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The new disease: Those who are concerned about the degradation of painting will have been confused by the favourable critical reactions to David Hockney’s inept watercolours. Interestingly, the charity shown to what was abominable work is not quite as bewildering as it ought to be, if only because we’ve come to expect such servility before artists whose reputations are apparently beyond criticism. There is an important reason for this tolerance of visual dross and it resides in a seemingly incurable critical sickness, a kind of art-professional hysteria, which has reached epidemic proportions among art commentators over the last couple of decades. I want to try to investigate how this voluntary blindness operates and why so much work that is by any accepted criteria piss-poor comes to receive widespread praise. One unfortunate legacy of Modernism has been a willingness among many to be afraid of their own immediate opinions about art, a fear which covers its back by finding elaborate, often far-fetched excuses for rotten technique. It could be that the industrial quantities of mediocre work which are now exhibited have caused this unhealthy condition to harden through habit into an identifiable syndrome. Eagerness to locate something worth complimenting is the first step down the steep slope to the critical pits where inept passages of painting are passed off as ‘new departures’. It is the process by which any daub can be deemed ‘significant’, ‘innovative’, ‘subversive’ or otherwise ‘challenging to convention’. This condition gathered support during the 20th century when artwatchers fearful of failing to appreciate the next new fashion wanted to be seen to understand and promote work in which no one else could discover anything save ugliness. I first identified in myself this desire to find excuses for incompetence when judging my own amateurish pictures. I start by painting a landscape watercolour. After sploshing about for a couple of hours I examine the result and, frustratingly, because I know the heights achievable with this medium, conclude that my effort is an amateurish mess. (The watercolour illustrated on this page is a fine example of the cackhandedness to which I’m referring.) Most who have worked in watercolour would immediately recognise the conspicuous shortcomings of my daubs: colours seeping together where a crisp outline is required; the absence of touch resulting in childish simplification and over-emphasis of all outlines; the use of too large a brush, or too small; an infant-like cipher for a tree (though in my defence I’ve had moments with cedars); muddiness and scuffed paper where even, pellucid luminosity is required; unconvincing buildings which float proud of their plane like drifting dirigibles; the flat, characterless shapes of even tone where crude stabs at aerial perspective have gone hopelessly awry; the delicacy of fine details reduced to unreadable blobs ... in my case the list of faults could fill a book. But then I start looking more closely, and this is where the symptoms of critical sickness appear and selective vision descends. On reflection, what seem to be entirely reasonable mitigating circumstances for my apparent uselessness begin to accumulate. Surfacing through the mess I begin to notice coincidences of interesting colour combinations; the horizon line appears not that unconvincing; an unintended expressive flourish might suggest itself in the variegations of sea or sky; that errant droplet of pea green among the branches evokes ... something; that A N Other plant is surely identifiable to anyone but a fool as a prickly pear cactus – even if the prickles have run together to form doorknobs. And even if it isn’t exactly a David Roberts, the whole begins to assume a cogency it didn’t have on first sight. At the very least it is approximately recognisable as the coastal strip which inspired it. Naturally, any objective onlooker would instantly dismiss it as a dud, but by circumventing its more brazen faults and regarding it specifically in order to locate those other qualities behind the incompetence I can justify it to myself. Thus does my artistry co-exist with chronic self-deception. This indulgent condition of mind can be just as readily summoned in galleries. My first awareness of being seduced into excessive generosity was looking at the paintings and drawings of Roger Hilton, those done at the end of his life whilst he was bedfast. They were being sold to me as the late flowering of an important artist, when really most of the sheets looked embarrassingly crude and dashed off. On closer inspection – by the way, ‘on closer inspection’ is an untrustworthy phrase when used by art critics – I began to find qualities of control in blocks of colour and in the lines of some aggressively pencilled figures. But was I clutching at straws? Was I merely trying to be kind and locate sensitivities that were unintended and not really there. The context of a flashy gallery, the customary puff of text written by a heavyweight critic and the reputation of the artist were all conspiring to make me disbelieve the evidence of my own eyes, which told me that these could without difficulty be passed off as a child’s daubs. Indeed, I can apply the same procedure to my son’s drawings. There, entirely fortuitous but – to my reasonably sophisticated eye – suggestive moments of line and colour might lead me to believe that here resides a sensibility more knowing than is actually the case. What I am saying is that desperation or confusion, or just the politeness of a desire to praise, can easily cause a viewer to find character, if not authority, growing among what are signal failings. How many times have most of us been in the following uncomfortable position? An artist or friend has produced a drawing or painting for comment. It looks like the perfect double for a scribbled mess. It is a scribbled mess. Originally, it might have been considered a scribbled mess even by the person who made it, but eventually, because of his intimate acquaintance with it over time, the faults have become invisible and other qualities invented to replace them. As I have discovered to my cost and, in one instance, to the loss of a friend, the worst strategy in such a situation is to tell the truth. Instead, out of consideration for feelings otherwise injured, one commences upon a game of pretence in which the scribble is regarded with deep seriousness. Soon, nuances are alleged to occur in the scribble, a poignant curve, a deft smudge, a calculated squiggle. Before long the scribbled mess is being accorded the same reverence as a presentation drawing by Michelangelo. It is being judged by a completely new and worthless set of values, the values born of desperation and a desire not to be thought square. This is the process by which any mark on any piece of paper or canvas can aspire to significance. I’ve been party to numerous delusional discussions of this kidney which, were they to have been secretly broadcast to the world as a fly-on-the-wall documentary, could only have resulted in both parties being immediately sectioned under the Mental Health Act. In contemporary painting anything, if necessary, can be excused, even the most flagrant incompetence. The job of the art critic, it would seem, is to identify qualities beyond the obvious failings. The recent treatment of David Hockney’s watercolours is a fascinating example of this damaging syndrome in full battle cry. Surely, I thought, Hockney’s landscape watercolours couldn’t be as infantile as they appeared in reproduction. Sadly, like many of the Boy Wonder’s recent paintings, the opposite is true – they are flattered by illustration. Involuntarily, I laughed out loud in disbelief when standing before the originals. Presented with these first-time efforts how could anyone possibly take them seriously? The strange truth was that, on the contrary, they had been spread in panoramic Technicolor across newspapers and supplements for what seemed like an age before the show opened. Hockney’s landscapes own every one of the faults of the neophyte watercolourist enumerated above in relation to my own weekend splatterings. Paint is applied too thickly, and too wet; planes and details are fudged; the coarsest of symbols are forced to signify delicate particularities; and mistakes are accommodated and struggled around. By any accepted criteria for evaluating watercolour drawings these are without merit and of the thirty or so judging juries I’ve sat on in the last twenty years not a single one of these pictures would have progressed past the first culling in any of them. One dealer even said to me that if a hopeful artist had arrived to show him this trash he’d have made sudden excuses about a remembered appointment and kicked him out within seconds of unzipping the portfolio. They look like what they are, a few hours work by one too arrogant to throw them away and too busy to master an unfamiliar medium. So why are they being exhibited? And, more pertinently, why, with only a couple of exceptions, have they been so extravagantly written up? The obvious answer is that being Hockney counts for more than it should. Anything by him will sell. He knows it, so do his dealers. Furthermore, whatever he does will be praised by those around him, especially those acolytes who have made mini-careers of exaggerating his achievements. As we’ve seen with pop stars who paint and write ‘poetry’, a counter-productive loyalty is the first quality expected from those in the immediate orbit of the stellar artiste who is otherwise insulated from objective, honest opinion. And besides, why should an art dealer – a shopkeeper by any other name – refuse to exhibit works on the grounds of poor quality when he knows he can shift them by the dozen at top dollar? What is not so easily explicable is the arrogance of a practitioner who comes new to an especially tricky medium and apparently exercises no self-criticism at all. Did Hockney think, “My god I’m making a total bollocks of this.” Apparently not. He probably thought precisely what I think when I’m watercolouring on holiday: “My god this is more difficult than I thought, but it’ll have to do. Anyway, it’s nearly lunchtime and my arse is aching.” None of these explanations is sufficient to explain why such demonstrably lousy work is not instantly discounted by independent outsiders. The real reason is everything to do with the sickness which seeks to ignore faults, that long-term legacy of Modernism: elective blindness. David Lee |  | ||||||||
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'Have you ever seen a worse watercolour than this exhibited in a major gallery? Well have you? It is by the great David Hockney so it must be a masterpiece of innovation in watercolour technique. Right?' | |||||||||
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