeed see that all of this is obscene]

 

"This is an artist who looks at – and thinks about – art from the past, [ How impressive!] and finds his most brilliant ideas there. The 18th-century rococo and the strange genius of Fragonard is not something he discovered yesterday. He has been drawing on the rococo for his sculptures for a long time.

 

[Ahaaa. The artist being impressed by something for longer than a day is clearly a sign of quality, emphasis on 'sign'].

 

Similarly, his flamboyant super-pop paintings are nothing less than attempts to revive the energy of Rubens.

 

[ Rubens, every time someone reads this, is turning in his grave. Perhaps even screaming.]

 

A subtle passion for art is concealed by his apparent belief in banality.

 

[Jones emphasises with all his might that simply to reproduce art from the past makes this reproduction itself art. The banality, the complete absence of its own content, other than the single intent to SELL an expensive luxury item called 'art' is apparently 'subtle'] 

 

"Now Koons is sharing the art he most loves [...] It is an artist’s meditation on the masters, in handbag form." [There really is no trace of cynicsm here.]

 

"Picasso copied and reworked great paintings in his later years." [Another justification]. Koons is offering a different kind of art lesson, 

 

[the "lesson": how to become richer and richer by being promoted by the Jonathan Jones's worldwide. The recipe to do this really is simple and artists worldwide follow it successfully] and it is a joy." [Clearly.  So the Guardian art critic continues:

 

"I want to see the names FRAGONARD and RUBENS glowing on Oxford Street, on Fifth Avenue, their masterpieces walking out of the museum into modern lives."

 

[Are Koons and Vuitton paying Jonathan Jones?! ]

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It is deeply disturbing and worrying that Jonathan Jones is given so much space in The Guardian, and given the platform to make his shallow, beyond low-level assessment of contemporary art mainstream, promoting what is in essence nothing but rampant capitalism, devoid of any meaning or actual contribution to the history of art. This kind of journalism has profoundly damaging effects on the public perception of what art is; it smothers and increasingly sidelines the kind of public debate about the nature of art in the 21st century which is urgently needed.

 

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Worryingly, on top of this, Jonathan Jones gives so-called 'Masterclasses of Art Appreciation', promoted by The Guardian, where for £99 per person he tells his largely unprofessional audience how to best become the perfect consumer of contemporary art. 

 

'God help us all.'

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