it, who are we to complain? But we do, of course, because there’s a part of the equation that’s missing. Art isn’t a term that can just be co-opted like that. It has connotations. There’s more to it than simply a term for what artists do, as journalism, say, is a term for what journalists do. To call something a work of art is to praise it in some way. Clearly we’re not going to able to reach an agreement that satisfies everyone as to what exactly those connotations might be – something to do with skill, personal vision, beauty, passion maybe – but the bottom line is that art is something that people will want to go and see, and find in some way inspiring. The connotations, in short, are positive. And confronted with Tracey’s bed, or Stanley Braun’s filing-drawer, the reaction, at least from us new philistines, is, I’m sorry, this may be Art, but it isn’t art. This is a con. This is a game which certain people have learnt to play, and certain other people for their own reasons claim to appreciate, but it’s got nothing to do with the business of human creativity which is what we understand to be implicit in the term art. Come up with a new term – call it Concept Realisation for Art Professionals, maybe – and we could all agree, yes, Tracey’s bed is a classic piece of CRAP; the filing-draw is another piece of CRAP….but art? No. Art isn’t a term that’s there for redefining. We all own it.
There’s another side to this: the artist’s ego. For Jeanette Winterson, there are “millions of people with unmade beds and obsessive notebooks filled with sketches and jottings. Tracey is different because she has transformed the personal into the public.” Well yes, but what’s so special about that? Why is the idea of exhibiting your unmade bed such a breakthrough? Most people wouldn’t have thought of it – didn’t think of it – not because they lacked artistic vision, but because they failed to see why anyone could possibly be interested in their unmade bed, and in what possible sense it could be seen as art. It takes a remarkable level of self-obsession to present the detritus of your life as a work of art.
I posted a while back on the Joseph Beuys exhibition at Tate Modern. He was one of the founders of conceptual art, “one of the most influential artists of the 20th Century”, to quote the exhibition catalogue. I argued then that his appeal could only be understood as a sort of cult – the cult of the artist. His works were of interest only because they were made by him, by Beuys, by a self-proclaimed genius. In the absence of any agreed criteria for great art, this is what we’re left with: those who shout the loudest are the ones who get heard.
It’s all beginning to fall apart, though. If even the art critics are starting to see through it, the days of CRAP are coming to an end.
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