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January/February 2009 The first beneficiaries of the post-1945 expansion of art education are now dying. Some have had their moment. Many more have not, preferring avoidance of limelight whilst working assiduously and exhibiting infrequently only for a small circle of admirers. If the last twenty years has taught us anything it is that those in the mainstream are more likely attention-seekers than genuinely meritorious. The heirs of these post-war alumni often inherit vast stockpiles of unsold work. Rare is the week when I’m not contacted by relatives of a dead artist and asked what they should do with the racks and chests of paintings and drawings accumulated over decades for which there is little market and for which storage costs are prohibitive. Short of recommending that they donate the best pieces to museums, schools and hospitals, there is little to suggest except a fire sale on ebay. Many homeowners of low income, who – like myself – consider all original art to be ridiculously overpriced (the obvious reason why so much of it doesn’t sell in the first place), would welcome the chance to hang work temporarily on their walls, but no agency exists to organise storage, free loans or a comprehensive website for the cataloguing of such bequeathed oeuvres. Undoubtedly this would be an expensive charity to administer but it would be one way to diversify interest in visual art and perhaps even to arouse a collecting instinct. Instead of concentrating on purchasing thousands of second- and third-rate works which it hardly ever shows, a decent Arts Council would surely have organised some similar warehouse scheme which potentially offers a free service to every deceased artist. Needless to say, on this as well as on many matters potentially useful to all visual artists and not just the chosen few, the present Arts Council is utterly useless. I encourage readers to correspond with their thoughts on this problem. I would especially like to hear from those with knowledge of the noble art-in-schools schemes inaugurated in the 1960s and whose acquired works have been either lost or furtively flogged off. In the last issue I was moaning about pictures whose quality is wasted because they are shown behind glass and lit badly. It’s worse than that in the Byzantium exhibition at the Royal Academy where there isn’t even sufficient light to see exhibits badly. The gloomy display was doubtless an attempt to recreate the atmosphere of Cefalu or Torcello. Only designers are that stupid. What is the point of endangering precious ivories by airfreighting them across continents only to render their beauties invisible? Designers generally are a breed of over-indulged, self-important fannies, but may I draw their collective attention to this. If an ivory is not lit in relief you need to come very close in order to decipher it. If the object is then centred in a very large box whose glass keeps you just out of range for reading spectacles those who wear glasses are unable to see it because at a distance it’s too dark and indistinct whilst close up it’s out of focus. I have never before visited an exhibition which I couldn’t actually see properly. Thank god I didn’t pay twelve quid for this privilege. Five minutes of open-mouthed awe in Sant’Apollinaire in Classe, especially if you’ve trekked to it from Ravenna and have seen it approaching step by step for miles, will tell you more about Byzantine art than unrepresentative shows of peripheral material like this one. Most of the paintings here, by the way, wouldn’t turn an eye in a Cotswolds’ bric-a-brac fair. Who on earth selected this tat as exemplary of a great style? Also, the one large mosaic, from Thebes apparently, might at best be termed ‘provincial’. Only those brought up on cackhanded Romano-British mosaics could think this worth looking at for more than a second. Why bother trucking it so far when we’ve got works just as bad right here in the British Museum? Realism has finally dawned – and my word it took long enough. Even a dullard like me could see that fantasy economics would eventually fall to earth in flames and its authors exposed as incompetent crooks. The gloss of fantasy these creeps spread across our lives for nearly two decades has now been removed like cataracts from everyone’s eyes. For the first time in years critics whom one imagined were blind are now miraculously cured. For example, those commentators who pretended to understand and enjoy nonsense art have been finally liberated to bear testimony to what their eyes actually see. The Turbine Hall magnum opus is, thus, a stillborn embarrassment. The Turner Prize is also, thus, dead, this year’s cheque waver being a ‘professor’ in a false beard who is stupid enough to think difficult words will conceal the pretentious banality of his work. Even State Art’s first eleven are being revealed in their true colours. Damien Hirst, whose factory junk has been an art-free zone for fifteen years, has betrayed his dealers and robbed his collectors by admitting that his works are vastly overpriced. He has laid off staff and now he’s suing an artist for using his absurd diamond skull (about which he’s fed us any number of lies) in a collage on sale for £65. This is the individual, don’t forget, who has himself turned plagiarism into an art form. In some cases he ended up paying for copying others’ works but his sin was to try to get away with it. Hirst is zealously protective of his own copyright whilst flippantly disregarding the same rights of others. He is an arsehole. And he is finished. Only the news pages, to which he constantly lobs stories like a keeper feeding seals, will save his collapse into a deserved and total obscurity. David Lee | |||||
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