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Thoughts on the Art World

December 6th, 2017

Thoughts on the Art World

It occurred to me today, as I headed out for my morning coffee, that what the contemporary art scene is lacking is work with real, punchy visual impact. Paintings with big bold colors that slap you round the head in the way that Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein could do without having to get out of bed. Okay, there's Banksy. He's not big on color, but his trademark stencils do have a powerful graphic resonance. But not much else (although Jeff Koons can knock out a pretty powerful neo-rococo canvas when he sets his mind to it). So I got to thinking about where it all started to go wrong, and it didn't take long to find the culprit: conceptual art.

Let me clarify. I've got nothing against conceptualism per se. Conceptual art can be intriguing and witty and challenging, even on a visual level. But working until recently as a blogger for a leading art website, a job that got me into all the latest shows for free and allowed me a bit of an 'inside' on the contemporary art scene, what increasingly bothered me was not just the lack of strong design and technical ability on the part of new and up-and-coming artists, it was the apparent need to accompany each work with a written 'explanation' about what inspired the work and what it aimed to achieve.

To me, this reeks of failure. A work of art should speak for itself. It should communicate what it has to say - however obliquely or subliminally - without the need for a written qualifier. I don't want the artist to 'tell' me what I should be thinking, or how I should be 'seeing' the artwork in question. If the artist has to resort to a written explanation, then he or she needs to look again at what they are presenting, and consider why it is their art is falling to get its 'message' across.

This neurotic obsession with 'explaining' art at the point of consumption has bled into the art world from its conceptual roots like some kind of unstoppable disease. As a result, we have art that no longer speaks to the world outside the art world itself. It is aimed at, and only communicates with, other artists and with what has come to be known as the 'art market' (more on that in another blog).

I think it's time art got back to basics. Art schools should start teaching essential skills once again (life-drawing, oil-painting, etc). High-flying students whose work becomes briefly fashionable should know that the world of contemporary art is fickle and fragile and that 'edgy' ideas, once they have fallen out of fashion, will wind up in the bargain basement of the Saatchi warehouse until they are eventually dumped in a skip and forgotten about. Banksy, Basquiat and a few others will be remembered, Tracy Emin too (for her drawings rather than her 'installations'). But Damien Hirst - whose exhibition of original paintings of a few years back should have been retitled 'The Emperor's New Clothes'- is already on the way out. That shark you bought that's clogging up the living room? Chuck it. It's already worth barely half the money you paid for it, and what's worse, it's already starting to smell.