March/April 2010
A good ARI isn’t hard to find > NSW
Artist Run Initiative (ARI) Read More
Art Month Sydney > Precinct 1: Paddington/Woollahra > NSW
The first week of Art Month Sydney kicks off across
Paddington and Woollahra, collectively crowned ‘Precinct 1’ Read More
Art Month Sydney > Precinct 2: Surry Hills/Darlinghurst > NSW
In reality Sydney’s gallery scene is a broad and vibrant kaleidoscope. Read More
Art Month Sydney > Precinct 3: Waterloo > NSW
Precinct 3 takes in the suburb of Waterloo, home to the Danks Street Complex which includes ten of Sydney’s commercial galleries. Read More
Art Month Sydney > Precinct 4: Redfern/Chippendale/CBD > NSW
Serendipitously there are two galleries in Precinct 4 that
showcase Asian art, Read More
Discipline ain’t what it used to be
Donald Judd, one of the more influential founding fathers
of minimalism couldn’t hack New York’s claustrophobia. Read More
The legacy of two great artists > NSW
Two significant Indigenous exhibitions, staged as part of
Art Month Sydney, are East Kimberley Painting Revisited at
Michael Reid at Elizabeth Bay and Museum III at Utopia Art. Read More
Last of the great aristocrats
By Andrew Mackenzie
Leaning heavily on his cane, a brooding gaze fixed at the street below, Robert Hughes strikes a pose that is at once contemptuous,
passionate and inconsolable. Strangely, the image of a withered Ancien Régime aristocrat, crippled by gout and surrounded by the ghosts of past prowess, comes to mind. It is the opening scene in a documentary called The Mona Lisa Curse, and a voiceover recounts the great floods of Florence in 1966. Hughes was there, helping to save masterpieces. It was there he resolved to spend his life dedicated to art. Sadly that dedication, which has enriched the world with masterpieces of
popular TV criticism such as The Shock of the New, American Visions, and Beyond the Fatal Shore, is losing its power. It’s not that he no longer knows his onions. The bright spark that wrote a commanding history of Australian art at the tender age of 27 remains, in his 70’s, sharp as a razor in defence of the art that he knows, loves and respects. If only popular art criticism could match his erudition, intellectual range and enthusiasm to communicate. No, this is not the problem. The problem is that the art that he knows, loves and respects is not made much any more. So much has changed since 1966.
The documentary, broadcast on ABC on the 7 February and produced by the BBC, was the first in a three-part mini series on art and money. Or was it? While there was a lot of talk about art and money, it seemed much more about Robert Hughes, pop culture and critical judgement. Hughes’ thesis is, in some ways, very simple. I will attempt to summarise. Great art has the capacity to mean a lot. To understand this meaning requires active engagement not passive ingestion. Art as popular culture excels in the ingestion part, and fails miserably in the deep meaning part. With museums now adopting ever more popular programmes, in the rush for ‘bums on seats’, the great bastions of cultural learning are losing ground. In their place, Sotheby’s, New York gallerists and billionaire hedge fund managers are seizing the agenda and using their power to canonise new great art. This, of course, strikes at Hughes’s own papal bull. Example: Snake-oil dealer sells bad art A to a Wall Street trader who knows jack about art, for $12m. The press love it. Museum, wanting to be popular exhibits it. The great unwashed attend, gawp and leave, thinking bad art A is good art, ‘coz it’s in a museum’. The corruption of art ensues. Contemporary art is emptied of meaning by a process ruled by a handful of oligarchs more interested in the staggeringly profitable secondary market, than anything as wishy-washy as aesthetic quality. Art, he declares, ‘is the largest unregulated market in the world’.
He has a point. Several in fact. Where I have a problem however, is in his conflation of real conditions, such as our collective reduced attention spans (the effects of gaming, computers, TV, visual technology etc on human attention spans have spawned a hundred PhDs), and his opinions, such as all contemporary experimental art (read, not on canvas) is bad. It is also true that vast amounts of Wall Street bonuses were ploughed into art of dubious quality in the nineties (how many sub-prime loans does a guy have to broker I wonder, to buy a Warhol print), but does that mean all million dollar art is bad. However, Andreas Gursky’s 99 Cent II, Diptych (2001) recently became the most expensive photograph ever, selling for $3.3M, but he is also arguably the best contemporary photographer alive. Meanwhile Hughes reserves his nastiest sneers for the art world’s golden boy Damien Hirst, seeing him as living proof that contemporary art is vacuous nonsense, as if Hirst’s work represents an adequate summary of art today.
At the core of his thesis there remains, however, questions of deep concern to those who care for art. When the Director of New York’s Metropolitan Museum Philippe de Montebello speaks melancholically of the end of the museum as cultural custodian, because Russian billionaires scoop all the good art, leaving the museums to pick over the crumbs; when visitors file past the latest art sensation, giving it the museum average of three seconds, waiting for meaning to leap out from an iPod guide rather than in contemplation of the work; when serious criticism struggles to find media space, supplanted by the circus of art world celebrity, questions do arise, as to the non-tradable value of art.
In part these issues are taken up by an insightful report from the British think tank Demos. The report, entitled Democratic Culture asks what it would mean to ‘democratise’ culture. Unpacking the word culture, the report identifies three distinct meanings; the ‘high’ culture of opera and theatre etc, the popular culture of the music and film industries, and hand-made culture updated today as the YouTube generation of lo-fi
co-authors. What all three share, is a tradition of quality regulation, the first two largely through a system of gatekeepers whose job it is to sanction, at any one time, good culture from not good culture.
Being a liberal socially-engaged think tank, the report identifies the ingredients that any democratic support for culture should include. Predictably these include transparency, pluralism, freedom, universalism and equity. The report is a thoughtful, succinct summary
of the issues surrounding culture and its public support. Concluding its recommendations, it points to the fact that political democracy has been hard won. We can therefore expect cultural democracy will equally take time, but worth it. “Our political democracy works because we have developed over many centuries, systems that benefit from expert opinion, but that accommodate dispute, changing circumstances,
media scrutiny and popular sentiment”.1
Though both come from radically different perspectives, Hughes and the report’s author John Holden share a common theme…the value of opinion, dispute and scrutiny. Holden is a product of today’s consensual politics, Hughes a hostage to the certainties of his critical position; one that managed to exclude in its entirety a single reference to Aboriginal art, in his Art of Australia. But what Holden seems to be getting at, with almost Blairite ‘third way’ language, is that perhaps it’s not either/or. Perhaps we don’t have to choose between expert opinion and popular appreciation, between erudition and entertainment. Perhaps a dynamic culture needs its autocrats and its entrepreneurs. If this is so, there remains a place for this condescending belligerently critical voice. He may not like much of the art that I do, but I hope so.
1 John Holden, Democratic Culture - Opening up the arts
to everyone Report 2008.
Various artists, installation shot. The (self initiated Artist funded) Second (fourth) Y2K Melbourne Biennial of Art (& design).
Andrew Mackenzie is an art critic and Editor-in-Chief (Inside) Australian Design Review and (AR) Architectural Review Australia.
