"What Good Are The Arts?" Chapter 4

Do the arts make us better?

“ With the Enlightenment, and the invention of aesthetics in the 18th century, the idea that works of art improve their recipients morally, emotionally and spiritually became part of Western intellectual orthodoxy.” P. 97

“ In the 19th century it became a widespread cultural assumption that the mission of the arts was to improve people and that public access to art galleries would affect this. […] if the poor could be persuaded to take an interest in high art it would help them to transcend their material limitations, reconciling them to their lot and rendering them less likely to covet or purloin or agitate for a share in the possessions of their superiors. Social tranquillity would thus be ensured.” p. 97


"Kenneth Clark, who took Civilization as the title for his famous television series, made no secret of his belief that 'popular taste is bad taste, as any honest man with experience will agree'. For him art, like civilization, was generically connected with wealth and large country houses. [...] John Berger's Ways of Seen was, in effect, a retort to Clark and far from regarding the history of Western art as a monument to civilization Berger denounced it as a monument to privilege, inequality and social injustice. Further, since art in our culture is enveloped in an atmosphere of bogus religiosity, it is used, Berger pointed out, to give a spurious spiritual dimension to the structures of political power. The whole concept of national cultural heritage, enshrined in national galleries, opera houses and so forth, exploits the authority of art to glorify the present social system and its priorities. “ p106

“ Half the world, nearly 3 bn people, live on less than $2 a day, and more than a billion live in what the UN classifies as absolute poverty. 1.3 bn have no access to clean water; 2 bn no access to electricity; 3bn no access to sanitation. Nearly a billion people entered the 21st century unable to read or write. Approximately 790 million people in the developing world are chronically undernourished, and each year more than the entire population of Sweden, between 13 and 18 million, mostly children, die of starvation or the side effects of malnutrition. Meanwhile the Western nations live in unprecedented luxury. The richest 20% of the population of the developed countries consumes 86% of the world’s goods. […] Annual expenditure on alcoholic drinks in Europe is $105bn, whereas global expenditure on providing basic health and nutrition for the world’s poorest is $13bn. An analysis of long term trends shows that the distance between the richest and the poorest countries was 3 to 1 in 1820, 35 to 1 in 1950, and 72 to 1 in 1992.”

P107

"What Good Are The Arts?" Chapter 2

Is high art superior?

Dissanayake's theory: we have Stone Age minds and needs that contemporary life cannot satisfy; we are lonely. Popular art is receptive and accessible so seeks to restore the cohesion of the primitive hunter-gatherer group. The violence and sensationalism are answers to biological imperatives, a need for novelty and excitement, to evade monotony. p 36

Noel Carrol, A Philosophy of Mass Art: mass art is made and distributed by means of mass technology, for mass consumption, and this is the most pervasive form of aesthetic experience for the largest numbers of people from all classes, races and walks of lives. p 45

With reference to Shakespeare's plays "The fact that they were once popular art, despised by intellectuals, but are now high art, itself suggests that the differences between high and popular art are not intrinsic but culturally constructed."

p. 63

"What Good Are The Arts?" Intro + Chapter 1

I read this book even though I skipped a couple of chapters that I thought might be boring or irrelevant to my research - and anyway I have to bring the book back to the library by Tuesday so I must really get over it ...

What Carey says that is most relevant to my research is the fact that the history of readership and audiences is almost blank (p. 167).

This is particularly true with regards to installations and it's a perspective that we should consider more and more seen the importance that now audiences (can) assume.

But let's start from the beginning.

Introduction

"The Australian critic Robert Hughes voices a general disquiet when he says that the idea of a Van Gogh landscape, the anguished testament of an artist maddened by inequality and social injustice, hanging in a millionaire's drawing room, is difficult to contemplate without nausea. For many, the pleasure of walking round a great public art collection is enhanced by thought that they are in a space where the laws of economics seem to be magically suspended, since the treasures on display are beyond the dreams of private avarice. "

"For some art enthusiasts, indeed, it is the very exclusiveness that makes the arts attractive. 'Equality is slavery', writes the French novelist Gustave Flaubert, 'That is why I love art'. "

"In our own culture the sacred aura that surrounds art objects makes imputations about superior or inferior artistic refinement particularly hurtful and disconcerting. The situation has been aggravated by the eclipse of painting in the 1960s and its replacement by various kinds of conceptual art, performance art, body art, installations, happenings, videos and computer programmes. These arouse fury in many because they seem [...] to be deliberate insults to people of conventional taste (as, indeed, they often are). [...] In retaliation, those who dislike the new art forms denounce them as not just inauthentic but dishonest, false claimants seeking to enter the sacred portal of true art."

"The notion of artworks as sacred implies that their value is absolute and universal. [...] Value, it seems evident, is not intrinsic in objects, but attributed to them by whoever is doing the valuing."

I agree on this, but we should then look at who is attributing value, and for what reasons? If these reasons turn out to be mainly economic, is that still art?

Part One
What is a work of art?

"The Italian artist Pietro Manzoni, who died in 1963, published an edition of tin cans each containing 30 grams of his own excrement. One of them was bought by the Tate Gallery and is still in its collection. Very well, you may concede, excrement was a bad choice but what about space, what about absolute emptiness? That obviously can't be a work of art, because it's nothing. However, that too seems questionable. Yves Klein [...] once held an exhibition in Paris consisting of an entirely empty gallery. So space can be art." p.4

"The artist must be the agent. But that is wrong too. Starting in 1990 the French artist Orlan underwent a series of surgical operations to reconstruct her face to conform with historically-defined male criteria of female beauty. [...] The operations were broadcast live to art galleries throughout the world. [...] the artist was no longer the agent but the passive victim." p.5

"Nowadays works of art regularly provoke anger or ridicule. For most of the 19th century the situation was quite different. Aesthetic theorists then, as now, were puzzled over how to define a work of art, and everyone knows about the fuss caused by Impressionist painting. But the kind of things - the pictures, books, sculptures, symphonies - that the definition of a work of art would have to cover were not in doubt. " p7

Kant in the Critique of Judgment in 1750 was the first to formulate what remain the basic aesthetic assumptions in the West for two hundred years. According to Kant, judgments about taste are subjective, but talking about beauty is another thing: "The case is quite different with the beautiful. It would [..] be laughable if a man who imagined anything to his own taste thought to justify himself by saying 'this object [...] is beautiful for me. For he must not call it beautiful if it merely pleases him. Many things may have for him charm and pleasantness - no one troubles himself after that - but if he gives out anything as beautiful, he supposes in others the same satisfaction, he judges not merely for himself, but for everyone, and speaks of beauty as if it were a property of things.' [...] for Kant, standards of beauty were, at the deepest level, absolute and universal." p.9

Two other crucial components in Kant's view are the separation of art from life - arts should evoke a pure aesthetic state of mind; in addition they are connected with moral goodness.

"Since beauty, as explained by Kant turns out to be so closely related to whatever mysterious principles underlie the universe, it is not surprising that in his view its creators must be very special people indeed. He calls them 'geniuses' ". p 11

The Kantian inheritance brings with it many superstitions, according to Carey, including such as that art is sacred and is higher than science because it goes beyond truth . . .

"By the start of the 20th century hopes of ever finding art's secret ingredient were fading, and at the same time the art scene was exploding. That was deliberate. To get outside the system, to escape the 'bourgeois' embrace of museums and art galleries, was a modernist drive - one that has continued as an impulse behind the pluralism of contemporary art." p.16

Most of the contemporary art I see is not a rebellion against the establishment. Modern art instead was clearly against the set of values of art galleries and museums.

"For Danto, the exhibition of Andi Wharol's Brillo Box sculptures at the Stable Gallery on East 74th Street in April 1964 marked a watershed in the history of aesthetics. As he saw it, it 'rendered almost worthless everything written by philosophers on art' . [...] " Anything, Danto concluded, could be a work of art. What could make it a work of art was nothing in its physical make-up but how it was regarded, how it was thought of. {[...] For Danto the Brillo Boxes celebrated a moment of historical emancipation". p 17

"Meanings are not things inherent in objects. They are supplied by those who interpret them. " p.20

"Modern art, as seen through, for example the spectrum of the Saatchi phenomenon, has become synonymous with money, fashion, celebrity and sensationalism [...] Art's surviving role in our mass media society, declares Robert Hughes, 'is to be investment capital'. Effective political art is now impossible, because an artist must be famous to be heard, and as he acquires fame his art acquires value and becomes ipso facto harmless. 'It provides a background hum for power'. [...] Hughes also condemned the reliance of modern art on shock tactics [... ]. The critic of postmodernism Fredric Jameson [says]: 'Aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally'. " p26

"An increased reluctance to accept authority of all kinds - medical, scientific, political - was a well mapped trend of the later 20th century, and scepticism about the art world's posturing is part of it. Improved access to higher education is one underlying cause [..] but another factor counteracting the acceptance of the art-world views is the advent of mass art. [...] the rebellion of the many against the few." p 28

"My answer to the question 'what is a work of art?' is 'A work of art is anything that anyone has ever considered a work of art, though it may be a work of art for only one person'. " p29

Assumptions about a separate category of works of arts belong to the 18th century and are not valid anymore. We can only answer yes or no if we are asked what a work of art is, and "if this seems to plunge us into the abyss of relativism, then I can only say that the abyss of relativism is where we have always been in reality - if it is an abyss." p30

"What Good Are The Arts?" , John Carey

The Guardian published this article just before the book " What Good Are The Arts" by John Carey was published.

David Hare
Playwright

Art seems inexhaustible. It demands and repays more and more attention. It deepens at every contact. It glows at a different angle according to when and where it's experienced. And you look at the world differently afterwards. That's how it's defined. By this standard, Nina Simone is a great artist. So is Mabel Mercer. And so is Patrick Caulfield. Une Partie de Campagne is a perfect film, less than 40 minutes long. Adam Curtis's television series The Power of Nightmares is already a hugely influential work of art. It's art although it's not fiction. You can't move your mind into the area of its concerns without finding it there, waiting.

When Auden said Raymond Chandler's work should be seen as literature, then plainly he was right. But now when some show-off claims that Meet the Fockers is a better film than Mouchette, they're just being silly. Our culture reflects our politics and our ideology. Good critics like Kenneth Tynan, Raymond Williams and Pauline Kael often had terrible taste, but they had great ideas. They thought ideas more important than taste. They sought to connect a work of art to human experience outside art.

Last week I heard Ravel's Piano Concerto for the first time in my life. Now all I want is to hear it again. Will it make me a better person? Oh, imperceptibly.

Hari Kunzru
Novelist

After the performances of Bach in Birkenau it's hard to argue that the arts are automatically humanising. We know it's simultaneously possible to be a sadistic murderer and art-lover. The point is that the arts 'can' make us better people, not that they manage it every time. Art offers tools for living - to console or delight or enrage or challenge or revitalise dulled perception. Art, above all, is a collaboration between artist and audience. It demands work to create meaning, or even to extract pleasure. To me the Nazi commandant crying at the Cello Suites while sending other human beings to the gas chamber is both terrifying and intriguing. Is he just a snob, a more extreme version of the kind of person who buys opera tickets to confirm his sense of himself as a superior person? Or does he have a genuine sense of beauty? Or both? It seems to me that the answer lies in the idea of 'high art', which I hate. To me 'high art' is just art + power: art that is for whatever reason associated with social privilege, or which is valued by a dominant class or group. Your appreciation of Bach confirms you as a member of the master race. The others are lesser, in part because they don't appreciate Bach. So you can kill them.

There is only good and bad art, and I agree with Carey that the difference lies in the response of the receiver. If I just hear a sawing noise, to me the Cello Suites are not art. If I cry and kill Jews, they are 'high art'. If I cry and feel some kind of connection with the rest of humanity, perhaps based on my wonder that it is possible to order sound in such a way as to produce this profound response in me, then I have experienced art - and am capable, maybe, of being an artist. Listen to Yo-Yo Ma playing the Six Unaccompanied Cello Suites and consider these things. I don't have a 'favourite work of art' in the 'My Funny Valentine' sense, but that will do very well as a starting point.

Jeanette Winterson
Novelist

There is no high art and low art. There is only the real thing and not the real thing. The real thing comes in all kinds of packages and dosed at different strengths. If by low art he [John Carey] means popular culture or entertainment, then it is better to be more precise in his use of language. I am all for the Kylie Showgirl tour and Shrek 2. But I know they are not in the same universe as Don Paterson or Ali Smith. Art makes us better because it offers an alternative value system. Even the making of it is an affront to capitalism; you can't ship it to Hong Kong to get it done cheaper. You can't put it on growth hormones or make it under lab conditions. You can't give it a deadline, cost it, predict it or bank on it. But if you believe that life has an inside as well as outside, then art is what you need. Art works on the inside against the 24/7 emergency zone we call real life.

I am always finding new things to love. The adventure of art is in the new. The consolation of art is everything you have seen, read, heard and kept inside you as a talisman against the popular lie that nothing matters any more.

Kwame Kwai-Armah
Actor and playwright

Civilisations are judged and remembered not by their most successful businessmen but by the art they leave behind. The arts make us better people because they are a mirror, and it's only when you look deep inside yourself and see what makes you tick that you can repair and change. Art is one of the greatest catalysts for debate, and debate is the greatest catalyst of change. A great book, film, piece of theatre or work of art - they all have the capacity to move the human spirit. Personally, I'm a bit of a Rothko man. I often go and look at his work because he makes me think about how life is not just black and white, but all the shades in between.

Saffron Burrows
Actress

Elizabeth Bowen said: 'Art is the only thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.' The imagination needs art in order to process pain, dispossession and desolation, as well as the other passionate extremities of human thought: love, yearning, desire and, of course, beauty. The arts, lining up in their multitudes, beheld in close proximity, are capable of inducing a state of energised, exhilarated thought. Art can propel, electrify, becalm and restore. And perhaps make us reach for our best selves. My favourite work of art? Perhaps a volume of Lorca or Yeats, a line of Emily Dickinson. A novel that continues to linger is Coming Through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje and Dirt Music by Tim Winton is both epic and intimate.

Sir John Tusa
Managing director, Barbican Centre

If you look at the average audience in the National Theatre looking at a serious play, are there fewer adulterers or wife-beaters in that audience than in a football crowd? The chances are the answer is 'no'. On the other hand, if you think of a society without the arts, without cultivation and without ideas that come from the arts it will undoubtedly be a much less agreeable and much less civilised place, and I have no doubt whatever that we behave in a much better way because of the time we spend with the arts.

I'd put the high and low art debate as the difference between reflective art and entertainment art, and we can all tell the difference and we all like both. The idea that some people only like high art and don't like entertainment is the highest form of humbug. The great opportunity for television is that of course it can be, and at its best has been, a reflective art - and certainly a reporter of reflective art - and the challenge for it is to rediscover that particular mission. I do think that it is one of those strange ideas that we assume that the high arts or the reflective arts are enjoyed by comparatively few people. All the statistics suggest that large numbers of people enjoy them and use them.

I also think that ideas trickle through, they percolate. We look at pictures differently because of Picasso and we use words differently because of Joyce and Beckett.

I really like video art. There aren't very many video artists who I feel deliver at the highest level. Bill Viola certainly does and Christian Marclay and there is an extremely good Israeli artist called Michal Rovner. The work they do explores humanity and belief quite extraordinarily.

Geoff Dyer
Writer

The arts don't make us morally better people but they do enable us to discriminate more finely and this means that we live fuller, if not necessarily happier lives. At a time when the culture at large goads us towards an ever-coarsening response to almost everything, the demands made on our attention by 'difficult' art are to be especially valued. I look at Wayne Rooney's face and think, 'Now there's a fellow who's not read much Henry James.' But then I read The Golden Ball or whatever it's called, and it's so boring I end up watching football instead.

The distinction between high and low art is itself rather coarse and unhelpful (as Allen Ginsberg said, Dylan proved 'great art can be done on a jukebox'). I prefer to distinguish between all the good things - food, friends, books - that enhance your life and the overwhelming quantity of crap from which you need to avert your eyes if you're to avoid sinking into despair. My favourite work of art is a CD of a concert in which the great sarangi maestro Sultan Khan performs the stately Raga Bhupali. That lasts an hour, and then, as an encore, he sings this beautiful little Rajasthani folk song that doesn't even have a name. Is Sultan Khan a nice man? I've no idea, but listening to this, I find myself believing that part of the training to create such music is, surely, to purge yourself of all spite, pettiness and hate.

Jude Kelly
Founder/artistic director, Metal

Enduring artistic figures throughout history have usually fallen out with their own societies for being too radical, challenging or seemingly 'meaningless'. The subjectivity of the conservative critic-official or vox pop is constantly trying to force negative language into the artistic debate. 'High' and 'low' sounds like a thermometer reading - I just don't subscribe to the terminology. There are many amazing, original and superbly crafted works in all genres and I respect that fact.

If I had to choose only one piece of art, the collected works of Shakespeare would provide me with enough poetic nourishment, political thought and evidence of human paradox to last for years. But the outpouring of arts of every form and type is what thrills me about human creativity. It's like having many children, all different and all loved. Why choose? Since the Lascaux caves we've seen that artistic expression is fundamental to our own sense of being. Are cave paintings high or low art? I personally don't care.

Matthew Collings
Art critic and presenter

There is a lot of fascination about what the arts are at the moment. For me, visual art is the superior. Right now we're in an incredibly idiotic moment of visual arts, but it will get better and ultimately it is the most important art form, along with music. It's superior precisely because it doesn't have that literary quality, it's much more open to interpretation.

Do the arts make us better people? Yes, definitely and emphatically; except for visual art at this particular moment, where anything, say, Tracey Emin does is regarded as somehow important. But when visual art is right it makes us better people. It is almost what makes life worth living. After love and looking after your kids and your old mum, art is the next most important thing.

Is high art more valuable than low art? Yes, of course, that's why it's 'high' art. Gold is more valuable than water because there's more water around. Anything more rare is more valuable.

My favourite work of art has to be Rembrandt's self-portrait in Kenwood House. It shows ageing in the context of incredible skill.

Dominic Masters
Lead singer, the Others

When you're watching a play or listening to music it can take you away from yourself and enable you to analyse things. If a lyricist says something with meaning, it's open to interpretation. You can feed people the art but it's a subjective thing how they react to it. Francis Bacon is my favourite artist. He's given a lot within my lifetime. And I'm not choosing him because he's homosexual, it's not a pink-power vote. I like the rage and anger in his paint.

Tessa Jowell
Culture Secretary

The arts make us better people - not morally better but more thoughtful and more complex. Exposure to high art affects us over time; it affects our capacity to understand and relate, and it allows us to develop a personal heartland of images, sounds and expressions that we can draw on. I have two favourite paintings. The first is the portrait of Mary Magdalene by Caravaggio, my favourite painter, which hangs in the Galleria Doria-Pamphili in Rome. The second is Rembrandt's Girl at a Window in the Dulwich Picture Gallery, in my constituency.

Lennie James
Actor and writer

The arts are vital - not the most important thing in the world, but as a key to a balanced education they're crucial. Art influences all parts of your life. Who's to say Otis Reading's 'Sittin' on the Dock of a Bay' is a lesser art form than the Mona Lisa? Good music can touch and inform you, and most importantly, introduce you to yourself. That's why art is important. It's a personal journey. In that sense it's unlike anything else. How do you relate to quantum physics?

Michael Eavis
Founder, Glastonbury festival

To me, art has the ability to take one out of oneself and into an expression of beauty or love, or even to a supernatural level, and in that context, William Blake's pictures come immediately to my mind. However, music to me is my greatest love, and the excess of it hasn't thwarted my appetite for it at all!

Ian Rankin
Novelist

The arts do not necessarily make us better people, as George Steiner argued so cogently in his book Language and Silence when he spoke of concentration camp guards who could listen to Beethoven, then head back to the gas chambers. I don't believe in high art and low art - I believe in good and bad art, but am open-minded enough to know that art I think one, others may think the other. The Richard and Judy Book Club scheme was derided by many as 'dumbing down', yet when put to a readers' vote, the favourite book was Cloud Atlas - by no means an easy book, and a book most people would regard as a work of art (though it didn't win the Booker, interestingly). My favourite work of art? Impossible to say: depending on my mood, I might posit Mozart's Requiem, Francis Bacon's Figures at the Foot of a Crucifixion, Ben & Jerry's Chunky Monkey ice cream, Gordon Banks's save from Pele, a Ronnie O'Sullivan break, Hawkwind's 'Silver Machine' or Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time. Or a thousand others.

John Carey: a life well read

Born in 1934; married with two sons.

Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford, 1975-2001. Chair of the Booker Prize, 1982. Chief book reviewer for Sunday Times; regular panellist on BBC2's Newsnight Review

Carey's books include Milton (1969); The Violent Effigy: a Study of Dickens' Imagination (1973); Thackeray: Prodigal Genius (1977); John Donne: Life, Mind and Art (1981); The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992); and Pure Pleasure (2001).

'Likeable, wise and often right... one feels an attractive sense of partisanship in Carey's writing, an alliance with the ordinary, the plain-spoken... he writes with an Orwellian attention to decency' - James Wood

'Hornby may not spring to mind as the most obvious Dostoevsky lookalike, but his new novel seems to me well able to stand comparison with the great Russian's rambling fable' - Carey on Nick Hornby's How to Be Good (May 2001)

How To Make Sense of Installation Art part 2 - Introducing Baudrillard

To understand installation art we must understand where we are standing culturally.

What I find most interesting about installations is that they claim or are said to be more approachable than other form of arts; interactive installations in particular seem to be all about audience participation, a trend that currently involves all media from broadcasting (YouTube) to journalism (citizen journalism, blogging, tweeting).

Before an interest in art and before my hate for what Tate Modern or The Saatchi Gallery embody, I am interested in understanding at what extent authorities - aka money-making-oriented multinationals - are convincing us that art like all media is becoming more accessible and therefore democratic. Hence it's not the case anymore that culture is transmitted in a top to down fashion but in the exactly opposite way: from the bottom to ... to where? - this being the main point. . .

I would like to understand why skulls horribly painted by D. Hirst are said to be art and so is a porn movie when broadcast in a museum. Who wants me to firmly believe that by spending a Sunday afternoon amongst (expensive) rubbish I can feel good about myself?

Evidently, the same trend towards "sensationalism" and the same infatuation for the "gruesome"and for the "freakish"that has pervaded media, journalism and TV in particular, has also affected art. This is the main reason behind exhibitions like Pop Art (Tate Modern): they attract the tourists but also spread ugliness and nonsense before ignorant (in the sense that they ignore) and careless visitors.

The power that pornographic sculptures by Koofs once held is gone by now, in 2010. Why then insisting on displaying them when there are artists who'd beg and stab their mothers to have a space in Tate Modern? Why calling back to the Tate Fiona Banner who is "looking forward to the prospect of working within the phallic pillars of this extraordinary grandiose space."?

Art used to be about sensitivity, beauty, rebellion and excruciating feelings like fear and terror; but it was never meant to be just another gadget in our consumer culture. But now art, like sex, like everything, has been inglobated in the all-powerful-machine.

Sex has been commercialized: Kate Perry singing "I kissed a girl" didn't liberate any of us; it just dummed us - females - further down. Lesbianism isn't even transgressive anymore simply because it sells, contextualized, commodified: an item, not different from toothpaste on the shelves of Waitrose. Art is working its way down that same path - and it's doing so terribly quickly.

The British cartoonist and writer Alan Moore, an anarchic whom I consider a genius and find hard to criticise, still misses the point in his intriguingly well written essay "25,000 years of erotic freedom".

Moore says, in the sassy way that distinguishes him, that: "Our impulse towards pornography has been with us since thumbs were first opposable and back at the outset of our bipedal experiment we saw it as a natural part of life, one of the nicer parts at that, and as a natural subject for our proto-artists."

We also ate raw food and defecated in the wild back in the days but we then evolved into cooking meat and even in having to almost translate complicated menus at the restaurant.

First of all pornography differs from art in the sense that porn nothing is but a repetition of formulas; on the other side art is not that simple: it's creative and imaginative, it's a productive and unexpected force. Secondly, the extent to which pornographic images permeate our society has become self serving; it doesn't make the world more beautiful, it doesn't serve as a weapon of transgression: it's just there together with toothpaste on the shelves. If Wharol once had a meaning and a reason to be, it appears a waste of time to be repeating a formula emptied of signification and value nowadays. If art in countries where freedom of expression is limited employs nudity and porn to break the ice, that is welcome. But here, in the West, it's the time instead to be creative and with that creativity engage the public in a way that it will be able to appreciate, produce and enjoy good art - not crap.

Jean Baudrillard was a French philosopher and his work focused largely on the pervasive sense of relativism that has invested modern societies; he tried to understand its roots, why it's come to exist and what it says about us and our world.

Baudrillard's theories, with their focus on aesthetics are a good starting point to look at installation art however the nihilism that pervades his work becomes almost intolerable.

Starting from Baudrillard I would like to look at our culture with a more hopeful outlook and see how art and in particular installations can effectively become expression of a movement that positively and proactively involves the audience while giving up the nonsense and ugliness that too often surround modern art and our world nowadays.

Somebody Agrees that Hirst is a joke ... Phew!

The full entry by Jonthan Jones can be read here.

I went to the exhibition with Arnaud and it made me sick. Well at least this time Arnaud didn't find me in the Koons' pornographic room (see video at 1.58 for vivid details), as it happened at Tate. Sigh.

"Hirst's exhibition at the Wallace Collection in London has sputtered on pointlessly into the bitter first month of this year, which is how I accidentally came into proximity with his paintings again. If I'd known the exhibition was still on, I probably would have avoided the museum entirely. As it was, I studied the Titian I had come to see, then left. I studiously avoided Hirst's free-entry show. Why? I didn't want to ugly the hour.

Bad art is ugly art, in the end. Whatever language we might prefer to use, it all comes down to beauty and ugliness. Hirst's ideas seemed to me once to possess an intellectual and emotional beauty – and their own physical beauty, too. Now everything he does is ugly, ugly, ugly, and it adds to the world's already copious stores of junk. His paintings betray a stupidity and arrogance that makes me lose all interest in him. I love painting and I hate to see it abused.

But ... I could probably kid myself otherwise, given time and a change of direction. That's why I have decided to shun Hirst. He's wasted so much of my time over the years. I freely admit that my determination to believe in him distorted my judgement. I won't get fooled again."

London Art Fair - it was good!

Su Blackwell

Her work is magical

Su Blackwell

This was just creepy, that's the only reason I took the picture. But now that I think about that the pink dog reminds me of this candle I have in my room ...

Conroy Maddox "Loitering with intention", which I was doing ...

Robert Ryan was great too, and I did like the butterflies by Allyson Reynolds but I can't find any good picture of them on the internet and the art gallery woman at the fair didn't let me take pictures when I asked, even though other people were taking pictures so I just shouldn't have asked. . . Robert Ryan is terribly romantic, by the way.

The World most visited museum in 2009 ...

... was The Louvre, with 8,5m visitors; Tate Modern in London was fourth (4.95 million)

On The Independent

The London Art Fair (13-17 January 2010)

The London Art Fair in 2010

Tickets are 14£ at the door (or 11£ + 1£ booking fee)
Nearest tube: Angel! On till this Sunday I suspect


Art Forecast for 2010

This blog can’t be read in China. Pushing the boundaries of artistic expression. Interview.

The Gallery Faurschou had caused controversy last year with the exhibition of a life-size bronze statue of Mao whose facial expression indicated deep remorse. What is more, the head was designed so that it could be taken off and hidden in a separate location with the body remaining headless and unthreatening to authorities.
On Sept. 3 the head came out for a Gao brothers “party” — the code name for one of the invitation-only private exhibitions that the artists behind this work hold several times a year. The brothers also employ underground exhibitions to bring their art to the people. (Read it here.)

Art gallery director Kuang Wei was so terribly kind as to give me some of his time for an interview. This is the transcript.


What do you think is the strength of the Chinese market with regards to art and what is its weakness?

I think the remarkable and sustainable Chinese economic growth is the most prominent strength of the market. As a country with rich culture, China has a long tradition of collecting art in her 5,000 years development. The vision for the booming art market is promising. As to the investment point of view, more and more people see art investment as a safe and wise thing to do during the time of inflation.

The weakness is that the market needs to be regulated. China needs time to digest and adjust to the dramatic changes happened in the recent years. The art collecting frenzy has caused a somehow chaotic and fickle atmosphere that will not do real good to the market in the long run. Contemporary art is new to most Chinese, so it takes time too. Since we opened our gallery in Beijing, we’ve been dedicated to promote art of the highest caliber to Chinese audience, and have done museum quality shows that serve as an art education to the audience.

How do you see your gallery in China in five years from now?

We are confident that Faurschou Beijing will be one of the top galleries with high quality of art and unique style in the market - This is also our goal ever since its establishment from the 1980s.

Who is the best artist you have had the pleasure to exhibit in your gallery?

From Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Shirin Neshat to Ai Weiwei, all the exhibitions are of high quality, and have attracted extensive attention from the public. Every artist is present with a unique style. We are pleased and honored to present each of our shows and the cooperation with the artists.

Why do you think there has been such a strong development of modern art in China recently? Is this dependent on improved economic situation or would you say it is the expression of a more profound set of needs?

It definitely has a great deal to do with China’s remarkable economic development. China actually has a long tradition of art collecting. In my opinion, the situation in China nowadays is similar like that of Germany after World War II – with very complicated feelings of lost of pride and setback have turned into an impulsive, explosive catharsis by means of art. After centuries-long isolation to the world, the opening-up policy commenced 30 years ago has offered such an outlet for the explosion in the aspect of art. The conflicts in the ideology, politics, culture, social and economic developments etc. provide tremendous energy and resources for Chinese contemporary art. Contemporary artist always serves as the prophet for civil evolvement in history. They are like the thermometer of our times and history.


What can we expect in the future form your gallery? How do you choose the artists who will have a space in your gallery?

We will have Tony Oursler’s solo exhibition from February 6 till May 10, 2010. We will always keep the top artists active in the field in our vision.

I am writing a blog about debates within the world of art .This particular video is about your gallery and an event that attracted a lot of attention - what is the real risk that artists face in China when they want to express their point of view freely? How is this going to be tackled in the future?

I am sorry to tell you that I couldn’t log on your blog to check out what the video is about, probably due to Chinese government’s strict internet control.

It is an interesting question. We have gone through a lot of problems of such kind that resulted from the contradiction between free expression and the government policy and ideology. It takes time to accept new things. We have talked to some government officials and found out that Chinese government doesn’t support contemporary art, but it doesn’t see it as monster, and interfere that much too as most of the western media has described. They know that it is unstoppable. More and more younger government officials actually have a more objective and tolerant stand to contemporary art. I think the situation is going towards a more lenient direction. My attitude is optimistic. It is getting easier to build up dialogue with them. Contemporary art is about being skeptical and critical – this essence will never change no matter what kind of political situation it is facing. From another point of view, such contradiction in China context serves as the biggest energy and resources for Chinese contemporary art.

Also, while in this case ''sensationalism'' could not be avoided because of political and cultural reasons, what do you think of the "shock" values that is more and more often used to promote modern art i.e. the latest Turbin Hall installation art at Tate Modern in London. Can art be "quiet" these days or does it necessarily need to disturb or offend to be noticed?

Life is like a stage, and everyone is the actor or actress. So do the artists – and usually the more expressive ones with more distinct styles and sharp viewpoints. They need audience. Every artist has their own ways of expressing themselves. Art that looks like to disturb or offend might have something to do with its nature of questioning and criticizing. There are also many art that are “quiet” but very beautiful, strong, impressive and also well addressing problems.

My last question is more generic and it is about your opinion about art: what do you think can we define art nowadays and what does it differentiate to popular culture or entertainment? What happens when the ''aura'' of fine arts disappears as it is now happening?

It is another interesting questions. Great waves wash away the sand. Art of true value can always stand the test of time. Art is a vivid and honest reflection of the times in human history – such as the political, economic, social, spiritual climate and problems. For example, “consumerism” is the gist of the time that we are living in, phenomenon of the popular culture and entertainment scenes nowadays are the product of consumerism. Art is the one who tries to address the problems and phenomenon. It remains independent, skeptical, critical, and ironic. For those who losing its “aura” of fine arts, the most important thing is to identify its motives. If it is a product of consumerism itself, it will be washed away at the end of the day.

How To Make Sense of Installation Art - For The Common People - Part 1

This is the year where I should be able to see the light at the end of the tunnel. University is not over yet but I can at least start thinking of my dissertation and in fact they even let me write a 3,000 word ''mock dissertation'', as I call it.

Because I am interested in new forms of art (as the daily office life is so utterly boring and London is constantly grey, or white lately, but still grey) and in understanding how values in our society are changing, I have decided to focus on installations.

Alternative art first caught my attention a couple of years ago when I went with Pino to visit a small alternative gallery in London that exhibited shit work - literary I mean sculptures, a lot of them, that had been made by what I recall being a Spanish or South American artist who employs faecis to turn them into artistic pieces. Then there was a dog by the same artist, whom he let die of starvation and called the process "modern art". I may well be making this up, however these information got so stuck into my head that I decided to take nude pictures of myself, urinate on them, tag them as post modern art, make a million dollar contract and leave the office. This clearly never happened so here I am.


What's the best place to start an exploration of installation art if not from Tate Modern and the Turbin Hall?
This year, Polish artist Miroslaw Balka is present in this gigantic space with his gigantic installation "'How Is It''. Some say this work wants to steer our attention to the Holocaust; Balka however never mentioned the Holocaust. But because he is Polish, he can't escape his past. It's like me, being Italian, pretending to have a proper meal without pasta.

Taking it from a cultural studies perspective, what I really want to look at is the Foucauldian discourse that "authorities" - or better, those agents who have the right to talk, to express an opinion and thus influence the public opinion and the common people - have enabled in the discussion of this installation. What can be said about installation art? How can we talk about it? What position is this form of art acquiring within society? And, more importantly, what are the changing values in culture and society that installation art represents and fosters?

To find out, I will start my research by looking both at marketing material issued from the museum (Tate Modern in this case) as well as at press articles.

Even though I am just at the start of my research, what I notice is that there's hardly any text that deals specifically with installation art so part of the difficulty here is in adapting other academic writings and publications that non specifically touch on this form of art to my ends.

This vacuum in the academia is pretty suprising as it's undeniable that exhibitions revolving around installation art have taken over, at least from the '90s on. More in details, what has noticeably increased is that type of installation art defined "interactive".

By saying "interactive" I am already touching on one of the main feature not only of contemporary art but also of our societies and media: audience participation.

This is a characteristic that has already become prominent in journalism at least since the beginning of the XXI century and especially during the reporting of global crisis. Many are those who date back the beginning of participatory journalism to events such as the Tsunami of 2004, when people started for the first time to act as reporters by sharing their photos, videos and stories of the disasters. The 9/11 is another clear example of an audience that is not passive anymore.

Similarly, art has also started to involve some form of participation and Balka's installation exemplifies this: the audience must walk inside the black box to experience what it is about; it is not enough anymore to stare at it like you would have once done with a painting or with an opera.

As I start off with my research then, I soon realize that to understand the value of art today and to grasp the discourse that not only surrounds but also constructs its meaning, I have to relate art to its context and therefore, in primis, to our culture.

As post modern is by many highlighted as the main feature of contemporary societies, this in turn means that I have to unpick this concept and apply it to Balka's installation if I want to fully understand it.

However, the first doubt I am confronted with is: if everything is relative, as post modern values seem to syndicate, how can I even know that what I am looking at is an artwork after all?

Before I even start my investigation on installation art, I must first understand what art nowadyas means.

George Dickie, a contemporary American philosopher, has elaborated in recent years what has come to be known as "the institutional theory of art". There is no evaluative principle at the core of this theory whose main point rests in its assumption that a work of art can be defined as such when just a person conceives of it as a work of art. Dickie specifies that such recognition must come from an artworld public, however this is not the point. The main point that we must read in Dickie's elaboration is that his theory is non-evaluative of art. It does not allow us to judge good art and distinguish it from bad art. If some have criticised such a theory for its circularity, still an important fact remains: this is the only theory of art that we might be able apply today - think of the pornographic work of Koons; think of Andi Wharol and his cans. How could we dare to say that Duchamp's Urinal is art if not by applying this theory? How could we think of Hirst's skulls as of objects that have an artistic value otherwise? Certainly a Kantian vision of art would not help us.

Together with post modernism, if I am to understand installation art, I must take into account consumerism theories that to it relates. We can't overlook the fact that talking about art means to also talk about a market, and an extremely prosperous one.

While Marxist theories are never appreciated these days, as all Marxists have anyway turned their back to communism (a failed proposition after all) we can instead employ more sophisticated theories to basically state the same: that all turns around money.

So, to cut a long story short, I will have now to list for my own utility and amusement the resources that I have up to now found and that will hopefully help me to give a deeper meaning to Balka's work, the Turbin Hall, the mass media and our society.

Any help or suggestion would be highly appreciated.