This is going to be a very short post, and therefore spectacularly un-nuanced. I go to art galleries whenever I have the opportunity. I like art. People who are disappointed with the kind of thing displayed at the Tate Modern (the article below mentions the Tate Britain) are often depicted as anti-art. Well, I'm not.
I've sometimes wondered what it is that depresses me about so much work that is nominated for the Turner Prize.
It's very simple, really. I don't believe that any of the artists really care about their own work.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/21/20091005/tuk-heap-of-dust-on-art-prize-shortlist-6323e80.html
8th Sept, 2009: Why has this post leapt up to the top of the screen? I didn't write it today. I wrote it some days ago. I hate my blog so much, you'll never know.
joe writes:do you really get that impression from roger hiorns? i think you’d have to be fairly driven to turn a jet into dust or make that scummy south london flat into such a beautiful scifi world. granted i think it would have been more interesting if he’d left it just as he found it (with old kettles/broken furniture etc.) before pouring in the stuff, but i still think theres something nice about it. i dont know much about the other artists yet so couldnt say. anyway, hope you’re well!
Well, I did say it would be an un-nuanced post.I didn’t go through the items mentioned one by one, and if I did, I’d have said that I liked the sound of the flat (I’m not just saying that now – I remember playing with ‘crystal gardens’ as a child and find them quite beautiful). I’m not even determined not to like any of the new works mentioned, since I haven’t seen them ‘in person’. I suppose I wrote this because it’s one more Turner Prize list which I read only to find that there are no interesting ideas there.The idea itself doesn’t have to sound interesting, of course, as long as it actually is interesting in the final execution, but my own observation of conceptual art is that the physical thing is usually secondary to the concept. Again, this would be okay, if the concepts themselves were at all interesting. Maybe I’m missing something, but I’d actually rather that I could find a lot of this work interesting.
Actually, I feel a bit guilty about this. Although I haven’t changed my mind, I think this post is both too general and too negative. What I really need to do is review a specific exhibition, either positively or negatively, but I never seem to get round to that, and since I’ve been in Wales, there’s not much of an opportunity for that sort of thing, anyway.Therefore, I would like to invite readers to tell me all about their favourite conceptual artists.
If someone asked me to prepare a conceptual art exhibit for this weekend, this is what I’d do. I’d get a sandbox and fill it full of any objects that I could lay my hands on – toy soldiers and other plastic figures, lucky charms, bits of glass from car accidents, the bones of dead animals, tea lights, costume jewellery, etc. Then I would put this sandbox in a room and ask different people to arrange the objects in whatever way they wished. They would be filmed while doing this. When they had finished their arrangement, they would be asked questions about it by a variety of people, including a psychiatrist, someone close to them, a random stranger off the street, etc. The box would then be placed in the gallery in a large perspex booth, with video recordings of these sessions playing outside (at the press of a button). Anyone who wanted to, could, at the convenience of the necessary others involved, have their own sandbox session recorded and made into one of the display videos. The sandbox itself, when not being used, would always be left in the arrangement of the last person who had a session there.Maybe it’s just me, but, I think that this is a far more interesting idea than just about any conceptual art installation I’ve ever encountered, and, though it’s not wholly original, it’s one that I came up with off the top of my head after posting this blog entry yesterday. And, of course, I haven’t devoted years to becoming a conceptual artist, etc. This is why, although I have absolutely no objections to conceptual art in theory, in my actual observation, I think there’s something wrong with the whole ‘conceptual art’ culture. The practitioners seem to be almost pathologically incapable of coming up with interesting ideas. I don’t believe, for the most part, they are interested in or passionate about anything, except courting publicity. The only idea that really seems to exist in the world of conceptual art (a world that should be rich in ideas) is the very, very old and tired idea that ‘anything can be art’. It seems like no one has had a new idea since them. No one has replaced ‘anything’ (as in ‘any old thing’) with something.Feel free to tell me my idea is worse than those lined up for the Turner Prize. I can take it.
Anonymous writes:the problem i have with a lot of art in general is that it seems to be a stale execution of theory. but also, it depends what u mean by conceptual. ‘conceptual art’ as a movement was to do with dematerialising art objects. heres a nice one:http://www.diaart.org/sites/page/56/1375but i’ll try and find something more recent.
That does look interesting, or maybe ‘intriguing’ is a better word, since I can’t really form a clear idea of what it is.This is Sol LeWitt’s definition of conceptual art:In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.It’s something I’m really not into. I might be more into it if the ideas were ever any good, but they seldom seem to be. To me, conceptual art means something like “art by academics and other intellectual careerists”. BUT, it shouldn’t mean that. By which I mean, art should be something that can be expressed in any form. There should be no limits to the imagination. I rarely find any imagination in conceptual art, and my impression is that many of its exponents are actually suspicious of the imagination, that this is part of the culture of the scene.You would not get away with LeWitt’s defintion of conceptual art as a means of writing a book, although, well, there is, of course, ‘high concept’ in Hollywood, which means, “Let’s make a movie based on Pikachuu and have Kiera Knightly star as Pikachuu”. And that’s the concept. And not much else matters, so, I suppose that’s the equivalent of what LeWitt was into. And, actually, there are books that are like this, too.Please do post more links.