I HAVE NEVER met anyone who told me they loved modern art. No one ever came up to me, their eyes glowing with pleasure, telling me I just must see, say, the new wall drawings by Sol Lewitt in the 1970s, or the smashed-plate paintings by Julian Schnabel in the 1980s, or the life-size, glazed porcelain figures by Jeff Koons in the 1990s.
I have, however, met plenty of people who have told me that I ought to like modern art. There is some place for “ought” in life, but none at all in art; art is a gift, not a duty. The people who told me that it was my job as a curator to like modern art invariably had a vested interest in so doing: either they earned their living making, teaching, criticising or curating modern art, or they came from the worlds of the media and marketing, who genuinely admire anything that can attract so much attention.
To counter this cynical, commercial compromising of artistic craft, learning and judgment, it is vital to focus on what art is actually about — on its meaning, not on its promotion, nor even its packaging. Content cannot exist without form and, obviously, marketing influences that form, as it influences everything to which we want to attract attention. The crucial question is: how good is the content? If we take our eye off that for a second, we are in danger of being distracted by the wrapping.
Unbelievable as it might seem to those unfamiliar with the world of modern art, the self-styled artist Piero Manzoni canned, labelled, exhibited and sold his own excrement (90 tins of it) in the early 1960s. The Tate has recently acquired No 68 of this canned edition for the sum of £22,300. They have coyly catalogued it as a “tin can with paper wrapping with unidentified contents”. None of those who collected Manzoni’s tins has, as far as I know, tested the veracity of their contents, but then, who would want to?
In another work, Manzoni drew a line on a strip of paper — a single long line, in ink — rolled it up, put it in a tube, sealed it and recorded the length of the line and the date of its making on a label pasted to the outside of the tube. The idea was that these tubes, containing lines of different lengths, should remain unopened.
This takes the triumph of wrapping over content to its logical, but sterile, conclusion. How can a line you cannot see be art? Nevertheless the Tate has two of these tubes in its collection.
It is all too obvious to anyone not in the art world (though always denied by those within it) that a rift has opened between the art being promoted in contemporary galleries and the art that people like to hang on their walls at home.
Samuel Kootz was perhaps the first of a new breed of art entrepreneurs, among whom Charles Saatchi is currently the best known. During the Second World War Kootz saw his big chance, not just to make New York the art capital of the world while Paris was occupied by the Nazis, but to maintain its supremacy after the war was over. This could only be achieved, Kootz realised, if the big spenders in America started to spend big money on American art.
In 1943 Kootz thought he had found the artist who could deliver the goods: Byron Browne. Browne’s art at the time was described as “individual”, “athletic” and showing “constant growth”. This gives no idea of what Browne’s paintings were actually like. In fact they now look like painfully sad imitations of Picasso. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, as depicted in his triptych, could hardly look less alarming with their clippity-clop shoes, electric-whisk heads and B-movie Martian hairdos.
It is easy to make fun of Browne at this distance in time when the difference between Picasso’s innovations and the efforts of his followers has become so clear, but it is less easy to forgive Kootz. He was perhaps one of the first art dealers to apply the methods of saturation marketing to his trade. By 1951, Kootz realised that he had made a mistake and he sold all his Brownes in a deliberately demeaning sale in Gimbel’s department store. This led to panic selling by other collectors. Browne was the first artist I know of to be “dumped”, a practice that was to become common in the increasingly cynical world of art.
Browne never recovered, but who cared? By then, Jackson Pollock had come along. The English painter Bridget Riley was one of many who thought that Pollock’s art, while exciting and liberating on the one hand, was at the same time a “dead end”, leaving “nothing to be explored”. No artist could pick up where Pollock left off; none did, nor did it occur to anyone to try. While Pollock was being promoted as the greatest artist in America, Edward Hopper, a painter much more deserving of such an accolade, was being totally marginalised.
The very concept of art has been so brutalised in recent years that it is difficult to see how it can survive, let alone revive. Without a widely accepted understanding of what we mean by art, what chance has it to regenerate? The task we face is to clarify what distinguishes a genuine work of art from the ersatz products of today. The quality that links the paintings of Vermeer and Matisse, Grünewald and Picasso, and that earns them the status of works of art — a status few would deny them — is, I would suggest, the aesthetic light that appears to shine out from them. It is worth trying to get closer to what we mean by “aesthetic light”, because it is this light that will re-emerge after the eclipse has passed.
Any work of art worthy of the name has an instantaneous effect on first viewing. An artist might bring all sorts of feelings and thoughts into play, but unless he or she manages to make them all contribute to one encompassing, illuminating whole, the work of art will have no heart, no “life” of its own.
