I think they got a First.
To frame something as art has become the get-out-of-jail-free card, a kind of bagsy and no returns to accusations of ineptitude.
When some people embark on doing something that they might fail massively at they call it an ‘art project’. A tactic employed by actors like Jared Leto when describing his alt-rock band (serious) or writers like Caitlin Moran when referring to tiling the bathroom (facetious). ‘Hey,’ she says, ‘you can never get art wrong.’ This is funny but it saddens me that ‘art project’ is now a byword for useless, unskilled amateurism. You know that often someone who’s not very good at making television programmes becomes a video artist, and someone who’s not particularly good at writing hit songs becomes an art band.
But I struggle with my curmudgeonliness here because intellectually I should be all-embracing and the art world should close ranks and we should all say, ‘Yes, everything we do is really brilliant.’ Thinking about what art is has meant I’ve had to question my own assumptions and prejudices along the way. I struggle with a vision of myself as an old fuddy-duddy, pre-twentieth-century arty type. But, conversely, I’m coming to realize that in many ways I myself am a conceptual artist masquerading as a craftsman: I employ traditional media like pottery and tapestry and etching in a teasing, reactionary way. But I enjoy correcting people when they suggest that my dressing up in women’s clothes is part of my art. Recently a video artist suggested that a series I’d done for TV was art. I replied, ‘No, it’s telly, I made it with telly values in mind.’
My own personal experience regarding definitions of art has revolved not so much around formal boundaries – for example, that art has to be something done by an artist – but around boundaries concerning taste. I think of it as a form of snobbery. Beneath the sophisticated tolerance – ‘Yeah, everybody can make art and everything they do can be art’ – there’s an interesting kind of class snobbery. Some art is more equal than others. Like a urinal – bringing that into art, that’s really radical. And a shark, bringing that into the gallery – oh my God, that’s an amazing thing. But a pot, now that’s craft.
I called an exhibition of mine The Vanity of Small Differences, after a phrase from Freud, ‘the narcissism of small differences’. He noticed that the people that people hated the most were the ones who were almost the same as them. That’s the thing about pottery and craft. It’s too close to art.
It’s also maybe the root of the worry about the middlebrow. Highbrow defenders of this trend for all-inclusiveness in the art world will often cite middlebrowness as the sin of their opponents. Since 1960s pop art the art world has been happy for artists to use the lowbrow to add zest and authenticity to their works. But middlebrow has resonances of the suburban bourgeoisie who might see art as aspirational by association.
Perhaps a defining aspect of middlebrowness is its allegiance with the child’s idea of what art is: painting and sculpture, or at least nothing too challenging. Middlebrow people like David Hockney or Jeff Koons, or at a pinch that bloke who did the big sun at Tate Modern. So perhaps there’s a tension between the forward thinkers, wanting everything to be art, and people who want a more traditional definition of art.
If you think of contemporary art as the vibrant city centre of culture with all the young, happening, trendy things going on, and you think of the old masters as this beautiful mellow landscape in the distance, then craft is probably thought of as a suburb that you drive through on the way to your second home.
Cool, modern thinkers might say, ‘Hey, relax, Grayson, why are you so uptight about things being defined as art?’ Well, I need to know whether to put my art goggles on, whether I should think and feel about the work as an artwork, whether I can apply art values to it. The philosopher George Dickie said an artwork is ‘a candidate for contemplation or appreciation’.
When I was at college in the late 1970s one of my fellow students, Jonathan Green, left the definition to democracy. He made a metal box and wrote on it the question ‘Is this art?’ Below this were two buttons attached to counters marked ‘yes’ and ‘no’. So the audience could vote, and whether it was art or not would depend on where it was and who saw it. In some ways the perfect embodiment of the whole problem, except that experts usually have the final say and, on the whole, democracy is quite conservative and looks for visual beauty and aesthetics.
A more considered test as to whether something is art might be, is it in an art context? Is it in an exhibition, on a plinth? Arthur Danto, a philosopher, said an artwork is about something, has a point of view, a style, and it uses rhetorical ellipsis – that is, it engages the audience to fill in the gaps. The artwork isn’t just there; you have to respond to the artwork. But he also said that art needs an art-historical context. This is an institutional definition of art. The artwork needs to be in the context where you might find art. After all, if Duchamp had left his urinal attached to the wall in the lavatory I doubt it would have had the same impact. Of course this takes us back to the question of who decides what counts as art that might go into art galleries. If an artist has already declared an object art, then by Duchamp’s definition it must be art. But what if a curator or a critic chooses an object not made by an artist and places it in a gallery. Is it art then?
Curators have taken up the shamanistic power of the artist to turn other sorts of things into the valuable high-status art object. The fine-art gallery has been particularly prone to drawing in categories of object that have the look and feel of art and yet their headline definition (photography or video or possibly even pottery) lies in a different category.
But after all these thoughts and possible tests of what the boundaries of art are, I want to take you on my own beating of the bounds. And I have my whip here to remind you when we come to one of the important little markers as I trawl around. And I’ve got several little tests that I’ve devised, so you might know when you’re looking at a work of art and not just at some old rubbish.
So the first marker post on my trawl around the boundaries is: is it in a gallery or an art context?
Now Duchamp’s urinal, he could have left it plumbed in – but, no, he brought it into the gallery. He went to a hardware place and he bought one and he brought it into the gallery and put it on a plinth.
Keith Tyson, a winner of the Turner Prize, did a piece once where he just got the things already in the gallery and made them into artworks with what he called his ‘magical activation’. So he looked at the light switch and he called it ‘the apocalyptic switch’ and he looked at the light bulb and he called it ‘the light bulb of awareness’. He was using his power as an artist to designate things art, but it was within the art context.
And this art context, it can be quite a powerful thing, but it can also be quite a lame excuse for an artwork. If I got the loveliest car in the world, a beautiful vintage Ferrari, and I put it into an art gallery and said, ‘This is a work of art now,’ it would be quite a lame work of art. It would be a lovely car, but quite a lame work of art. This happens a lot in the art world – it’s what I call borrowed importance. You can go round an exhibition and say, ‘Oh, I really like the politics. That’s right on, those politics. That needs saying, those things. Rubbish art though.’ Or ‘That’s really funny. Rubbish art though.’ So the art-gallery context is a good test, but it’s only a start.
My second boundary marker: is it a boring version of something else?
I call this one the opera joke phenomenon. When you go to the opera you go for the music and the colour and the costumes and the drama, and you get swept up in it all. You don’t go for the jokes. Of course they have jokes in opera sometimes and everybody laughs uproariously, but they’re really bad jokes. Sometimes I think that one of the things that defines something as art is that it’s quite boring: it lacks entertainment value, it lacks pleasure. I mean, in the contemporary setting, one of the most insulting words you can use to describe an artwork is ‘decorative’.
But it’s a v
ery noble thing to be decorative. And this idea that art is not pleasurable is wrong. Leo Tolstoy said, ‘In order correctly to define art, it is necessary first of all to cease to consider it as a means of pleasure and to consider it as one of the conditions of human life.’ I don’t think Leo went to a lot of video art, but he could be referring to having to stand for ages or sit on one of those tasteful but uncomfortable benches they always install in video-art rooms. Christian Marclay, a video artist, made this amazingly clever and brilliant piece called The Clock. It is a masterpiece of video art and I recommend it if you ever get to see it, but he did have sofas, which might have contributed to the good reviews.
The next boundary marker: is it made by an artist?
Art historian Ernst Gombrich said, ‘There is no such thing as art, only artists.’ So you have to be an artist to make art.
In 1995 Cornelia Parker, a conceptual artist, had a show at the Serpentine. Part of the display was a collaboration she did with the actress Tilda Swinton, where Tilda lay in this glass box. It was called The Maybe and Tilda was asleep and you could go along and look up her nostrils and stare at her very closely. It was an interesting thing and it was part of this exhibition. In 2013 Tilda Swinton decided to do it again and so she put the glass box in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. We’re in the age of Instagram and social media so this is a very big hoo-hah. I find this very interesting. I thought she was the artwork in 1995, but maybe she wasn’t in 2013. But is she an artist? Was it different this time because it wasn’t a collaboration with artist Cornelia Parker?
Another issue that boils up when we’re talking about the question of ‘Is it made by an artist?’ is something like Aborigine art. I went to the ‘Australia’ show at the Royal Academy in London, which had quite a lot of Aboriginal art. They are very beautiful and powerful objects, but are they art? The old original bark paintings were spiritual maps and were about the people’s relationship with the universe and the landscape. They’re powerful items, but are they, and the paintings made more recently in the same spirit, contemporary art?
I read a story about this 81-year-old white artist in Australia called Elizabeth Durack. She painted Aborigine-style paintings under the pseudonym of Eddie Burrup and put them into an Aborigine art show, and there was outrage that she should borrow their special otherness – the fact that they weren’t artists.
She was borrowing the power. And there was outrage at that but there wasn’t outrage about the Aboriginal artists borrowing the power of being a contemporary artist. Can it be art if it’s done by someone who doesn’t acknowledge themselves as an artist?
Next boundary marker: photography. Problematic.
In the 1990s every second show seemed to be photography, but how do you tell if a photograph is art? In the 1990s you could tell it was art photography because no one was smiling and they often had a stagey portentousness. But the main reason you could tell these photographs were art was that they were huge. Their size made them look more like paintings and less like snaps or photojournalism.
We live in an age when photography rains on us like sewage from above. So how do you tell if a photo’s art? Well, you could probably still just see if they’re smiling. If they’re smiling, it’s probably not art. And you could also ask, is there a lot of meaning emanating from this image?
I asked Martin Parr, the very famous and brilliant photographer, if he could give me a definition of an art photo as opposed to another kind of photo. And, almost in jest, he said, ‘Well, if it’s bigger than two metres and it’s priced higher than five figures.’
And I thought, that’s actually quite accurate if you think about it. Someone like Andreas Gursky, a famous photographer, makes these huge photographs, sometimes four metres by two metres, and his photograph of the Rhine has the highest price of any photograph ever: $4.5 million.
Now this brings us on to an interesting other boundary post, which can be applied to other artworks as well as photography, and that is the limited-edition test.
The reason that Gursky’s photograph made $4.5 million is that it’s an edition of five and the others were already in museum collections and so would never be available. This was the only one left on the private market and that’s why it made such a high price, and that is an example exactly of how the limited-edition factor works. So if something is part of an endless edition, it’s giving away part of its qualification as art.
Another test that perhaps sounds facetious is what I call the handbag-and-hipster test.
Quite often you can’t tell if something is a work of art apart from the fact that people are standing around it and looking at it. If there are lots of people with beards and glasses and single-speed bikes, or oligarchs’ wives with great big handbags looking a bit perturbed and puzzled by what they’re staring at, then it’s probably art. People often say that art belongs to privileged people who’ve got a good education or a lot of money, and so if those people are staring at it, there’s quite a high chance that it’s art.
The other thing you might look for is a queue because people nowadays, they love queuing for art, especially participatory art – the art that kids can crawl around or you can take an Instagram of yourself in front of. There’s a need for spectacle, public spectacle. I call that ‘Theme Park plus Sudoku’. People want an outrageous and exciting experience from art and then they want to slightly puzzle over what it’s about.
This can take us back to participatory art and the construction of social experiences. If anything can be art then this sort of art cleans up the bits of life that have not already been claimed by art history. Tino Sehgal, nominated for the Turner Prize, sets up unsettling human interactions for people: children spouting fluent art speak, gallery attendants who engage you in philosophical debate, performers provoking the audience to talk about them. Tino is so dedicated to this dematerialized version of art that he won’t even allow any photographs or recordings of his work.
Another artist often associated with this type of art is Liam Gillick, whose coloured Perspex constructions are ‘potentially’ meant to facilitate audience interaction. They often look like bits of architecture made for some event. Despite his titles often being a cool parody of management speak, Arrival Rig or Dialogue Platform, Gillick insists that the presence of an audience is an essential component of his art: ‘My work is like the light in the fridge,’ he says, ‘it only works when there are people there to open the fridge door. Without people it’s not art – it’s something else – stuff in a room.’
But perhaps this is applicable to any art: if an artwork falls over in a forest, if nobody sees it, does it exist and is it an artwork?
I sometimes wonder if institutions and curators like to promote this type of art because there is less focus on the artist and their skill, so the cultural capital and status is picked up a lot more by the institution and curator who stage-managed the spectacle.
These works often bleed into theatre, dance, design, architecture, activism or running a café. In fact they are often indistinguishable from these other genres. The only way you can tell they are art is that there seems to be a preponderance of bewildered oligarchs’ wives carrying enormous designer handbags present.
The next boundary post is the rubbish-dump test.
Another test for art was proposed by one of my tutors. He called it the rubbish-dump test. You should place the artwork being tested on to a rubbish dump and it only qualified if a passer-by spotted it and wondered why an artwork had been thrown away.
But of course many good artworks would fail this test because the rubbish dump itself might be the artwork.
In 1960 Jean Tinguely made a piece called Homage to New York, which was this big metal mechanical sculpture that self-destructed itself into a load of scrap. Many artists use destruction. So it’s not the most reliable test, but I do like it.
Of course one thing that’s here to stay now in the art world, which has exploded what art can be, and we all have it in our lives – it’s p
robably the biggest revolution in my life – is technology: computers and the web. Art projects are very easy to do now because everybody can do a little bit of creativity on the web and put their YouTube video up or whatever.
So this is the next boundary post, the computer-art test.
I asked my friend Charlie Gere, Professor of Media Theory and History at Lancaster University, for a definition of when I would know that I was looking at a piece of web art and not just an interesting website. And he came up with this. He said, ‘You know it might be art rather than just an interesting website when it has the grip of porn without the possibility of consummation or a happy ending.’
In other words, it’s all about frustrating our urgent need to double click our way to satisfaction whether in the form of a joke, an opinion, a fact, a sale, or indeed an onanistic experience, to detain and suspend us in a state of frustration and ambivalence, and to make us pause and think rather than simply react. And in many ways that’s quite a good definition of any artwork compared to any object.
Playing to the Gallery Page 4