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Once More, with Feeling At lunch with friends the other week, I found myself sitting next to a conceptual artist, a nice man and an agreeable conversationalist. In the course of lunch, I happened to mention a painter friend – in a context unconnected with art – and I noticed him flinch. It might have been because he’d never heard of her - always a potential source of embarrassment for a successful artist, because either the person mentioned is a nobody, which is awkward, or he’s betraying his ignorance, which is worse. But this embarrassment seemed to have been triggered by the word ‘painter’. The reflex was familiar from another context: the momentary panic non-believers feel when a perfectly normal person they are getting along with fine suddenly turns out to believe in God. The look on his face said: ìCareful! She believes in painting.î It struck me then that painting and conceptualism are belief systems as directly opposed as religion and atheism - and that after years of peaceful coexistence, their differences are coming to a head. A year ago, a non-believer would have laughed off this sort of awkwardness in the confident knowledge of the intellectual superiority of his position. But with the imminent collapse of the world as we know it, shares in intellectual superiority have tanked. Believers are back in the game, and becoming a threat. Remember when Matthew Slotover, editor of Frieze, informed us that sincerity in art was dead? It wasn’t long after Francis Fukuyama announced the end of history. Now, bang! history is back out of the box, and sincerity may not be far behind. Look what’s happening to the word ‘conceptual’. Once a badge of honour - a mark of intellectual contempt for the ploddingly literal - it seems to be becoming synonymous with ‘lying’. In February, when an ad for the Costa Brava picturing a barefoot blonde on an empty beach was exposed as having been shot in the Bahamas, the director of the local tourist board used the defence that literal pictures of the local littoral – with wall-to-wall umbrellas - were of ‘insufficient quality’ for their ‘conceptual’ campaign. (The ad’s strapline, incidentally, was ‘Where does the Costa Brava start?’. Any Irishman could have told them ‘It can’t start from here’.) The moment advertisers latch onto art movements, of course, they’re finished. Relativism is a boon to the ad industry, as it removes any obligation to tell the truth, but the bad news for advertising - and conceptualism - is that since lies have landed the whole world in the shite, truth is undergoing a revival. Call it ‘sincerity’, ‘genuineness’ or ‘authenticity’, that old chestnut once so despised by contemporary art seems to be creeping back in the most unlikely places. At Camden Arts Centre the current artist-in-residence William Hunt is running a series of performances titled ‘I don’t believe you, you’re a liar’ (after Bob Dylan’s reply to the British heckler who called him ‘Judas!’ for going electric). Hunt has fixed up a music recording studio with a polygraph machine to test the honesty of different performers and discover the answer to the question, ‘is it truly heartfelt or are they just pushing our buttons?’. Of all the questions posed by contemporary artists over the past two decades, this was the last one I expected to hear. The series will culminate on 30 May in an X Factor-style talent contest at a venue in King’s Cross where acts will be hooked up to the lie detector and ‘critiqued not only on their singing talent but their genuineness’. Yep, the times they are a-changing, and not just on the leafy fringes of Hampstead. The new scourge of neo-authenticity seems even to have reached Bankside, where the promotional blurb for the recent Tate Triennial, Altermodern, announced that ìthe historical period defined by post-modernism is coming to an end, and a new art form for the 21st century is emerging.î Which prompts the question, if postmodernism is dead, where’s the apology for selling us a pup? As with the Treasury, in the place of the hardest word all the taxpayer gets from the Tate is a barefaced attempt to divert attention onto the next big thing. Which isÖ impossible to tell from the 2009 Triennial. To the casual visitor it looked like the same old same old, with a few new names. Buried in the small print, however, was a word almost as surprising as ‘sorry’. One of the launch events, or ‘prologues’, for the exhibition included a ‘Declaration on Inauthenticity by the International Necronautical Society (INS)’. OK, I know that’s the negative of authenticity – and the context was deliberately tongue-in-cheek – but when did the great Sphinx of Bankside ever speak other than in riddles? If the word appears in her utterances at all, it’s on the radar. Too late - as usual, Britain trails behind France. There art history is already being rewritten, starting with that sacred monster of inauthenticity, Andy Warhol. In a new exhibition at the Grand Palais curated by French art historian Alain Cueff, Warhol has been repackaged as a post-modern Raphael preoccupied with the grand themes of life, death and religion. ìThis is the first rereading of Warhol,î says Cueff. One wonders who will get the treatment next. Jeff Koons as a latterday Michelangelo? French art historians have never shirked a challenge - expect a born-again Koons at the Grand Palais any time soon. Most Jackdaw readers will be old enough to remember a time when art was believed to be a higher calling which, in some strange unfathomable way, was in the business of revelation. When ex-city slicker Koons became the world’s highest paid artist, that era seemed to be well and truly over. Reformed religion had triumphed: inspiration was heresy. All that remained of the artist’s priestly role was the preaching, and that was delegated to curators and press officers. The pulpit had successfully replaced the altar, without – miraculously – diminishing the flow of mumbo-jumbo. But now the mumbo-jumbo is drying up, and the reformers are beginning to look rattled. Could we be on the brink of a Counter-Reformation? When the world spontaneously crashes about one’s ears, iconoclasm does seem less of a priority – not just to you and me but also, apparently, to the chief executive of the Arts Council. ìWhen the system is collapsing and certainties have become uncertain, the arts become more important,î Alan Davey recently told the press. He then – oh sacrilege! – deployed the Matisse gambit: ìWhat the arts do is challenge and ask questions – but they also provide comfort [my italics].î Yes, he did it – he uttered the ‘c’ word. If this goes on, Matisse’s comfortable armchair may yet be rescued from the art history tip and wheeled on its ropey castors back into its old corner of the gallery. The fact is that when the going gets tough, the tough get tired and want to flop in front of some art that makes them feel that the world is not such an awful place. If art achieves that, we don’t mind if it pushes our buttons. So bring back the armchair, and don’t bother with the lie detector. Laura Gascoigne | ||||
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Laura Gascoigne All of this site is | ||||
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