MAY/JUNE, 2023
Three things, related after a fashion. First. Every day The Jackdaw receives scores of unsolicited emails of little interest. Many of these messages promote young artists, each of whom is announced with a loud fanfare of adjectives suggesting genius of global reach. Their promoters specialise (or so they assert) in spotting ‘rising stars’ – any green, Fine Art BA is no one these days if not a ‘rising star’. And if you’re in the market for ‘collecting’, that deceitful euphemism for ‘investing’, you must climb aboard now, they urge, while you can still afford them. But beware the lingo, if you dare, for ‘Ones to watch’, another commonly used devious phrase, rarely has anything to do with ‘Ones to actually look at’. The implied promise here is that your ‘support’ of these stellar names may multiply once the artist is swept up by a dealer capable of pulling more strings than Quasimodo so that prices rise, critics drool, buyers queue, billionaires punt, auctioneers hype, then Bingo! It’s time to cash in and buy that e-type. Sweeping aside the flannel, the fundamental here is Greed. The market in contemporary art rarely discusses quality of work, not least because, conveniently, there is no longer any way of relatively appraising it. On the other hand, investment you can definitely measure. This reminds me: decades ago virtuoso guitarist, Eric Clapton, bought abstract works by Gerhard Richter. He was well advised; perhaps he even liked them. In recent times these canvases sold for tens of millions. It caused me to speculate that Slowhand made more from investing in art than ever he did riffing so brilliantly with Jack and Ginger. For such is the dividend offered for spotting ‘rising stars’.
Second. Parallel to the above is the marketing of fashionable trends which appeal to the less discerning (but morally ever-so-superior) younger audience. Today, and especially because students are not trained in any way to stand out technically from their peers, artists are likely selected for promotion based on criteria distant from any originality or special competence in what they produce. Because similarly minded people as those they seek to attract are in charge of our public galleries, such considerations and topics are hammered home to the exclusion of all others. Preaching to the easily converted is a cinch. These are generally not the conditions for work attractive to older audiences, those who are used to demanding of art more than mere lip service to their political persuasions. And here lies the answer to a question I was recently posed about why those of my pensioner generation no longer attend State Art outlets with the frequency they once did, if at all. The ICA, Hayward, Serpentine, Whitechapel have all sacrificed a discerning audience in pursuit of another one which is more sympathetic to the social and political obsessions of their staff.
Third. In John Rattigan’s article (p. 22) he mentions an artist, Thomas Denny (shamingly I hadn’t heard of him), whose work, he writes, will still be admired centuries after most of the modern charlatans currently crowing have been silenced and their works condemned to permanent storage outside Swindon. I agree with him; to me this belief in the inevitable failure of almost anything fashionable is a self-evident truth, almost a Commandment. He cites a major commission completed by Denny, a designer and maker of stained glass, for the church of Burton Percy, a Yorkshire hamlet south of Tadcaster neighbouring the 1461 Roses’ battlefield of Towton, with its infamous distinction of being the bloodiest ever fought on our soil. This is a 500–year–old perpendicular Gothic church of quite beautiful proportions with carved box pews throughout. The surrounding area is an English idyll of streams, willows and yews, flood meadows, rooks, lapwings and, presently, the golden glow of flowering rape. Inside the church (if you’re lucky), its stained glass, including a recognisable Burne-Jones’s figure, Charity, flanked each side by an angel, sings courtesy of bright sunshine. Denny’s three tall lancet windows at the rear was a commission to celebrate the millennium. Foliage flames dance skywards. Hidden in their patterns, twists and turns are details of spirits, animals, fishes, birds and people celebrating peace, goodwill and respect for all creatures great and small. I don’t normally care for modernistic windows in old churches because they appear insensitive, so gratingly out of tune – Hockney’s disfigurement of Westminster Abbey is the superlative example of this – but I was won over by this one, whose subject is optimistic in so dark an age. Its decent secular themes complement the compatible religiously-inspired ones nearby. And the craft, all Denny’s own work of course, is at least on a par with theirs.