Untitled Document

They say that in a big old city like London you are never more than five yards from an artist. In some boroughs, they actually outnumber human beings. And we all know of certain districts which are completely overrun, so you can’t even move without stepping on one, or bumping into something it has made.

I feel sorry for them. They have feelings, just like you and me, and it must be hard with so many of them about. The competitive pressures these poor creatures endure are known to produce insanity, violence, even cannibalism - and of course, the ever more elaborate strategies for survival we know as their artworks.

Which is why I feel sorrier for the rest of us, who have to pick our way through the mess and somehow make sense of it all. In this regard, contemporary art is like the scene after an explosion in a joke shop: though we might irrelevantly snigger at a few of the items blown into the street, we’ll only solve the larger crime by sussing out its perpetrator’s motive. Obviously, we need a theory: some basic rule of art that will give us an insight into this stuff - in fact, the sort of thing artworld people must keep handy for those times when difficult questions are asked and they might accidentally say something uncool. So nothing too taxing then...

Anyway, here’s a good one, which I heard most recently from Tracey Emin, though its unfair to blame her for it, since everyone who is anyone in art today has bought in, and she’s just repeating something she’s picked up. So let’s call it the Official Theory: it goes (inasmuch as it goes at all) like this: Anything can be art.

There: thats it. If you want to produce, sell or simply enjoy an art made out of fried eggs, dirty underwear or the tree at the end of your road - any everyday thing, however trivial or squalid - this is the theory for you. Its modern, inclusive-sounding and best of all, easy to remember. For the artists and dealers among us, it has the added attraction of helping persuade everybody else of the superiority of today’s product over the uptight rubbish our ancestors wasted their lives on - when of course the rules of painting were really a form of oppression, and art itself just a snobby old conspiracy against a younger generation’s talent, originality and courage.

In contrast to these ancient tyrannies, our new theory is a rule about having no rules, and describes that state of total freedom which has been the dream of artists since they first started thinking it had something to do with them (probably around the time those competitive pressures started getting too much - but I digress). Its loudest advocates are people whose talent, originality and courage have never been seriously questioned, least of all by themselves. Not surprisingly, they would have us believe this happy state of rulelessness has now been achieved in a wholesale renewal of art itself, and point to bums on seats as evidence. Look, they say: never before has so much been enjoyed by so many, and in such a variety of ways too - not only in the friendly new mega-galleries popping up everywhere, but right on down through the saturated media of television, newspapers and more art-happy glossy magazines than you can shake a bottle of sponsor’s beer at.

So we look. But people who are still in the habit of using their brains at the same time as their eyes could be excused for thinking it a shame that the alleged increase in the range and popularity of art should not be accompanied by much of an improvement in its general quality. If anything, the opposite has occurred, and our contemporary Renaissance amounts to little more than wall to wall tat and the energetic celebration of those who produce it. It seems artists, in their desperate struggle to climb out of the sewer, just can’t help but make stuff that drags the rest of us straight back into it - stuff governed by a principle that dictates bad equals good and more bad even better - a principle which just by existing refutes that nice-sounding theory about there being no such thing, and which explains why, when anything can be art, art tends to be garbage. So much for all that talent.

Still, what did we expect? Flying blind in their rule-free daydream, artists have no way of sorting good from bad, either in their own practise or in anybody else’s. But if they want to be players - and they do - they must find some other basis for making work and validating it in the marketplace. Since artists are not stupid, even if they are not very intelligent, they discover this soon enough in already existing art - or more accurately (for they are lazy and venal too), that already existing art generating the biggest headlines and the most cash. This is immediately and uncritically imitated: well, they say, nothing succeeds like success - a truism so meaningless it could only be confused with actual thought by people who have no idea there’s a difference, let alone how to tell it. Of course, in order to disguise their works’ origins and pretend they’re all excitingly new, artists have to add their own little twist - invariably a dash of irony, which is very fashionable these days, and hence signifies nothing. The overall formula is as fixed as its application is routine - yet another unacknowledged rule contradicting that liberal slogan about there not being any, and the reason why, when artists promise ‘anything’, the art we actually get is just more of the same old predictable stuff. So much for all that originality.

For in a world where anything can be art, nothing is. Because for any thing to be art, there must be some other things that are not. The trouble here is that nobody is prepared to say what they might be or why, and so much tosh is encouraged by default that art becomes indistinguishable from everything else. Perhaps its that old anxiety about sounding uncool, or maybe a more generalised spinelessness - whatever, the unspoken rule here is fear. Under this regime, people who ought to know better convince themselves its enough to stick labels on things (the better to compare prices perhaps), but prove unwilling or unable to risk judging them. Risk what, exactly? Their reputations? God help us - and so much for all that courage.

And so much for our theory. Every piece of evidence we have examined weakens it. Taken together, the uselessness and conformity of artists and the bankruptcy of their product reveals an even bigger contradiction at work: yet another rule everyone is agreed on, but conspires to keep secret - since it is fatal to the slogan under which they all trade. This is that anything can be art all right - except art itself, the true victim of a culture really not worth the name. Because art is just different to money making and celebrity, and the stupid, boring and malign rubbish shoved in our faces to achieve them, it must be banished in case it gives anyone ideas that culture can’t handle. The claim that this prohibition means freedom is simply nonsense - in the real world it just means no choice.

By the way, just in case anyone thinks this simply another version of the “return to painting” (or so-called traditional skills and values) argument we hear from time to time, a final observation: though most recent British art is incontrovertibly lousy, much is still better than a lot of what went before - and almost any of that vying to be next big thing, which relies even more heavily on promises of artistic rebirth than the current lot did. Given what was delivered then, why anyone expects anything sold as renewal to be better than renewal sold as anything is beyond me.

But what do I know? I think if you are interested in art, you must look elsewhere - must perhaps look differently. This may demand from you at least something of what it requires from those who still produce it. Nobody is going to tell you in advance what that might be, any more than they will tell you where to look or what to think when you’ve found it. So its your call. That is freedom.