A response to the question: Is conceptual art removing the need for skill in today's art world?
A response
to the question: Is conceptual art removing the need
for skill in today's art world? Posted
by the Define Collective in the World Contemporary Art Group, www. Linked-in
The old
masters had their factories just as Hurst has and to say that art produced by
the YBA’s for example is somehow substandard is wrong. In the Tracey Emin show at the Turner Contemporary
earlier this year; the gallery hung some of her drawings next to drawings by
Rodin, William Blake and Moore. She came off rather well and her large scale embroidery
was exquisite, a real tour de force. I’ll concede some conceptual art can look
a bit sketchy perhaps this is the legacy of the abstract expressionists, I find
works too ‘polished’ don’t let me in and a bit austere.
We live in a
different time to Vermeer et al, our culture has changed, and the philosophy
has changed. We have moved from know how to
know that – involving a power shift
from the workshop and studio to the academy, this has not democratised our
understanding – in fact it has put conceptual art, especially, only within the
grasp of the educated classes and with the UK in the grip of reactionary right wing
policies and expensive higher education an appreciation of art is widely seen
as elitist and not for, or of the people.
Art, as
taught by some at the academy, has moved into a period of exploring its own
nature. This has meant an emptying out
of the associations with previous forms of production – and the patrons (art
market) have changed: No longer emperors, popes or industrialists who valued
the hundreds of man-hours spent on works, the market now is the middle classes
who value individualism and free expression. The rich west, having banished
traditional manufacturing – and with it the culture of the hand skill – to the
east, now has the dilemma over what to value in terms of its art. Art schools
frequently don’t have the staff with expertise in traditional techniques to be
able to teach them, nor are they valued. We have entered a post material
paradigm through which art has been transformed into a sanctioned collection of
ideas from the academy on one hand and outsider
art such as graffiti on the other, which until Banksy ruined it, was a
performative, honest and highly creative strategy of popular resistance.
Since Kant
until the modern parables of environmental catastrophe we viewed beauty as being
an innate sensibility and distinct from the profound
which was to be found out there in
the realm of nature whose aesthetic path was somehow different, awesome and
other. Now, since Robert Smithson tipped asphalt down a hill side, we have the
dawning realisation that our objectification of and separation from ‘nature’
was wrong – and is part of the problem – and that anthropocentrism leads to a
utilitarian view where the profound
is sought to be managed, controlled and profited from. The environment has not only entered politics and human history it has
entered us and our collective
understanding of the place humanity has in the scheme of things: that WE are a force of nature; like the
volcano or tsunami, the profound is no longer an objective out there but inside of us – we carry it
around – and when expressed, rarely conforms to traditional notions of beauty.