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The Reality Check is in the Post The injunction ‘Know thyself’ famously inscribed on the temple of Apollo at Delphi provided the theme of a recent exhibition in the chapel of the Ecole des Beaux-arts in Paris. Academia: Qui es-tu?, which closed in November, was curated by the international dealer and interior designer to the super-rich Axel Vervoordt. The eclectic selection of works, ancient and modern – an Egyptian Seated Sekhmet figure of the 2nd millennium BC and a Hellenistic torso of Herakles sharing space with Rembrandt’s youthful self-portrait of 1628, a Piero Manzoni Achrome and a Louise Bourgeois Cell - left audiences in no doubt of the Belgian collector’s exquisite and individual taste in art. But the accompanying claim in an essay by the economist Bernard Lietaer that ìA work of art, any work of art, is an attempt to answer the question ìWho are you?î – coupled with the suggestion that this was the prime concern of Plato’s Academy - did make me wonder about Vervoordt’s taste in catalogue essayists. Both claims are such obvious, utter bunk it’s not worth wasting words on a rebuttal. What I will take issue with, though, as a lapsed Classicist (ie one who has forgotten everything she ever knew except the bits worth picking fights over) is the persistent and deliberate misunderstanding by contemporary commentators of what the god Apollo actually meant. As I learned at the knee of my venerable Classics teacher Mrs Bozic, who came to school in a paisley toga and hush puppies, the Delphic instruction ‘Know thyself’ had nothing whatsoever to do with navel-gazing. Far from being an ìinvitation to turn our gaze deep into ourselvesî – as Henri-Claude Cousseau, Director of the Ecole des Beaux-arts maintains in another catalogue essay – it was a caution against self-absorption; an exhortation to pull our heads out of our arses and realise we are not the only people in the world. On Mrs B’ s authority, the Greek ‘Gnosi seauton’ translated into common English as ìKnow your placeî. Why was it inscribed on the temple at Delphi? Obvious. The Pythian priestess was sick of being pestered by queues of people wanting to know things that were none of their business, such as ‘Is my son having it off with his philosophy tutor?’ ‘Is my wife having a lesbian affair with her Phrygian slave?’ ‘Why did Lysias give a jar of expensive ointment to that preening poof Diodoros and not me?’ And so on. To shut them up, she spelt it out in playground vernacular in the pronaos: ‘Don’t come to me with stupid question about things you’ve no right to know. Know yourself!î The Pythian sybil was nothing if not pithy. It did no good, I’m sure, just as it won’t do any good trying to explain to Director Cousseau and his School of Muffins that art is unrelated to self-absorption. Fortunately time will do it for him. Self-obsessive art can only flourish in an atmosphere detached from reality - when reality bites, the question of who you are quickly becomes less interesting than the question of how you will eat. And now that the global meltdown is ‘feeding through into the real sector’, the school of hard knocks will soon replace the School of Muffins. What evidence do I have for this prediction? My inability to read press releases without dropping off. In the past I read them less out of a sense of duty than a desire to have a good laugh at the general lunacy, but suddenly the lunacy looks so passÈ it’s about as unfunny as a joke from the Jurassic era. Ever since the real sector reasserted its existence most contemporary art has become irrelevant to the point of meaninglessness. If art’s function is to hold up a mirror to the world, the better for us to see and understand it – a point on which Director Cousseau seems to agree – then art that fails to mirror the present is failing in its job. And the fact is that the world reflected in the contemporary art mirror is already lagging behind the world as we know it. Suddenly, come the credit crunch, art about greed and selfishness, and art about art, has passed its sell-by. Hirst’s Sotheby’s sale was the last chance saloon; now he’s laying off workers. Pity the cutting-edge galleries with a stream of shows in the pipeline that already seem mind-numbingly insignificant. Many will be lumbered with future programmes stuck in the past - that’s if they’re still receiving funding in 2010. Not so the sensible South London Gallery, which is seeing in the New Year with Danish collective Superflex’s Flooded McDonald’s, a 10-minute film of a replica burger bar filling with water. The sight of Happy Meal cartons floating downstream is exactly what the post-credit crunch curator ordered. If it was really in tune with the zeitgeist, the Tate would hand over the Duveen Galleries to moustachioed Millau sheep-farmer Jose BovÈ to recreate his historic attack on McDo’s. But presumably they’re booked up years in advance and we’ll be dead of boredom before they reconnect with reality. What art do people want in a recession? This sybil’s prediction is that small will triumph and Big Art will follow the dinosaurs into extinction. With the global vision now exposed as a mirage, people will want to focus on the close-at-hand. They’ll be more inclined to trust their own judgment - if the financial experts can get it so spectacularly wrong, why should the art experts know any better? Knowing the market will be proved to be an illusion and knowing what you like will come into its own. There’ll be a time lag while the market adjusts and rich collectors fight to defend the inflated value of their investments, but eventually they’ll throw in the towel. Most of them only collect art to show off, and when the public and the media lose interest, they’ll lose their audience. It’s not all good news, of course. The Jackdaw will lose his artbollocks, and artists everywhere will suffer. Smaller galleries are already feeling the pinch as the inevitable drought of red dots sets in. But when the system has been flushed out, things can only get better. Imagine an art world where the art mattered more than the artist, because it was about things that mattered. A world where knowing about art didn’t mean knowing the market, but appreciating lasting values of form and colour and having some sense of the eternal verities. Where curators were not intent on peering into the future but content to live in the present. Where knowingness no longer passed for knowledge, and art had nothing to do with knowing yourself and everything to do with knowing the world around you. It may never happen, but it’s not inconceivable. The question ‘Who are you?’ may obsess the sort of collectors who want to bolster their sense of identity through art, but art itself can get along without it. When Alfred Wallis died, Naum Gabo wrote on his funeral wreath: ìIn homage to the artist on whom nature has bestowed the rarest of gifts, not to know that he is one.î Laura Gascoigne | ||||
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Laura Gascoigne All of this site is | ||||
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