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The End of Art History In the early 1990s an American academic announced the end of history. It was an ingenious theory designed to sell books and was constructed around the fancy that now Communism was dead and Capitalism had triumphed, as witnessed in the fact that the former slaves of the Soviet bloc could now shop for daft clothes they didn’t actually need, the future would be an infinite present, a utopia of three-quid cups of designer coffee and leadership by ‘elected’ rogues instead of self-appointed ones. This idea flew for a while but was brought down in flames as soon as militant Islam discovered its loathing for Western degeneracy while expressing an alternative preference for a caliphate whose paradigm was the Stone Age – except this time with RPGs and burkas instead of cudgels and bearskins. There is, however, one exception where Professor Fukuyama’s theory remains buoyantly intact. In art we really are at the end of history. Turks, Koreans, Uruguayans, Uzbekis, the Irish, are all now making videos and installations at least as long-winded, flairless and forgettable as those done by British and American artists. So universal is the reach of the international State Art sausage machine that it is now impossible to tell the nationality, or even the continent, of an artist based on what he exhibits. Those scores of pointless iron bedsteads last year at Tate Modern could just as easily have been the work of a Lebanese as the Venezuelan, or whatever she was, who actually bought them in. There is only one show in town. No longer is there in art a multiplicity of either idiom or flavour. We have entered the sempiternal state of grace that is the Un-Avant Garde. No scholars are required for this end-of-art-history Opportunism because discrimination is dead. In a permanent status quo there is nothing left to be connoisseurial about. State Art requires only blind faith so the sole qualification needed to curate art is unquestioned belief in Big Brother and half a nose for Newspeak (see Artbollocks). But where is the modern Orwell to satirise this numbing condition? The 25th running of the Turner Prize, playing to immensely popular empty houses at Tate Britain until January 3rd, is seen as a cause for self-congratulation mainly on account of its longevity. It is claimed that the art is as ‘radical’ as ever, by which is meant Same Old Shit; for words used by State Art apologists always mean the opposite of their actual definition – think of ‘challenging’, ‘significant’, ‘important questions’, ‘progress’, ‘analytical’... there are dozens of them and they all mean Same Old Shit. At this rate the Turner Prize will keep going for ever, each year selecting four different artists to fill a room apiece with skill-free whimsies which look every inch unworthy of the prominence the prize affords them. And nothing can stop it whilst the political establishment who pay for State Art persist in the belief that it is ‘progressive’ and ‘dynamic’, misapprehensions which make it strategically inexpedient to speak out against it. All three main parties now praise State Art using the familiar mantras sown into the credulous minds of their spokesmen by the President-For-Life and his barkers. 25 years used to be a long time in art. In the quarter century following 1900 there was Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism, Constructivism, Suprematism, Vorticism, Orphism, Surrealism and Dada, as well as Salonist figurative art, and each with adherents inspired by no other reason than their eager curiosity to explore and reveal. In the same length of time from 1985 to 2010 we’ve had only Conceptualism which is claimed to be varied when it isn’t – oh, and there’s another lie-word, ‘diverse’. The work presented as ‘different’ is unified always by the absence of any form and also by any criteria with which to evaluate it. It is all similarly unexpressive, any expression allegedly residing mysteriously in the simple idea behind it. One is none the wiser today of how judgements are made about the significance of, say, a pile of ash, than one was in previous years when presented with piles of rags, leaves, grass, electrical appliances, household equipment, crates, sweets, rotting food, fridges, and – back in the ancient history of the 1970s – that primus inter pares of piles, the bricks. Additionally, there have been so many ‘significant’ piles of stones, in all grades from gravel and pebbles to boulders and slabs, it would take a researcher weeks to catalogue them all. We are told in this year’s Turner Prize bumph that Roger Hiorns’s pile of ash is a ìnew developmentî, ìradicalî and ìanalyticalî. And, yes, it also ìraises important questionsî. Over the period of the Turner Prize we’ve been urged to believe exactly the same about all the other random piles of material at sundry locations. Can you remember, for example, what those famously controversial heaps of old clothes and cellophane-wrapped caramels signified at the Serpentine? I’m buggered if I can. Yet, at the time, they were sold to us as highly significant and challenging. We can doubtless look forward to a great many more piles down the years until, Amen, the Walthamstow Taliban declare a blanket fatwa on all artists. Conceptual art is the last word, the full stop, the final curtain. Nothing else will ever be allowed. This is a depressing picture, so I’ll move on. When Lord Russell passed the Museums Act in 1849 it allowed local authorities to raise a special rate in order to build museums for the education of newly urbanised masses. Many now famous city museums were built in the decades following. Before the recent inauguration of art history as a general university subject, these places were, like the proverbial monasteries of the Middle Ages, loving protectors of knowledge and research. There was no doubting the seriousness of what went on in these places, crammed as they were with oddities overseen by erudite enthusiasts. They encouraged in some of us the desire to probe deeper. It is now deemed that such galleries, which inspired the imaginations and curiosity of so many, are unfit for purpose – which, translated, means they are forbidding to punters who don’t like museums. Something called outreach has replaced scholarship, whilst history itself must be brightened up and crassly slewed in favour of politically correct soundbytes. Since the National Lottery was instituted in 1993 we have lived through a period of museum building matched only by the decades after the Museums Act. The latest to throw open its re-varnished portals is the Ashmolean in Oxford, a university museum of ancient standing compared to the municipal upstarts mentioned above. Its new extension mercifully leaves the painting and sculpture galleries more or less untouched, and enjoyable much as before. The new ‘galleries’ are the usual maze of ‘spaces’, a confection of glass, lifts, bare walls, ramps, gantries, lavatories and chromium handrails familiar from other extensions – that disagreeable tumour behind Manchester City Art Gallery springs to mind. Objects are laid out with much the same allure as designer merchandise in Bond Street. Whereas the old Ashmolean was stuffed to its high ceilings with objects there seems little to look at now. The marvellous Roman Britain gallery, for example, with its Dickensian clutter and fascinating cabinets of material excavated at Cotswold villas, has disappeared altogether. I miss it. I want it back. Which idiots asked for it to be changed? The look of seriousness has here been sacrificed to the wishful thinking that if you make a museum resemble a department store those who really prefer Debenhams will come in and round off their window-shopping with a five-quid snack. Now there’s an exquisite idea worthy of Oxford. David Lee | ||||
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