{"id":1962,"date":"2018-02-10T18:45:02","date_gmt":"2018-02-10T18:45:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/?p=1962"},"modified":"2021-01-13T14:56:21","modified_gmt":"2021-01-13T14:56:21","slug":"laura-gascoigne-entertainment-value-march-2019","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/?p=1962","title":{"rendered":"Laura Gascoigne: Entertainment Value – March 2019"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Laura Gascoigne
March\/April 2019<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

During a bibulous press trip dinner a few years ago, a travel journalist laid into me about art criticism. How could I set myself up as a judge of contemporary art when it was all a matter of taste and no one could predict the verdict of history? I spluttered something about not sitting in judgment but informing readers about what artists were doing, when the arts editor of a local paper came to my rescue with the simple statement: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Art criticism is entertainment\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. He took everyone at the table by surprise and put an end to the argument at a stroke.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The surprise was because most art criticism these days is too boring to be described as entertainment, but that was not always the case. Nineteenth century reviews of contemporary exhibitions crackle with coruscating wit, insights and insults, and still make rollicking reading today. But they were written at a time when painting and sculpture were popular art forms which everyone felt qualified to sound off about, before modernism invented specialist art demanding specialist art critics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the current anti-elitist climate, the modernist composer Arnold Schoenberg\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s dictum:  \u00e2\u20ac\u0153If it is art, it is not for all, and if it is for all, it is not art,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d would get him beaten up by yellow vests. In Victorian England he would have got the bum\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s rush from the crowds that flocked to see John Martin\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Last Judgment triptych on its national tour, when it attracted 50,000 visitors in Glasgow and more than two million in Edinburgh, if contemporary visitor figures are to be believed. The fact that in 2011, after decades of neglect, Martin\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s crowd-pleasers were re-anointed as art in a major exhibition at Tate Britain suggests that art and entertainment are not incompatible \u00e2\u20ac\u201c dangling the possibility that if contemporary art were a little less boring our galleries would not have to struggle quite so hard to generate the impression of public enthusiasm for exhibitions that are nine-tenths empty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Victorian art was moralistic but fun; too much of ours is moralistic and deadly dull. Our public galleries vacillate between serious exhibitions that are dry as dust and interactive ones with an element of play, on the principle that what is lost on the roundabouts will be gained on the swings. Yet even play apparatus is given a moral dimension. The kids taking advantage of superfuse three-person swings currently set up outside Tate Modern might not enjoy themselves so much if they knew the installation was \u00e2\u20ac\u0153conceived as an assembly line for collective movement\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and that their job was  \u00e2\u20ac\u0153to combat social apathy through collaborative action,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d challenging  \u00e2\u20ac\u0153society\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s apathy towards the political, environmental and economic crises of our age\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. (I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d like to see a notice to this effect put up beside the swings in our local children\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s playground to ensure that all that unproductive, morally neutral pendulism doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t go to waste.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a misconception that entertainment is essentially frivolous. It doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have to be, as the American artist Steve Powers proved in 2008 when he installed a waterborne Thrill Ride on Coney Island, inviting trippers to pay a dollar to see hooded actors torture each other \u00c3\u00a0 la CIA. The nation that gave us Hollywood films understands that people can be entertained by anything, comic or tragic, that grabs their attention. Whether it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s \u00e2\u20ac\u0153a clown with his pants falling down\u00e2\u20ac\u009d or a plot  \u00e2\u20ac\u0153simply teeming with sex\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 it could be Oedipus Rex,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d as Judy Garland sang in The Band Wagon, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s entertainment\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. The Jam took a rather different view of the subject in their homonymous punk era song, with its  \u00e2\u20ac\u0153lights going out and a kick in the balls\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 a freezing cold flat and damp on the walls\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. Each to his own: The British never really bought into Hollywood pzazz, but that doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t mean we don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t need entertaining. No one wants to be bored, especially not if they have to pay for it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like the rest of you, I suspect, I was initially shocked to hear that Jeff Koons has been given a show at the Ashmolean. What\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a university museum stuffed with treasures doing showcasing a load of pumped-up tat only famous for selling for inflated prices? I can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t be bothered to go and gawp at it myself \u00e2\u20ac\u201c I prefer Samsung\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Michelangelo\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s David mounted on a washing machine, an honest-to-goodness advertising stunt \u00e2\u20ac\u201c but on reflection I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not sure it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s such a bad idea. Not only will it get people who have never stepped inside the place through the doors \u00e2\u20ac\u201c while relieving them of their money \u00e2\u20ac\u201c it might also act like an expectorant to dislodge the phlegm clogging the visual faculties of the great British public. As Sarah Lucas once observed with her usual frankness: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I think the public does like contemporary art, and when they take a stance against it and think it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a load of bollocks, that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s how they like it.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Art, the stuff you love to hate: anything\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s better than indifference. In Painting as a Pastime, Winston Churchill divided human beings into three classes: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153those who are toiled to death, those who are worried to death, and those who are bored to death\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. The first two classes are never going to visit galleries, so please let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s avoid piling on the boredom for the third class who might turn to art in the hope of relief. Would I rather a Jeff Koons exhibition to the terminal ennui and sanctimony of last year\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Turner Prize? A thousand times yes. At least Koons, bless his shiny baubles, isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t trying to moralise. He knows he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s an entertainer and he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s justly proud of it, like any artist who achieves the miracle of becoming popular. Look at David Hockney, a consummate showman, and Grayson Perry ditto. If they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re honest with themselves, every artist who becomes a household name must accept this fact in the privacy of their studio. The confession \u00e2\u20ac\u0153when I am alone by myself, I have not the urge to think of myself as an artist in the great and ancient sense of the term\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 I am only a public entertainer who has understood his time\u00e2\u20ac\u009d may have been put into Picasso\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s mouth by the Italian satirical novelist Giovanni Papini, but if Pablo didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t actually say it he should have.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Until relatively recently, avant-gardists from the Dadaists to Dali were shameless entertainers  \u00e2\u20ac\u201c the Italian Futurists Marinetti and Russolo packed out the London Coliseum with their Art of Noises. It was modernism that killed off art as entertainment, with art criticism as collateral damage. We can thank conceptualism, courtesy of Koons, Hirst and co, for reviving the corpse. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s no coincidence that in 2016 the Hollywood entertainment conglomerate Endeavor reportedly took a 70% stake in Frieze ahead of its LA launch this February.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Purists will choke on their Pepto Bismol, but we have to stop being pompous about art if we want the general public to take an interest. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The English may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Thomas Beecham recognised in his wisdom, and AJA Symons made the same point about art when he remarked: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Comparatively few people care for art at all, and most of these care for it because they mistake it for something else.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d If we want visitor figures to justify public funding, then we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d better not correct people\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s mistakes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Laura Gascoigne March\/April 2019 During a bibulous press trip dinner a few years ago, a travel journalist laid into me about art criticism. How could I set myself up as a judge of contemporary art when it was all a matter of taste and no one could predict the verdict of history? I spluttered something […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[742,75],"class_list":["post-1962","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","tag-comment","tag-laura-gascoigne"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1962","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1962"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1962\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1963,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1962\/revisions\/1963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1962"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1962"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1962"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}