Blunt Edge is an offspring of the newsletter which has been sent every year to Friends of the Peter Fuller Memorial Foundation.  It aims to provide a place for discussion about the visual arts free from the prejudice of current fashion and curatorial justification. The views given here are independent of, and might even be antagonistic to, views held by all or any of the memorial’s trustees.

Any opinion expressed in opposition to the cutting edge inevitably runs the risk of being branded reactionary. Consequently, however uncomfortable, most commentators prefer sitting on the edge  to offering serious criticism about it. Writing about the last decade of art in London, Adrian Searle says, ‘We are all probably too close to all of it, and no one wants to be wrong-footed by making definitive judgements.’  Peter Fuller was certainly never slow to make them. Risk is the natural accompaniment to the exercise of discrimination. And as Nicholas Serota has reminded us we took Peter Fuller seriously in spite of his not having ‘an unerring eye.’  But eccentric – occasionally even ridiculous, though they may have been, were Peter’s enthusiasms any less absurd than much of what is offered by Nicholas Serota himself?  Most of the conceptual tricks and games played out by today’s favoured artists are second or third hand routines and frequently very heavy-handed ones at that. The sad fact is that most of the new art is not only not new but it is extremely boring. Supposedly challenging and offered with the full authority of adolescent recalcitrance it usually results in bathos.  What, for example could be more tedious than a video trip round the inside of Mona Hatoum?  For audacity and imagination as well as social comment I would prefer any day to see an episode of South Park.

The best of modernism died with Matisse. And certainly there is no way of putting the clock back. Last year’s words belong to last year’s language…  Can the traditional forms of painting and sculpture still extend that tradition?  There are few signs that today’s circumstances make that even remotely possible except in occasional isolated cases. If the alternatives to the tradition of ‘art objects’ look pretty threadbare – so unfortunately does the tradition itself.  It is time for something really radical and there is no sign of it yet.