David Lee
November/December 2020
In the last editorial, when describing the new full bloom of official Wokeism, I didn’t have space to consider if, in the context of State Art’s exclusive obsession with conceptual and minimal art, work selected without resort to the gender/sexual/racial ticklist would be of a higher standard than what is chosen when applying it. Over the years I’ve seen no convincing evidence that it would. Wokeism is offensive, but there’s no mileage in kidding ourselves we are missing much as a result of its now universal adoption. Yes it is unfair, patronising, predictable and crassly discriminatory but it doesn’t matter how you choose most State Art work because, in terms of its judgeable quality, there isn’t that much to choose between anything by anyone.
State Art is a charlatan’s charter, the clapped out, undying endgame of Modernism where anything goes. It is the one approach in which no artist can be seen to be better than any other. Thus a majority of such work comes and goes but leaves neither trace nor afterglow. Even works hyped as masterpieces, as almost everything routinely is nowadays, are instantly unmemorable and forgotten as soon as seen. And because working in this area is so easy to get away with, there is no shortage of it. The best known and most expensive artists – those written up with uncritical servility in the posh papers – are not actually the best, they are