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The void Previously little known sculptor David Hensel (b. 1945) of East Grinstead deserves a footnote in the history of British art for the important service he recently unwittingly performed. Hensel it was who paid his eighteen quid to submit a laughing head in smooth resin on a chamfered wooden plinth for consideration by those sages, the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition judges. Like most submissions to this annual bazaar Hensel's was no worse an effort than most by the RAs themselves, and he's had his work accepted before. Luckily for him, during the handling process the two parts of his sculpture became separated with the amusing result that the head was rejected whilst the plinth was accepted and exhibited. The catalogue enshrines the balls-up: “No. 1201: One Day Closer To Paradise, jesmonite for bronze (edition of 9: £3,640 each)”. As the amused 61-year-old sculptor himself declared: “It tells you something about the state of art today”. Indeed it does, but what? In the last issue I asked rhetorically what an artist as shallow as the Academy's current Professor of Painting, Gary Hume, could possibly have to profess. I couldn't in honesty think of a single technicality or insight which he might impart to the painting students beavering away in their dark lodges under the main galleries. A cruel correspondent wrote in to complain that in citing Hume's title I had carelessly missed off from it the last two words: “and Decorating”. I now know the certain answer to my question: he has nothing to profess if only because the title of 'Professor' at the Academy is now just a conceit dubbed upon those desperate or insecure enough to want it. There is no longer in art anything to profess let alone anything resembling a cherished and revered practice to teach. What is the point of teaching when there are no rules and when everything is equally good and wall-to-wall mediocrity the result? Furthermore, what is the point of wasting time encouraging students to strive for layers of expression and meaning, and formal beauty, when any stillborn object can be left to the mercy of the viewer's powers of association? In this abject situation the only possible purpose of the art “teacher” is to endorse the orthodoxy of the status quo and to try, for as long as possible, to get away with it before the inevitable happens and you're rumbled as a charlatan. Hume's peer and counterpart in the Royal Academy's pantheon of instructors - and don't forget the tragic irony here is that the Royal Academy was instituted principally as an academy - is David Mach, who is, we discover, the Professor of Sculpture. Well, Mach has now been well and truly rumbled. In one moment of casualness he has holed the rusting tub of State Art below the water down. Doubtless, along with all the other rats, he'll desert the sinking ship claiming he knew all along that it was rotten and unseaworthy. Mach it was who found Mr Hensel's plinth sufficiently “minimally interesting”, apparently, to select it. There must have been others on the adjudication panel who also being none-the-wiser gave this plinth the thumbs up. Perhaps they did so partly for fear of having to explain their demurral to Professor Mach, thereby eliciting his favourite put-down - he once called me “a fascist” for having the effrontery to disagree with him. (I didn't object on the grounds that there was no point arguing with someone who probably knew neither the meaning nor the derivation of what he was accusing me. Interestingly, as a willing claque and standard bearer for the State Art magistracy, Mach himself might with literal accuracy be described as a fascist.) Nine-tenths of what was this year a reduced open submission to the Summer Exhibition was rejected, but the plinth, which has no perceivable sculptural merit, survived in the decimation. Mach's decision is a great relief to those philistines among us who are perennially bewildered by the arbitrary decision-making processes of State Art, because it demonstrates that even he, the Professor of Sculpture at the Royal Academy no less, hasn't the foggiest idea what he's doing or what criteria of judgement he's supposed to be employing and defending. In any academy worth its salt professors are the mouthpiece for the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of tradition. In five years of university I worshiped my professors, who were considerable scholars. Bullough, Smart, Pickvance, Reynolds, White; I had complete faith that they would either know the answers or signpost the direction of discovery. If I had a query about Alcuin's patronage of art it was natural to ask Donald Bullough because he seemed to know and love the 8th-century Tyke as a friend and fellow traveller. Likewise Barbara Reynolds, who was undoubtedly on first-name terms with Dante and, therefore, a living acquaintance of Giotto and Cavallini. They were inspiring all of them and willingly shared their specialisms realising that they were chainlinks in a living, continuous quest which in due course would be edged forward by their better students. Without them my own life would have been even smaller. This civilising force of professorship has now completely collapsed in art colleges. Certainly, students at the Royal Academy do not have access to the advantages I enjoyed. Mach's decision demonstrates that the game is up, that there are in fact no rules, no precepts, no standards, no scholarship, no connoisseurship, no anything. There would be no point for a sculpture student at the Academy asking Mach to explain the formal and practical advantages of using limewood over oak, let alone of Proconnesian over Pentelic or Parian, or even plastic. The connection with the past has been broken by the appointment of know-nothing placemen and sinecurists. Selection for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition is now not based on anything more judicious than the personal whim of the judges; that is, when the decision isn't made on the basis of friendship with the supplicant or simply - that lovely term - on the nod. Where are the satirists of this wretched demolition? What fun Hogarth and Rowlandson would have had with this weak ragbag of impostors. If there aren't any rules, judging can't be done in any other way than by caprice. Judge 1: A thousand works to get through today Gary. How you feeling? Judge 2: Not bad Dave. I'll probably go for the blue 'uns today. Judge 1: Aye, go on then, me too. When I suggested some years ago, a propos of an all-female shortlist to the Turner Prize, that the judges should save their time (and no doubt our money) and award victory to the candidate with the largest breasts, I was denounced as an infantile misogynist. Fair enough. In actual fact, given that no comparative judging was possible between the candidates, awarding laurels on the Page 3 principle would have been no worse a criterion of selection than the one they actually ended up using - whatever it was, because needless to say we weren't informed. In the wake of Mach's selection of Mr Hensel's plinth, we now know that we couldn't have been told, because there aren't any criteria - not a one. The Turner Prize judges are in step with the Royal Academy 'Professors': they make it up as they go along, and then pay someone to write half a side of self-justifying flannel. So what are the implications of Mach's revelation that he hasn't a clue either? The most important one is that there is now nothing to teach in art schools, so what is the point of them? Those of us who are poor enough to have to traipse around regional art colleges and who, due to the incompetence of staff and the indifference of 'students' most of whom shouldn't be there in the first place, give talks and lectures to half-empty rooms of blank faces knew this was true anyway. Nobody teaches anything. Indeed, the very idea of a 'Lecture' is considered off-putting to someone with the attention span of a goldfish, so in some colleges the dreaded 'L' word is banned, 'Presentation' being the preferred designation for any formal contact with the students. The teaching of art students has collapsed into a travesty of education where anarchy reigns because nobody knows what to teach and an alarming proportion of the colleges' skeleton staffs have nothing to teach anyway, even if they had the time to do it. Tom, Dick or Harriet Student can produce anything they please and still pass muster because, astonishingly, in many colleges no one is allowed to be thrown out even if they fail to attend. I've not only seen this myself but I've been given chapter and verse on it by people who run arts courses. They know too that it's a mockery of education but declare that they are powerless to act. If they rock the boat they lose their jobs. They must watch while people with skills are disposed of and box-tickers and willing committee-fodder are retained. The entire edifice of art education has been perverted in order to provide rigged, positive-sounding statistics for lying prospectuses and for ministers to spout. Touchingly, given this disintegration, there is still a rump of students who work like hell. It's moving to see them battling against the odds, and especially against the under-provision of teaching and materials. They deserve more frequent and visible tuition from their institutions and not just of the cosmetic sort which encourages the writing of 'challenge'-gibberish on grant application forms following graduation. The Fine Art degree from an English university is now the only currency worth less than the Zimbabwean dollar. Typically, in a rip-off country which leads the world in valueless BAs, it will cost you a debt of at least ten grand sterling to buy one. Why so many thousands still pay their money to be treated so shabbily remains the most baffling of mysteries to me. If there are no criteria for judging art, and if the art education system can't teach anything because no measures of quality are allowed, and neither elitism nor excellence are encouraged, where on earth does this leave art critics? The most flippant answer is writing artbollocks that's where. In fact a few don't, and we'll get to those flame-kindlers below. Most critics muddle through inconsistently, pretending that there are standards to which those in the know - themselves - are all privy because they've 'learned the language'. If you study their oeuvre over a period you can catch them out with inconsistencies of the sort where one week they praise white monochromes, the next they're so-so on red ones, and the week after that they reserve special bile for green ones. Like the Royal Academy's professors they make it up as they go along: they have to. And also like the professors they just hope that no one will notice. No one does notice because, if my experience is typical, increasingly few read the art columns in newspapers. There's no point because one never learns anything, nothing sticks. Sadly for perennial students like myself, the expert critic is a dying breed. The Feavers, Mullalys, Hiltons, McEwens and Packers have gone. They knew what they were talking about. One may have disagreed with their evaluation but they had insight into the way pictures were made because they did it themselves. Polished and subtle in style, they never wrote jargon or artbollocks: one learned from them. They've been replaced by a bevy of gigglers who not only give the impression of knowing bugger all but haven't even the good manners to be brief about it. One reason why this not-so-old guard had to be replaced is because they were all unreliable promoters of State Art. A background in practice, teaching, history and scholarship is the last preparation you need for assessing a flow diagram, a flashing light or a shed. If no specialist knowledge is needed to make art, neither is special insight required to criticise it. Editors of newspaper arts pages realised this before the rest of us. They knew that they might just as well have their ex-girlfriend, ex-boyfriend, or their Friday drinking pal from the business section, writing about art as no one would realise the loss of expertise. This lamentable state of art criticism has been nagging at me for another reason. Some weeks ago a contributor to State of Art, a free tabloid not without interest published by Flowers East gallery, whose artists it mainly promotes, declared that she was paid for her penmanship in prints, prints, she was proud to announce, which were worth far more than she could ever expect to earn if paid in cash. Here was someone so deliriously happy to have spotted a good number that she was going to keep writing whatever pleases the editors in order for the 'free' prints to keep rolling in. Thus is her opinion, even if it was ever worth anything, compromised. The casual reader about art probably has no suspicions that any connections may exist between writer and subject. Assuming the probity, incorruptibility and truthfulness of most art writers is about as sensible as believing in the veracity of the Prime Minister. In one of my first assignments for an art magazine in the mid-1970s I was given a screenprint which retailed for 24 times what I was paid for writing the resulting piece about this particular dealer's activities. I tried to refuse it, not least because it wasn't to my taste, but they rolled it in tissue and laid it without my knowledge on the back seat of the car. It was a shaming, embarrassing, distastefully furtive episode which still makes me shiver to think of it. This gift was the sort of decorative affair you'd see in the café of a motorway services and was promptly given away to someone who claimed to like it. I assumed that such constructive bribery must be common, and I was right. The assumption of independence where art criticism is concerned could only be guaranteed if, like Members of Parliament, art critics were compelled to keep an up-to-date Register of their interests: perhaps there could be a supplementary inventory tabulating art critics' art collections - now that would be interesting. I can think of one writer, formerly the art critic of an important daily newspaper, whose credibility would be shattered by such a disclosure. If, for example, we readers knew that a critic was being paid by gifts of artists' works would we be more circumspect about the positive gloss the writer was casting over the work? You bet. Unfortunately, in a world as small as the one administering visual art, artists and critics know each other, often too well. Knowing hardship themselves, artists tend to be generous, whereas most critics, unless they work for a paper or have a salaried profession, will rarely achieve an annual income beyond the poverty level. Compromise caused by the close fraternity of artists and art critics is unavoidable and critics are often placed in invidious positions. I once spoke to a blue-riband art critic of elegant style and occasionally dazzling insight, now dead, who was of modest means but had an art collection worth many millions, nearly all of which had been acquired as quid pro quo. Such trade-offs are never stated in print and the reader of a resulting piece may believe, and why should they know any better, that he is reading an objective appraisal of an artist. The critic may well have been a fan of the artist before, but the inducement of the gift can only result in excessive gilding of the lily. This particular critic also divulged on the quiet that he had recently written an essay for an exhibition catalogue at a national gallery dedicated to a major “landscape” artist which had been returned to him because it was not considered positive enough by either artist or dealer. He was forced to rethink the superlatives. Thus may the piper call the tune, even with grandees at the top of the critical ladder. This was in days gone by when critics mattered, or thought they did. Today, the critic's importance has waned. Critical opinion now barely registers because it is news pages which create reputations rather than reviews. The reporter, the feature writer, the profile writer, the diarist, the star columnist, will each have had his say before the art critic declaims on a page which four-fifths of the readership don't even open. The best demonstration of this irrelevance of criticism is Damien Hirst, whose exhibitions are routinely panned, but this doesn't stop his reputation and prices rising exponentially. Hirst is shrewd: his minders cleverly draw the sting from adverse critical response by having him give “rare” interviews to every paper in advance. And a picture of an overblown sculpture, like that currently in the Royal Academy forum, splashed across every front page instantly emasculates all critical dismissals of it. No, the only reason for reading art criticism is if it is the work of a fine writer and if by reading their thoughts one is seduced by the cadence and sound of language, their historical breadth and the occasional treasured pearl of insight. The only three currently worth bothering with, precisely because each is a worthy professor, are Brian Sewell in the Evening Standard, Jonathan Jones in The Guardian and Ben Lewis in Prospect. The rest just fill space. | |||||
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