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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 |  | ||||||||
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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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