ARTS

Art

A new age for art

It is time, argues Giles Auty, to break the modernist stranglehold and direct public funding into worthwhile living art

In my first Spectator article of this year, I made a statement with an accompanying challenge. What I wrote was that an almost total modernist hegemony exists now in the administration of the living visual arts in Britain. This lop-sided domination has come upon us by the steady accumulation of all key jobs in this field by those of an often hard-line modernist persuasion, e.g.: Nicholas Serota as director of the Tate Gallery, Lord Palumbo as chairman of the Arts Council, Henry Meyric Hughes — who was formerly head of visual arts at the British Council — as director of exhibitions at the South Bank Centre (with responsi- bility for all Arts Council touring exhibi- tions), Norman Rosenthal as exhibitions secretary at the Royal Academy, Bernard Cohen as principal of the Slade School, Paul Huxley as professor of painting at the Royal College of Art, Waldemar Januszcak as commissioning editor at Channel 4.

But such names are only the tip of a modernist iceberg. What about the direc- tors and senior staff at the Whitechapel, Serpentine and ICA galleries or all the other national and regional galleries of liv- ing art which receive public funding? Out- side journalism, almost every job of significance in living art in Britain is the exclusive preserve now of the modernist faithful: regional Arts Boards, Arts Coun- cils, the British Council, national and regional museums of living art — to say nothing of their boards of trustees — art schools, art broadcasting at the BBC, uni- versities which run courses in con tempo- rary art history . . . the list goes on and on. Not surprisingly, the system has become hermetic and absolutely self-perpetuating; no hint of daylight or fresh air can get in. My challenge was for anyone in authority to deny that this state of affairs exists. Nobody has done so. I suggest this is because everyone employed in art above a certain level knows perfectly well that what I wrote is true.

Given this is the case, what are the effects on a living art form of such a one- sided regime? Does anyone really think it can be a good thing? Or is it a malign influ- ence on the free development of national and international culture? More to the point, perhaps, does such extreme bias enjoy the support of the country at large or the backing of any kind of official or legal sanction? To quote merely one example, what gives the Tate Gallery the right to promote artistic avant-gardism so heavily — at the expense of other forms of living art — not just through widely questioned events such as the Turner Prize but also through long-term purchasing and exhibit- ing policies?

Clearly, if the business of living art were simply a privately organised club one could not cavil at the rules and objectives set by its members. But, of course, this is not at all what I am describing here, for most of the senior administrative posts in contem- porary art in Britain fall squarely within the public sector. Effectively it is we who pay for the nation's leading museums of living art, Arts Councils, regional Arts Boards, the South Bank, the BBC and British Council, to say nothing of our art schools and university courses in art history. If all are dominated, in effect, by what amounts to a narrow and self-interested faction, then one imagines that the sanction of the general public, through the persons of its elected ministers, would be a first necessity. Where the public pays there has to be pub- lic approval or, at least, public accountabili- ty. In fact there is neither. Through strict adherence to an arm's-length arts policy, successive governments have effectively created a train without a brake: they have divested themselves of any power to stop art steaming off headlong now in danger- ous or even fatal directions. Such lack of government safeguards strikes me as reck- less and short-sighted.

In my New Year's article I compared the current control by modernists of jobs in liv- ing art in Britain with that exercised for- merly by Communist Party members in Marxist states. Oddly, modernism and Marxism have had broadly similar life- spans. Both arose in response to what may have been, at least originally, justified needs. But when the ideological masters of Marxism and modernism found they could not deliver the revolutionary utopias they had promised, both regimes hardened, relying thenceforward more on realpolitik than on intellectual arguments or quantifi- able performance to maintain power. This is the state of affairs still prevailing today.

But while Marxism has crumbled, mod- ernism in art persists in the West as an imposed culture, in spite of its ever increas- ing unpopularity. Eastern European Marx- ism was destroyed finally by its own economic ineptitude. Modernism hangs on simply because it is underpinned by a major commercial, capitalist enterprise: the vast industry of creating, promoting and selling what most people are conditioned to think of as modern art. Most of the artis- tic values which pertain to this industry are so vague that the industry depends very heavily for its continued existence on the endorsement of its values by modern muse- ums. The views of the public which pays for the museums in the first place do not come into this equation. The relationship between dealers and museums is a cosy arrangement which relies for its continued success on an absence of dissenting voices from within the system itself. Hence the modernist obsession with hegemony — the effective control of all key positions. In this way dissent can be confined to the outside, where it can be dismissed as philistine or uninformed and as motivated solely by fail- ure to rise to the supposed challenge pre- sented by avant-garde art.

Today, the most influential dealers in avant-garde artefacts are located in the USA, Germany and Britain. So, by pure coincidence, are many of the most influen- tial modern museums. Do you ever wonder why such a high proportion of contempo- rary artists who appear in major exhibitions in Britain's halls of living culture hail either from the USA or Germany and so seldom from other artistically active nations — Spain, for instance? German and American galleries, which are in a position to pro- mote their artists heavily, expect to be able to get works by them exposed in Britain's modern museums. But often when they do, this country's artists and critics can detect little or no merit in the imported art which has been thrust upon them. The American painter Julian Schnabel is an excellent case in point: a few years ago he was the subject of major exhibitions at the Tate Gallery and Whitechapel. Yet at much the same time all the modernist directors of New York's modern museums flatly turned down an exhibition by Britain's — and arguably the world's — pre-eminent figura- tive painter, Lucian Freud. This extraordi- nary snub could hardly have been on grounds of the works' quality — unless all the directors were blind — and arose sim- ply because Freud's painting fails to con- form obviously to the prescribed canons of modernism.

Not surprisingly, modernists act as though the condition of modernism — art manifesting as little evidence as possible of any traditional thought, practice or quali- ties — is a virtue in itself. Yet clearly artis- tic radicalism, modernism — call it what you will — cannot ever be a virtue in itself, since any change, let alone change for change's sake, can as easily be for worse as for better. It is a little remarked-on fact that a majority of Britain's foremost artists of this century — Sickert, Spencer, Bomberg and Freud among them — have not been modernists at all in any accepted sense. Modernism is essentially schismatic in nature, severing itself from the guidance and values of traditional practice and dis- missing these as irrelevant to the needs of a truly modern society. But who is to decide on what the true needs of contemporary society may be? Indeed, are these needs known only to a few avant-garde artists, who often have only the haziest contact themselves with the realities of life? Might not art which celebrates extraordinary human skills, beauty and humanity have something to say in our lives?

It is significant that the three art move- ments most in favour at present with the controllers of modern museums in the West are those most opposed to the knoym values of art itself and to all traditional thinking: Dada, Pop and Conceptualism. Total modernist domination of profession- al opportunity means effectively that art can develop or flourish now only in direc- tions which ruling modernists specify. One has only to think here of Lord Palumbo's recent initiative in trying to raise and spend £20 million on 'experimental' art, or the Tate Gallery's recent bid for virtually unlimited expansion and powers. Clearly the carrying out of practices other than those specified from on high becomes the artistic equivalent of swimming against the tide.

In the comparisons I have made between the radical totalitarianism of Marxism and that of modernism one element was miss- ing: the systematic oppression of tradition- al beliefs and practices. But a surprisingly apt parallel can be drawn here between the discrimination employed by modernists against traditional practice and forms of training in art and that used by Marxist regimes against Christianity. In both instances it is the possibility that longstand- ing traditions may still be relevant that artistic and political radicals seem so des- perate to deny. While Marxists closed and destroyed churches and seminaries, mod- ernists have had to content themselves with denying gallery space, professional oppor- tunity of almost every kind or the right to a proper training to those who wish still to belong to the great, unbroken traditions of European art. In each case opponents of major tradition hope that the tradition Will be damaged irrevocably at its roots through their actions and so will become, in time, unsustainable.

Modernist domination of art schools is possibly the most sinister consequence of the current hegemony. Clearly, if all public resources are given to radical forms of fur- ther education in art then no alternative approach is likely to flourish. In the historY of further education in Britain, no courses can ever have been pursued in such an arbitrary and capricious way as those run in recent years in our art schools. Here, the modernist claim that no agreed standards exist creates ample licence for anarchY. Today, students who resist the familiar modernist brainwashing that takes place in virtually all our art schools are punishea academically by being awarded poor degrees, while staff who try to make the case for alternative and more durable val- ues usually end up getting the sack. Urisur' prisingly, all but the most resilient studeh.ts are crushed by a system which is driven, In the final analysis, by the greed and pall' noia of the modern art industry. For even art students are discouraged from querY018 the values promoted by this industry, since serious questioning from almost any source could trigger the collapse of a market sus' tamed by the enforcements of a reginle rather than by intellectual arguments. Foreseeably, students become cynic° and disillusioned as a result of such Pres- sures, believing that the only route to sue' cess under the prevailing modernist reglni! lies in attracting attention to themselves °Yci the extremism of their work or actions all f through being taught to exploit all forms °r publicity. Last year's short-listed Turne Prize artist, Damien Hirst, could hardlY bcie improved on as an example of this tren The college he attended — Goldsmith's --; runs courses in how to manipulate !.115 media as a central part of fine art stuoieo there. It is hard not to reflect on what.ci repellent world the prevailing mode) domination has created. ti4i4

As we must realise by now, the objee- of those employed in our publicly financed galleries of living art has little to do with either public pleasure or admiration. Real kudos is gained by administrators of those galleries who put on exhibitions which pub- lic and critics dislike. Dislike proves simul- taneously the ignorance of public and press and the supposedly challenging nature of the art on view — as well as the good party mentality of the curator. This kind of action is the most certain route to success in our modern museum hierarchy. Low attendance figures or the irritation of pub- lic and critics merely prove the curator's moral superiority. Clearly, wherever mod- ernist rules apply, the unfortunate paying public has little chance of winning.

Two years ago, a young modernist administrator put on the London version of The British Art Show 1990, one of the most poorly attended and critically slammed shows ever presented at the Hayward Gallery. Last year he got his own avant- garde show there, possibly as a reward. If anything, this turned out to be even worse. In an end-of-year survey conducted by Arts Review, five of the nine established art crit- ics approached by the magazine voted this particular hugely costly show, Doubletake, the worst exhibition of 1991. Nonetheless its organiser has since been elevated to the Arts Council's buying panel, empowered to recommend on purchases made in the pub- lic's name. You may sense some irony here. In what other career can one possibly gain promotion or reward by actively displeasing the client who pays? How can we even begin to find a way out of such enveloping darkness?

From what I have written it should be plain we must find a way of loosening the current modernist stranglehold. Until this stranglehold is broken, art cannot breathe, nor artists — or even administrators — develop naturally. Justice and the long dis- regarded wishes of a majority of thinking people demand an overdue levelling of this particular playing-field. At least a propor- tion of public funding in this country must be removed now altogether from modernist control and channelled into a new initia- tive. While the Tate Gallery blithely demands from the nation a huge increase in annual funding plus a brand-new muse- um costing 1100 million as an extension of its already totalitarian powers, such money could not but be better spent elsewhere fostering a revival of the great craft, tradi- tion and values of art which modernists have tried so hard to stifle and ridicule.

By starting a centre for living art of a non-avant-gardist nature and an attendant art school devoted to the development of real and necessary skills — rather than merely of attitudes — a rallying flag would be planted for everyone tired beyond belief with the present modernist hegemony. As more and more artists and students re- negotiate their pacts with the past, they need do so no longer in the certainty of acute professional disadvantage. The pro- posed centre might devote itself initially to showing the vast range of excellent living art from this and other countries which the restrictive canons of modernism exclude at present. Catalogues accompanying these exhibitions would aim at sense and lucidity — another revolutionary suggestion. The projected centre could show us what we have been missing in art; the validity of an alternative viewpoint to modernism demands at least this minimum of recogni- tion. Of course, galleries devoted to mod- ern art as we think of it could continue for so long as anyone wished to visit them. What we need is the provision of a greatly overdue alternative and the recognition that the reasonable needs of a great many artists and gallery-goers do merit attention.

The Italian Renaissance was triggered by a look back to a golden age and standards. Faced by current avant-garde excess, it is difficult for many not to look back to artists such as Titian and Veronese, Velazquez and Goya, Rembrandt and Vermeer with an acute and justified nostalgia. Yet we should never lose sight of the fact that even these great masters were mere human beings, as we are. What we can learn from their example is that given the right condi- tions in art great achievements were possi- ble once — and could be again.