WHISTLE BLOWING IS AN ART FORM – OFFICIAL : A JOKE FOR OUR TIMES.

“Curators have the important advantage in that they need not take any responsibility for their actions. Any spin through the career of our most esteemed curators reveals how nimbly they can move from Conceptualism to Neo-Expressionism, Minimalism to mannequin abuse, without being court-martialled for dereliction of duty. Artists, however are required to perfect their schtick and stick to it. It’s tough enough for a curator, what with coming up with a title for a show, ringing up your mates, rummaging through art magazines. … These modern-day Sophists have worked in concert with a greedy market to ensure that artistic development is restricted  to product placement and to niche marketing.
The artists themselves are curiously mute about their practice, perhaps because there is little to say about works that specialise in stating the obvious. Art is a commodity in the marketplace, women have had a raw deal, children’s sexuality is spooky, we are all going to die, etc. The more feral artists have gone even further and forged a career by loudly proclaiming that they have nothing to say. However, they have learned one important lesson: context is all. What is lamentable on Jerry Springer is presentable in the gallery. The authority of the gallery creates a magical hiatus where pandering to the audience’s appetite for sensation and vulgarity is seen in the guise of importance.” 

So much for curators and artists (note the order of play). But no this is not reactionary bile from some old easel painter (ie someone over forty) one of Drew Milne’s “flat-earth, flat-canvas fundamentalists.”  Not at all. This well- aimed and well deserved criticism comes from the heart of the art establishment itself, from no less a figure than Mark Wallinger, exhibitor in the Sensation show and the artist chosen to be the official British representative this year at the Venice Biennale. So what’s he up to? His indictment appears in Art For All,of which, with Mary Warnock, Wallinger is co-editor. Published by The Pier Trust, Art For All  is a hotch-potch of views from the art fraternity selected presumably with the aim of demonstrating how open and democratic art world affairs are.
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Since he is substantially a beneficiary himself of the very system he appears to be condemning should we assume that Wallinger is speaking from conscience?  A more likely explanation is that Wallinger, as devil’s advocate is having us on. As Andrew Brighton says in the Preface to Art For All  ‘There are jokes, polemics, considered arguments …’. That’s it, it’s a joke. Without irony you’ll get nowhere with today’s art.

GOOD LUCK TO DAVID LEE       and his Newsletter The Jackdaw. This is serious as well as amusing whistle blowing, but what a pity about his choice of alternatives to the cutting edge.

HOWARD JACOBSON   applied his characteristic flair brilliantly in the Winter edition of Modern Painters. As he says ‘art has meekly consented to one party government.The Turner Prize Tendency is so old hat that the next revolutionary work will be a watercolour.’

GEORGE STEINER does not have an unerring eye. Suspicions about this were alerted in January 1978 when a photograph appeared in The Observer. It showed Steiner at home in Cambridge standing in front of a distinctly sentimental looking painting called Children at Malaga. Now, in March, to accompany an interview,The Guardian has printed a recent photograph of Steiner with the same background. So it rather looks as if he has been living with the thing for over twenty years. This deficiency may endear him to admirers and fellow elitists like me who have less heavy brain-boxes. We may flinch a bit when he says, “very few human beings can understand a proposition of Kant or Spinoza, or a fugue by Bach”. Understand? And then there is that painting and an interesting question arises. Does he sing along with the fortyeight or is Bach merely an intellectual exercise? The thought brings on similar fears we may have about our curators and interpreters of art. Knowledge about art is not the same as appreciating it. As Steiner himself is reported as saying, “To be part of an elite means loving passionately and not negotiating your passions.”
Steiner apparently felt unable to accept an invitation to contribute to Blunt Edge, understandably on the grounds that he had too many deadlines to meet. But apart from that, he said that he does not share a commitment to the Peter Fuller Legacy. Naturally no one wants to join an English Landscape Tradition supporters’ club, if that’s what he means. However there is no agreed PFL and no one has been asked to sign up to one.

 

Cover Drawing                                                          ROSE  WYLIE