Art Critic Crisis (article from the guardian)

Art Critic Crisis

March 21, 2008 in Aesthetics, Art Buying, Art/Life, Art/Politics, Commerce, Criticism, Popular Culture, The "Art World" | No comments

Damien Hirst’s diamond skull

You can whack them with a shovel. You can shoot them, poison, stab or throttle them. You can threaten their families and you can hound them in the press; you can put them down any way you like, but some artists refuse to stay down. What does this tell us? That artists are the undead? Or, worse, that criticism is in crisis?

At almost every international art fair over the past few years, there has been a panel discussion about the crisis in art criticism. I have found myself talking about the topic in London, Madrid, Berlin and Miami. Wherever critics are paid to gather (you wouldn’t catch us in the same room otherwise), they go on about the crisis. These debates have become an occupational hazard - but they also pay well. If I had known there was money in it, I would have invented a crisis myself.

At Art Basel in Miami Beach last December, just as we were about to go out and perform on the imminent death of criticism and to answer such questions as “What is art criticism today and why is it relevant?” and “Is money the new art criticism?”, the Las Vegas-based critic Dave Hickey said he felt like Donald Duck at the Last Supper. Being Donald Duck is at least livelier than being a dinosaur, drowning in a dismal swamp. There is indeed something faintly ludicrous in sitting around at an art fair talking about criticism. Never has the art market been stronger. Never has money been so powerful. Never have so many artists got so rich, and never has there been such alarming stuff on sale. Never have critics felt so out of the loop.

People blame all the money sluicing round the art world. They blame the internet and the rise of the blogger. They blame the dumbing-down of newspapers and the replacement of criticism with the sparkling, if vapid, preview featurette, and the artist-as-celebrity photo opportunity profile. Who cares about the art or the concepts?…

Jerry Saltz, art critic for New York Magazine, has complained: “At no time in the last 50 years has what an art critic writes had less effect on the market than now.” Whatever he writes, Saltz believes, has no effect. Might as well shrug and walk away. I just wonder why a critic even cares that their writing has such a negligible influence on the market. Although there has been a certain pleasure, on one or two occasions, in making Charles Saatchi stupendously angry, I couldn’t care less if collectors pay any attention to me or not.

Some critics think that the fact that there’s so much bad art around means that it is a great time to be writing about art, which is like saying that because of the plague, what a great time the 14th century was to be an undertaker. Critics aren’t doctors. We can’t fix things. We are not here to tell artists what to do. They wouldn’t listen anyway. Maybe the word criticism has become part of the problem. Or the problem is that we are asking the wrong thing of the critic: critics are not the painting police nor the sculpture Swat team, not market regulators nor upholders of eternal values (there aren’t any). Those who think they have a role to play in this regard are as jumped up as they are unreadable. Criticism might blow the whistle on overhyped art, flabby curating, moribund institutions or the odd fly-blown administrator, but that is because you cannot divorce art from its context.

Being iconoclastic, slagging off artists and institutions, gets a critic noticed. Anger, undeniably, is also a good motive for writing in the first place. Controversy, the smell of blood, the whiff of scandal - this makes careers. It also sells newspapers and magazines. Of course it is the duty of the critic to be iconoclastic, and to be reckless; but critical terrorism is no good as a long-term strategy. It becomes predictable, and the adrenaline buzz soon wears off. It is also disingenuous, and ultimately a false position. There is such a thing as bad faith, and lousy opinions.

Getting things wholly wrong is also a critical prerogative. But, again, it is no good just turning up with a lot of fixed opinions and then complaining that the art doesn’t measure up to your impossible requirements and unassailable prejudices. Some critics make you wish you didn’t like art at all.

The Guardiann

Latest Publictation (25/04/08)

The Apotheosis of James I
Tate Britain
until 20 June

Off to the left at the far end of Tate Britain's Neoclassical Sculpture exhibition, tucked away where few will find it, is a small display centred on a sketch by Rubens that the gallery wishes to add to its collection. By Rubens? For Tate Britain? What has a painting by a Flemish artist who began to get into his stride some four centuries ago to do with the duties and responsibilities of any part of the Tate Empire? To this, precious little is the sane man's answer, though any dab-hand casuist can easily conjure arguments in favour of its hanging in this Tate, for Rubens was the most important European artist ever to visit Britain, was knighted, given extravagant gifts of jewellery and even offered the post of Court Painter by Charles I, and awarded an MA by the University of Cambridge. But — and it is an overwhelmingly important but — in the nine months that he spent in London between late May 1629 and late February 1630, he had no influence on English art; the sympathy and grandeur of his portraiture established no heritage, his profound interest in landscape did not divert the stilted doll's house work of the topographer towards the wilder shores of realism, and his baroque allegories and apotheoses were way beyond the imaginations of all the plodding numbskulls here.

It is, however, an apotheosis that the Tate proposes to acquire — the single sketch that Rubens made while in London in which he incorporated seven ideas for the ceiling of the Banqueting Hall of Whitehall Palace, built to the designs of Inigo Jones for James I between 1619 and 1622. King James died in 1625 and Rubens may have been approached that year to paint the ceiling, but it was not until he was physically in London five years later and could see the building for himself that flesh was put onto the bones of the idea — the apotheosis of the new king's father, the founder of a dynasty, the Stuart monarch who ended a thousand years of conflict between those to the north and south of Hadrian's Wall, united their two thrones and looked forward to a thousand years of peace.

Did Inigo Jones, who did not die until 1652, devise the underlying programme, or did Rubens? Perhaps neither, but an intellectual courtier with an eye for propaganda? We shall never know. Nor shall we know who took part in the debate over this sketch and the subsequent sketches that clarified and developed motifs and details. These were all conceived after Rubens had returned to his home and workshop in Antwerp, and were sent to London for comment and approval. The finished paintings too were executed in the Antwerp factory, and the surviving correspondence over their delayed completion, packing and passage to London free of Customs taxes as late October 1635 is mightily entertaining; we learn from it that Rubens had gout in the later stages of the work, but that this did not prevent him from painting, and he was accused of laziness in not responding urgently to letters. Rubens was not paid until more than two years after the ceiling paintings were installed.

Some 15 or 16 of the Antwerp sketches survive (the authenticity of one is disputed), scattered in St Petersburg, Vienna and elsewhere, their tone and strength of colour much warmer than the Glynde sketch, as the very first has long been known from its provenance; this is essentially a monotone drawing with the brush in oil paint (grisaille the technical term) charting the prominent highlights and shadowed depths of the astonishingly sculptural figures. It is a beautiful thing, at once delicate and robust, and like all great drawings, it gives us insight into the painter's imagination, here when first stimulated by the proposal, and into those aspects of a composition most important to him from the very start — the dynamism of the whirling, lifting, dragging movements of King James as Jupiter assumed into an Olympian heaven, and the sculptural logic of every effortful pose and gesture. When, in the winter of 2003-04, it was possible at the Hermitage Rooms of Somerset House to compare the Glynde sketch with the closely related variant in St Petersburg, it was obvious that the latter, though it may have come from the Rubens workshop, was not painted by the master himself, so much of it is misunderstood in the attempt to clarify complexities.

The Glynde sketch has since 1981 hung in the National Gallery, seeming so much a part of the extensive Rubens collection there, and so essential to it, that in 1995 it was included in the Complete Illustrated Catalogue as though it were indeed a possession (it has long been the property of an English family trust). It is in the National Gallery that it belongs, not in the Tate. In the National Gallery it has been, not a parochial document, but a magnificent baroque concept that has a place in the broader history of European art; it speaks of a Whitehall Palace intended to rival the Louvre, the Escorial and the Vatican, and of Charles I as the boldest and bravest connoisseur, patron and collector of paintings ever bred in Britain.

All this can, of course, be documented in the Tate but there this panel will hang among the gallery's wearyingly uninspired paintings of the 17th century, isolated from everything that matters of its period and kind — making it the most beautiful sore thumb. Moreover, at the National Gallery it has been, apart from when on loan, on view for a whole generation: at the Tate, with its idiotic programme of annual shift and shunt, foolishly and damagingly sponsored by BP for its own self-serving purposes, it will be yet another now- you-see-it, nowyou-don't possession, spending far more time in store than ever on view. The Tate is the wrong place for it. Let me repeat that: the Tate is the wrong place for it. Nevertheless, the Tate has already accumulated £1.5 million towards the net asking price of £6 million. Of this, half a million has been pledged by the Art Fund with a comment from the director that “it is hard to think of any work of art that better deserves to be saved than this”. True — but not for the Tate; by all means pledge that sum, but only on the condition that the painting returns to Trafalgar Square as part of the permanent collection of the National Gallery. That should also be the condition under which all other contributions to the purchase fund are made.

I presume that the National Gallery has other fish to fry — it must be permanently under appalling pressure to stop gaps and preserve the heritage of which blind government takes no account. I presume too that the Tate sees itself as making an heroic intervention, the director asserting that with this work by Rubens “we can begin to represent the magnitude of his importance in Britain”. Begin? How many more does he expect to buy? And why duplicate what is done so well in the National Gallery? For my own part, I would rather see this Rubens bought for the Royal Collection than the Tate — it is a pretty thought that something once so personal to Charles I should soon be in the hands of Charles III — for with that collection's ever-generous response to requests for loans, the wider public is likely to have much more access to it than will ever be the case on Millbank.

The Apotheosis of James I is on display at Tate Britain (020 7887 8888, www.tate.org.uk) until 20 June

Latest Publictation (24/04/08)

Who Was Isaac Rosenberg?

Who was Isaac Rosenberg, poet and painter? As a poet, and particularly as a poet of the First World War, he is not entirely unknown — certainly the bibliography of that aspect of his life suggests that there has been considerable scholarly and sentimental interest in him — but reverse the order of his talents, and as painter first and poet second he is almost invisible, to be found in very few convenient works of reference and in none of the multi-volume lexicons that have some claim to be encyclopaedic. This absence of easily accessible information is now, however, remedied; a new book has just been published that is much more a study of his life as a painter, though it does not ignore his poetry; it sets him among other Jewish artists and writers of his generation and locality, Bomberg, Kramer, Brodsky, Wolmark and Meninsky — now far better known than the writers Rodker, Leftwich and Winsten — all collectively, if loosely, known as the Whitechapel Boys, to whom as much of the book is devoted as to Rosenberg.

The springboard for the book is an exhibition at the Ben Uri Gallery, earnest, pious and too small, from which Rosenberg emerges as a minor and uncertain talent never fully formed, the available material so limited in quantity and so modest in attack that it is almost swamped by the ambition demonstrated in the accompanying examples of work by his associates and peers. He was an adequate draughtsman in the manners favoured by the Slade School, his portrait studies remarkably sensitive to the sitter's character, but — to put it bluntly — with little to distinguish them as Rosenbergs, they could easily be mistaken for the work of a hundred other students at that conspicuously regulated school. His nude figure studies have the same Slade stamp, and so too have his very few attempts to construct a complex composition.

Rosenberg joined the Slade in October 1911, a month short of his 21st birthday, and left it in March 1913, a period perhaps both too late and too short to develop him from a largely self-taught amateur into a rigorous professional. The school gave him prizes that now seem scarcely merited, so of its time was all his work, so Slade, so Camden Town, so New English Art Club, so very John and Lamb. A larger exhibition, including paintings from his South African period — nine months in 1914-15 in which he was entirely free to draw, paint and lecture — might have broadened our view of him, and so too might more of the little London and other landscapes from his Slade period, but the total number of his paintings and drawings must be very small and the book, unfortunately, makes little effort to fill the exhibition's many gaps and none at all to list the known surviving works.

The visitor who knows nothing of Rosenberg must, with self-portraits providing one-third of his exhibited work, form the impression that he was obsessed with himself; I suspect, however, that this was far from so, and that instead, intending to earn a living from portraiture, he practised the skills of likeness and flattery on his most easily available model. That flattery did indeed play a part is evident in his treatment of his nose, for instead of the fine-boned aquiline feature that we see in photographs and portraits of him by his friends, he gave himself a nose that was long, thin and retroussé — an intriguing fib. In these and other portraits he adopted a characteristic handling in which paint was applied with short vertical strokes of the brush; with them he fumbled his way towards form, volume and tonal unity, occasionally lending definition to jaw, collar and fingers with drawn lines, adding contrast and excitement with the pink or red of a tie. Some could hang with the then very recent portraits (and other paintings) by Sickert, Gilman and Gore (influenced by them, perhaps) without seeming particularly out of their depth, but in the most ambitious, a half-length of more than twice his customary size, he could not manage the extended scale (though the canvas is only 76cm tall), and the fumbling brushwork combines with a pose awkwardly misunderstood, to make a ragged nonsense of what, had it been no more than head and hat, might have seemed bravura work.

David Bomberg thought Rosenberg “a good poet but no painter”. Should this be our verdict too? Rosenberg himself, writing in July 1916, agreed: “I am convinced I am more deep and true as a poet than a painter.” I think there is too little of both poetry and painting to tell. Though in wretched health, as ever, he enlisted in the autumn of 1915 — a volunteer, it must be stressed, though essentially a pacifist and the child of Lithuanian émigrés who spoke little or no English (Whitechapel at War is the most telling chapter of the book). In the early hours of 1 April 1918, laying barbed wire in the dark to impede a German attack, he was killed. What was left of him is buried in a war cemetery near Arras under a headstone inscribed “Artist and Poet”. The sentimental among us will not question that.

Isaac Rosenberg is at The Ben Uri Gallery, NW8 (020 7604 3991, wwwbenuri.org.uk). Until 8 June. Mon-Fri 10am-5.30pm, Sun 12-4pm, Closed Sat. Admission £5. Whitechapel at War, Isaac Rosenberg and his Circle, edited by Sarah MacDougall and Rachel Dickson (Ben Uri Gallery, £25).

Favourite Sewell Quotes

(On the Tate Britain Neoclassical Sculpture Exhibition)
- "The dismal, ugly, second-hand and transitory installation that gained the Turner Prize for the lamentably witless Mark Wallinger. There, in the place of the 'it's art because I say I'm an artist and it is in a gallery' definition of the Wallinger generation, for whom anything declared to have broken the bounds and insults all who have to look at it, are scultures..."

(From 'The Modern Ruin of my Favourite Restaurant' 04/04/08)
- " I always though progress a snare and a delusion; I am with Lenin on the subject - 'one step forward, two steps back'."

Defences and Accusations..?

The ironic thing about Brian Sewellis that he generates as much outrage and mockery as his sworn enemies - the conceptual artists. He is just as controversial as the works he'd probably love to eradicate from the face of the earth.
I'ts a funny sort of one-sided battle to watch. The artists/enemies duly ignore and mock him, comfortable in the safety of the inner workings of the current art market - he begins to appear like a boy neurotically beating the toe of a giant, ridiculous and largely ineffective.
Or so it's easy to believe. The truth is he voices what few have the courage to, specially in the face of God-like figures like Saatchi. A lot of artists, I would imagine (in particular those more traditionally minded) loathe what Saatchi has done to the art world, but I'm guessing that not many would refuses his attentions - therein lies the fear, or perhaps more appropriately, the caution.
Another evident fear is that no one knows which art work is meant to be respected and which is not, so why not play it safe and consider everything? Sewell quite obviously, is not thus minded, as he proves with his sardonic quotation of the 'Wallinger generation' : ' "It's art because I say I'm an artist and it is in a gallery"'.