Ways of Being, 2

To continue from yesterday.

Some think that so much of today's art mirrors and thus criticises decadence. Not so. It's just decadent. Full stop. It has no critical function, it is part of the problem.

As I wrote, it's a good point, and it's in the company of a few other good points, like how an overheated art market is transforming desired paintings into super-expensive commodities, and having a horrible impact on public galleries’ ability to collect and show. There's also a suggestion - poorly explored - of how it may be skewing instruction at art schools; something that hit my art-school alumnus boyf as extremely relevant.

BUT what we have building up to this point is an extremely personal, elitist and deeply unpleasant vision of decontextualized art and the response of masses of people to it. We have the messy, badly argued, and unlikely premise running through this documentary that the way working-class and middle-class Americans ‘experienced’ the Mona Lisa on its trip to New York in 1963 and the way they generally see gallery art is by its nature generally deeply inferior to the way Robert Hughes sees it in its proper context. Not just less educated, not just less loving, but by its nature deeply inferior - that the masses experience seeing art, and Robert Hughes looks at it. Or vice versa. Whatever verb makes Robert Hughes sound cleverer and the masses sound more insensible. I think this was a beastly, unfair, and erroneous generalization, and it’s what I hated most about the documentary.

Another thing I hated about it was the idea it presented to us that this perceived deep inferiority of the popular vision is tied to the present overheated, overpriced, and qualitatively poor state of the expensive end of the modern art market – a ridiculous, speculative art market with which only the tiniest percentage of the population has any engagement at all, and which mainly impacts them by baffling them when they go to public galleries to see something else . . .

Hughes’ perspective shows a complete unconsciousness of the importance of all the mighty piles of art vastly aesthetically and intellectually superior to shark-in-formaldehyde, that continue to be accessible and affordable in co-op or community galleries or other points of sale – points of sale that are burgeoning like mushrooms after the rain now that we have the internet. This is predictable, because the man seems incapable not only of appreciating the way the masses may or may not be impacted by art, but incapable of appreciating there may be an artistic world in existence beyond the top end he's covered in Time magazine and a series of admittedly delicious books and documentaries.

But both things I hated about the documentary can be summed up rather more simply in one phrase: Robert Hughes absolutely failed to think outside of himself.

He failed to consider that in all those thousands of people herded by the Mona Lisa in New York in the 60’s, there mightn’t have been a few hundred who saw something in it they deeply needed, making the whole exercise worthwhile; that even the frustration of being herded past something so small, so distant, so quickly could of itself be of huge importance in the artistic consciousness and education of many spectators. He failed to question if the re-contextualization of it could possibly have any value.

And by virtue of the contempt he felt for both, he was happy to put the popular experience of art in the same dependent chain of the events as Damien Fucking Hirst - when the two things are, quite obviously, only linked in antipathy. And he failed to consider that - in terms of what’s available out there in the reams of galleries and art schools and co-ops and communities - we could be living in a time that’s deeply exciting and important for the visual arts, with fine art creation de-centred and widespread as it's never been before in the western tradition. He could only see the expensive end of the market, that he's been involved with throughout his professional career.

Of these two documentaries, it’s only the raving pinko Berger who succeeded at all in exploring the recontextualization of art, not simply wailing over its decontextualization. It’s only Berger who made a real effort to go beyond himself, to leave himself behind, and engage with the perspective of the rest of people standing in front of art. So to answer yesterday's question to myself, this is why I’m left-wing. I think it’s only on this side of the political spectrum that you can think outside of yourself, that you have the framework available to help you think outside of yourself. In a sentence: I’m left-wing because I’m resisting the urge to live up my own asshole.

Anyways. We've gone on watching the rest of the Berger documentary. Episode two was about the female nude, and it was rather lovely to see an actual-real-life man engage in some feminist theorizing. But more on that later. Episode three, rather topically, was about the oil painting as a commodity or as an indicator of wealth. Plus ça change . . . what Berger's history of the oil painting illustrated was that as pissy as Hughes is with the hedge funds, diamond-encrusted skulls, and other fucking massive taste challenges currently buggering up the art world, this isn't the first time artistic time and talent has been wasted on expensive, market-driven curiosities.

Imagine if oil painters over the last 700 years had a real choice of subject, instead of languid women, Jeebus, and decadent still lives for rich clients. Imagine if all those technically superb and yet tediously repetitive academic painters had had the freedom to let their imaginations run riot. They were trained to believe they didn't, and they painted as though they didn't, and only madmen and geniuses, like the geniuses we remember and seek to look at now, managed to think beyond the spirit and market demands of their age, and create something new and eternal, even to the detriment of their pockets. Art endured and endures.

Anyways, worktime.