Back and forth: a crock of art

All of the letters to date are collected here

Dear Finbar,

I think you misunderstand me. Frankly, I suspect ‘alter-modern’ is a crock – I just hope that it is not. In addition, I don’t think all post-modern art is rubbish. As I pointed out in the initial piece: “Whatever about the merits of the era (and it did, of course, produce some interesting work) what post-modern art says most clearly is that life is pointless.” You may think this is simply damning with faint praise but it is certainly not an outright rejection of all art produced since the 1960s.

I must say, I think we actually agree more than you realise. It’s just that we’re coming at the same issue from different points of view.

My problems with contemporary art are simple: firstly, much of it is needlessly self-referential and inwardly focussed and, to my mind at least, when it does attempt to engage with the world it does so on a purely negative basis. Secondly, aesthetics have taken a back seat, to say the least, to the very manifestos you despise – the fact that an ideology is centred on lacking a coherent ideology does not an less an ideology make it, as Donald Rumsfield may have said.

I really don’t think it is too much of a stretch to say that many artists are more concerned with what art ‘means’ than how it is experienced.

Do I blame artists? Only partially. Yes, I feel they have been taken-in by the odd notion that art is philosophy, however, it is literally true that we get the art we deserve – I am not so naive as to think that art drives society, rather it is necessarily a reflection of the society in which it was produced. This certainly makes for very interesting sociological study but, as I suspect you agree, sociology is not a sufficient basis on which to judge art. The best art of any era transcends not only its own milieu but also the broader culture which it was a part of.

What I am seeking, therefore, is not doctrinaire visual reproductions of tendentious manifestos but, in fact, less didactic art.

I fully accept that the seeds of this phenomenon predate what we call the post-modern era. The tedious and virtually unreadable manifestos of modernism are only worthwhile as historical documents. Growing out of the Enlightenment tradition as it did, modernism was a stormy and confusing phenomenon but its virtue was that it looked forward, offering a positive vision of tomorrow. Some of this was naive utopianism, of course, but much of it was not. Certainly, it spent a lot of time destroying the pieties of the past but what it built in their place was centred on a forward-looking vision that is lacking in today’s “multiplicity of competing ontologies” or whatever post-modern theorists might call it.

You have talked about the canard of ‘the death of painting’ – I agree with you, painting is not dead. Nor is it the only acceptable form of visual art. Please do not mistake me for a nostalgic. My interest in modernism is not as a historical phenomenon but as a potential living tradition.

On Gormley, I disagree. It is the fact that his usual work is so rooted in aesthetics and, literally, materialism that makes his ‘fourth plinth’ project so disappointing. I’m not saying “it’s not art”, I’m saying it’s only significance is as a spectacle.

I admit it is easier for me than it is for you – after all, I am outside the tent pissing in. But still, there are many questions the art world must face up to. Here is one: why is so much art simply repetition of Duchamp’s infamous urinal despite the fact that this was an assault on art rather than a contribution to its canon?

Finally, why shouldn’t art be left to the market? Whom would you have as the arbiter of public worth?

Yours etc.,
Jason Walsh