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What good is art Why are the Culture Department and so many tub-thumping evangelists so obsessed with encouraging those demonstrably uninterested in art to visit museums? The DCMS seems to be under the misapprehension that art dispenses some sort of elixir, the visual equivalent of ‘mother’s little helper’. They seem to suggest that looking at art is followed every time by a guaranteed reward: a bit like one of those time-share scams where if you sit through an hour of hard-sell at a motel in Epping you’re guaranteed a free telly or a week in Lanzarote. Whatever it is – this pick-me-up medicine the Government thinks museums supply in liberal dosages – the underclass must be force-fed with it at all costs. But what is the real nature of this supposed feelgood drug that is art? What precisely are these benefits those in authority are sure will accrue? What do they think these people have been missing to make their conversion so urgent? And if what’s on offer is so important why do so many people enjoy fulfilled lives without ever encountering it? I’ve been forced to consider these tricky questions by several troubling recent experiences. There was the television interviewer who asked me in all seriousness why a poster wasn’t an adequate replacement for Oslo’s stolen Scream. She was only the latest of many who seem to believe that second-hand acquaintance with art, preferably via the internet, is as good as the real thing. The astonishing truth is that it has never occurred to most people that something extra is gained by immediate proximity to the real dimensions and actual colour and touch of the original. There’s no substitute for ‘live’ art but most won’t realise it on their first or even their twentieth visit to a gallery. Then there were acquaintances who claimed familiarity with Constable’s Hay Wain, the most famous and instantly recognisable painting in Britain, but who couldn’t actually describe it properly. Familiarity through endless casually encountered reproductions and parodies had deceived them into believing they knew intimately a picture of which it turned out they were comprehensively ignorant. There was also the intelligent commentator in a posh paper who I’m sure spoke for so many when he wrote that even the greatest art has no effect on him; indeed, he couldn’t understand why art galleries held so many in such thrall. Why if it was so good, he mused, wasn’t he succumbing to a Stendhal syndrome swoon at the sight of the Mona Lisa, which to him just seemed like any other dark, old painting that needs at some stage in everyone’s life to be ticked off a list? It occurs to me that many who don’t visit galleries might not bother because they’ve sensibly admitted to themselves what many others who do go to museums are perhaps afraid to admit to themselves; namely, that the hit delivered by looking at art is not nearly what it’s cracked up to be. The truth is that most human beings have a built-in resistance to museums – only now do I realise that MMR really stands for Museums, Measles and Rubella. If I were to give my children a choice between visiting almost any museum and having a very painful injection I’m honestly not sure which they’d choose. I wouldn’t put it past them to opt for two minutes of agony followed by an ice cream in preference to a whole afternoon of slow torture followed by an ice cream. No one gets a spring in his step at the thought of visiting a museum. Even I don’t most of the time. Museums don’t make you feel any better than would, say, a nice swim or a country walk, both of which are more therapeutic and unquestionably more enjoyable. And there are pubs on country walks. Neither do museums make you feel educated as is so often claimed; in fact quite the reverse. There is no better place than a museum to force you to confront the cosmic vastness of your own ignorance, for the best museums can’t avoid being daunting. For example, you walk into the British Museum and are instantly confronted by millennia of history and strange objects and places about which you know almost nothing. Far from serving up those educational benefits familiar from ministerial platitudes, museums are catastrophic to one’s self-esteem... So, I sympathise with these views and agree that for most people the hard reality of museums has no chance when the alternative is Blockbusters. It is wrong of those in authority to claim that art is somehow magically restorative and delivers an instant rush. It isn’t and it doesn’t. What they don’t tell you is that it requires effort to wrestle either edification or a moment of revelatory beauty from the overwhelming majority of objects in the overwhelming majority of museums. Without intelligent interrogation most artefacts are dead. Most of the paintings I look at with interest may once have contained small moments of aesthetic satisfaction but they have been so badly treated by time and restorers that any art, any delicacy, any miracle of manufacture, any exquisite marriage of colours, have vanished. My interest in these works is commanded by other reasons, more of which later. It is equally wrong of our experts to tell us that there is more to a particular object or image than meets the eye, and that time – if only you’re prepared to spare it – will reveal all. It won’t. They’re liars. Just like those people who tell you that consommé is a taste you’ll eventually acquire and come to savour. Believe me you won’t. It’s emetic first time, second time, every bloody time. They might also tell you that what you’re looking at is “deceptively simple” when there is no deception about it: it looks simple because it is simple. Such falsehoods allow egocentric artists to believe that their solipsistic ramblings are accessible and even interesting to the rest of us ... eventually. Usually, and especially in contemporary art which relies to a dangerous extent on the mystique of the invisible to the untutored eye, there isn’t anything there other than what you can see. How can there be? Do you believe in fairies? It is a gross deceit to perpetuate the myth that certain people have better eyesight than others. Yes, they may have more knowledge, better understanding and appreciation, and they may have more developed powers of association, but they certainly can’t see any better than you can things that aren’t there. The appreciation of most fashionable contemporary art, however, seems to me to rely on the perpetuation of the fallacy that those in the know can see better than the rest of us. And we let them get away with it. Every year we give them another truckload of our money so they can continue insulting us by pretending that we’re blind and they’re blessed with X-ray vision. It is my opinion that the view of the aesthetic experience as one liable to induce a beauty-induced faint, or anything approaching it, is a myth. Over a lifetime of looking I’ve seen a small number of works in all media which truly made me want to thank God for the rare blessing of great artists and architects. For the record, my most recent cause of thanksgiving was provided two years ago by the Tiepolo frescoes in the Villa Valmarana near Vicenza. I would recommend anyone to go. There, lifesize figures, who look as if they’ve just wandered up the hill from the local village, are there on the walls alongside you. I’d have given anything to watch Giovanni Domenico painting those embroidered rustic costumes in his long, brown, fluid strokes – like Vivoli’s chocolate ice cream running down your fingers. This is hexing perfection, unmatchable. Alas, most museum visits rarely produce such intense physical pleasure. ‘Tiepolo’ moments are one of life’s little bonuses but they are not a staple of all galleries and museums, and no one should pretend that they are. Those, like myself, who frequently visit museums and galleries do not do so as a means of topping up batteries flattened by life’s energy-sapping ravages, or because we are skivers with nothing better to do. There is a touch of that, yes. Galleries are sometimes a welcome place of escape, concentration, contemplation and solitude – though these are states increasingly impossible to achieve in some of the busier ones due to the flocks of tourist sheep who should be barred entry and the plagues of unruly children who, on most days, should be banned. Galleries mainly benefit those with a developed interest in art, those for whom looking is not solely the pursuit of a beautiful moment but part of a bigger programme to know and understand. For most tourists museums are a cheap way of filling the otherwise even duller hours between meals and shopping. Galleries are also places of practical instruction. Recently, for example, I was for many minutes lost in an errorless pen drawing by Edward Lear. He had convincingly, summarily drawn the broken formation of a high coastal cliff. I had made a dog’s dinner of a similar motif in Anglesey the previous weekend. From Lear I learned a few tricks which I’ll put to good use next time. Lear’s drawing, note, was not a work of art: he wasn’t setting out to do art. It doesn’t work like that. It was a sketch by a man trying to fix on paper a landscape which for some reason had caught his eye as worthy of a drawing. Indeed, probably a similar reason that the cliffs and islets of Rhoscolyn sent me rummaging for the conté sticks. There is no dividend in this pursuit of drawing, except perhaps the small one that in forty year’s time of a winter evening my grandchildren will be nosing through my notebooks and crow in unison: “By jimminy grandad, you really got those dark, looming cliffs absolutely spot on.” O frabjous day! I’ll murmur to myself. Without this habit, this developed desire to learn and understand from looking, museums are meaningless and I can understand why the experience of them is for so many one to be avoided at all costs. I am convinced that this is why statistical surveys of museum visitors always achieve variants of the same results: over half the population never set foot in a museum but a minority visit frequently. We in the minority know that a single visit to a museum would be pointless. Quite what anyone hopes to gain from breezing through half a dozen civilisations in the British Museum in a couple of hours is anyone’s guess. The truth is that many of those millions of weary visitors don’t achieve half of what they might because they haven’t been told that effort is required. They haven’t been taught how to look, and often. What is the benefit to me of gallery-going? As far as I can work it out, it has nothing to do with elixirs, pick-me-ups or ‘Tiepolo’ moments. In the British Museum and the V&A I head for the same areas of personal fascination, where I find sculpture of consummate refinement and beauty among other less artistically pleasing works which are equally absorbing for historical and contextual reasons. Occasionally, another brick or two will be added to the incomplete edifice of my meagre knowledge. Even more occasionally a tiny insight might dawn. For example, I realised recently that of the numerous hands at work in the fragmentary sculptures from the east pediment of the Parthenon, the individual who carved the seated and lolling female figures on the right – those which so obviously impressed Henry Moore to copy them in the 1950s – are of a different order of delicacy and sensuousness to those on the left and especially the figure of the clumsy dancer with billowing drapery which, though wonderful when studied from the back (from where of course it was never intended to be seen), is an awkward pig of a dead-weight viewed from the front. In the figures on the right drapery melts and sags sexily off the bodies into a tide of rippling folds, whilst on the left similar corrugations are thick and rigid like set lava, as if coexistent with the body underneath. It is a fact that even on the Parthenon some sculptors were better than others. I’d been looking at these carvings for years and never realised what now seems blindingly obvious, that there can be no stylistic uniformity in a sculptural project of this scale because too many people of too many differing abilities were needed to get it finished on time. This is precisely the sort of realisation which is of no interest to most people but which gives me pleasure whilst, yes, helping to pass the hours in what I consider a productive way for me. But what about the National Gallery? Wouldn’t one of Tessa Jowell’s museum neophytes be able to charge the batteries in this most recherché collection of pictures? Possibly, but there again probably not. Here are all manner of works incapable of dispensing the alleged drug of art because so many are no longer in a condition to do it. Whilst the grazer in search of an arty buzz may discover seductive virtuosity in some of Rubens and Velasquez, some of Titian and Rembrandt, the same is not possible from a work like Gentile da Fabriano’s Madonna and Child. Though not as ugly and off-putting as some other early Renaissance madonnas and their children in neighbouring galleries, this one is no oil painting either – tempera actually. It is, however, historically a telling picture in the context of the nearby painting by Masaccio depicting a similar subject. Gentile’s painting lacks seductiveness. Mary is a flushed, bud-lipped weakling. The infant Jesus plays with a buttercup and is a perfect little ponce. Anyone curious enough to stand a while, and notwithstanding that until the early 19th century it formed part of a large altarpiece – then, but no longer, signed and dated 1425 – with side panels and a predella (all now spread across the world), would quickly realise that were examining a work which Gentile himself wouldn’t even recognise as one of his own. His pictures usually glisten with gold leaf, decoration and a surfeit of charming narrative incidents, for this Umbrian itinerant was a crowd pleaser. At some point the glistering backdrop, which featured tooled and painted rosettes and fern-forms similar to the gorgeous patterns on the throne steps, was crudely covered over with a matt coat of plum jam. It’s horrible. The deep blue of Mary’s robe has in places been scrubbed back to the gesso and elsewhere thickly reinforced. The eagle-eyed will also spot how the original line of the drapery across the step of the throne has been dropped several inches from that originally envisaged. All of this is visible to the naked eye, and all of it is unlikely to cause in anyone a ‘Tiepolo’ moment. However, if you are interested in how pictures were made and the complex organisation of a busy artist’s studio in early quattrocento Florence then there is plenty to discover here. Additionally, the stylistic contrast with Masaccio’s account of the same subject, painted at the same time and probably within a few streets, will introduce you to the existence of stylistic factions, of competition between conservative and progressive, well over four centuries before concepts of the avant-garde surfaced. What am I trying to say? That the DCMS should realise that a majority of the population is thick, passive and bone idle and stop pretending that galleries and museums are for those other than specialists and devoted art lovers. Museums should be left alone to get on with their serious work. They should be kept free of charge – just in case – and no museum staff should be browbeaten and blackmailed in order to manufacture attendance, any more than a swimming pool manager should be scolded because too few use his facilities. David Lee | |||||||
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