A FEW WORDS ON ART

Art is so varied.  It ranges from Cycladic heads to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and includes African rugs, Japanese textiles, Chinese ceramics… and then the exhibits you see in London’s Tate Modern and New York’s Museum of Modern Art.  Then there are conceptual art, installations, video and so on.  Too much for one man to take in and I mostly ignore the latecomers.  Anyway, I am not sure whether they are art at all.

Art is an ill-defined mix of imagination and craft, flights of inspired fantasy and hard-learned technique, and a lot of rubbish.  It may be totally new and fresh, or yet another Mother and Child.  And whether it is called Art depends on who you are and where you are standing.  It has meant different things for different people at different times.  Lovely!  Plenty of scope for discussion, argument, maybe even war.

One thing is clear: great art transcends all of this and will have universal appeal, whether to a New Yorker in 2006, a Hottentot, a Samurai, or a Stone Age caveman.  And it will still be great art in two thousand years’ time.  But most of what is shown in galleries and exhibitions is essentially ephemeral, not great art, maybe not aspiring to be anything other than imaginative, attractive and, of course, saleable. 

And why not?  It is there to catch a mood, it is of today and for today.  And it is not easy to predict which pieces will make it into the future and be a long-term success and which will not.  You have to make up your own mind, follow your own instinct and taste. 

If you can understand what they are about, you can follow the art gurus.  I don’t speak their language or understand what they say so it mostly passes me by.  So does all the art networking that goes on.  Fine if you like that sort of thing, though I think the networkers are often promoting themselves and their goings-on, not the art.  Good luck to them, they are show-offs and self-publicists, instant celebrities, perhaps the world needs more of them.  Maybe they themselves see the art.

Not for me, though, thanks all the same.  I stay at home and paint, and I let the galleries come to me. 

I think about this stuff, but not too much.  Essentially I go where my imagination takes me, sometimes quite serious work, sometimes just fun. What I don’t do is look for a winning formula and then flog it to death, looking neither right nor left for new inspiration.  I find work of this kind very tedious and I cannot understand how people claiming to be imaginative and creative artists can do it.  If they are imaginative and creative they should be trying all sorts of things; some will work, some won’t, but at least they should try. 

Once he had found his formula, for want of a better word, why didn’t Rothko try a few curves, a few circles even, gosh how daring!  And how can a painter such as Bridget Riley be fulfilled doing minute variations on the same stuff she started on forty years or more ago?

I couldn’t do that; I couldn’t be bothered.  I would rather do nothing.

There seems indeed to be a premium in the art world, not only on imagination and diversity but also on brand recognition, building up a following of people who know your work, see it in galleries and shows and then want the same, maybe for social reasons as much as aesthetic.  One idea can make a career and a fortune; lots of ideas tumbling out are not so good for some reason.  And it is easy to reply to this implied criticism that Cycladic art, so much iconised by everyone, stayed essentially unchanged for millennia.  Is that art or craft?  Maybe only the first Cycladic figures were truly art.  It seems to me one can stand on this sort of discussion just where one likes: there are no absolutes.