Lesser and greater worlds
Mark Glazebrook
When out of a job with a title, and freelancing as exhibition organiser, lecturer, writer and painter, I was introduced at a London party some 30 years ago as follows: 'This is Mark Glazebrook. He's in the art world!'
Having been brought up in the mountain and river world of the Vale of Clwyd, north Wales, I wanted to protest that at bottom I came 'from haunts of coot and hem' like James Thurber's Rousseauesque cartoon character who enters a party tipsily quoting this passage from Tennyson's 'The Brook'. In the event, I swallowed my rustic origins and tried to live up to such expectations as my hostess's breezy introduction might have raised. When as a child I was rendering Welsh landscapes in watercolour, perhaps I was already in the art world without knowing it.
What exactly is the art world — this world that I was perceived as belonging to? A spy from Planet Zog might be forgiven for reporting back, having studied the popular British press, that the mind-boggling, multimillion-pound price tag is what the art world is all about. In a word, money. The price per square centimetre of Raphael's little 'Madonna of the Pinks', which one could slip into a briefcase and which the National Gallery has acquired from the Duke of Northumberland for £22 million after a Getty Museum offer of £35 million, is impressive. The Inland Revenue has lost the difference between the two figures, so you could say that we've all paid about 20p for the privilege of keeping the Raphael in the country. t> Picasso's case is at least as dramatic. When he was young, poor and in Paris, around the time of his short Blue and Rose periods, Picasso was burgled. The burglars ignored the pictures. Picasso's Rose period 'Boy with the Pipe' has recently broken the auction record to break all auction records by going for $104 million. Paloma Picasso already owns a Greek island but in theory she could now buy the large, Onassis family island, Scorpios, for about three of her grandfather's pre-Cubist paintings. Turning to the Brit Art produced today, our man from Zog could not but notice that, whereas the Raphael and this particular Picasso were pink, sweet and charming, outrageous artefacts and shocking images connected with sex and death are also newsworthy — and rather expensive in all the circumstances. He would report that an unmade bed, a portrait of a Moors murderer and a pickled shark may make it to the front pages of newspapers just as auction records do. This brings us to artists.
Although logic dictates that without artists there would be no such thing as art, a typical artist, according to British folklore, is probably mad — with the possible exceptions of Sir Joshua Reynolds and Henry Moore, a Yorkshireman. Fictional spinsters are inquisitive, colonels are irate, vicars are dotty, but artists are just mad — like scientists, or 'boffins' as they are often called. 'Stands to reason,' as Richmaei Crompton's freckled little hero William Brown used to say. In William's day an English painter would stand on the edge of a cliff in a storm, clutching a rickety, timehonoured easel in one hand, while attempting with the other to capture the sea, the light and the weather with paint on canvas.
Today's Brit Artists don't make paintings of beds as Boucher and Fragonard did, or as James Pryde did in Edwardian London. They deliberately fail to make their beds so that they can exhibit and sell them. They don't paint cows as Aelbert Cuyp did in 17th-century Holland. They slice and pickle them. It would be logical, therefore, back in Zog, for the analysts to assume that on Planet Earth a high value is placed on money, madness and Conceptualism.
There is, of course, another story. There are many other stories. The number of books on art has exploded. From Glasgow or even the Orkneys to St Ives, from Birmingham's Barber Institute to Liverpool's Walker Art Gallery, from the railings of Bayswater Road to the showcases at the British Museum, there are innumerable, different, innocent or sophisticated, rich or poor, honest or crooked, sane or eccentric, often expanding art worlds which overlap within the greater art world. The case of Jack Vettriano's painting 'The Singing Butler', dismissed by one academic as 'dim erotica', well highlights the difference between establishment and popular taste. Reproductions of this Scottish artist's work currently outsell Monet's lilies and Van Gogh's sunflowers to make the artist £250,000 per annum. The original painting recently sold for £744,000. We are told that Jack Nicholson collects his work but that an example was refused as a gift by a public gallery in Scotland.
There is also an unpublicised infrastructure of scholars, editors, picture-restorers, graphic designers, specialist photographers, frame-makers and many other toilers in the field of art.
Despite Modernism and Conceptualism, habits and hard-won skills which were current in the 19th century persist, because of the demand for them. Lucian Freud has excelled in part by more or less ignoring the Modern Movement. The greater art world includes little-known but accom
plished traditional portrait painters, not to mention fine horse and dog portraitists, some of whom have been well tested at the bar of the Chelsea Arts Club. Almost all such artists heartily deplore the acceptance of Concept Art by the market and by the art establishment. If anyone really wants to find out what is going on in the art world, he should skim the front pages of newspapers and study the arts pages, the art magazines and the television programmes devoted to art. He should also study the Art Newspaper.
The Art Newspaper is international in scope. It presents news about art against a broad cultural background. It lists and reviews exhibitions and art books. It tells about government policies that affect art. It documents fraud, grave-robbing, fakes and stolen art. It deals with law and art, collectors, benefactors, museums, scholarly institutions, galleries, auctions, art fairs and the people great and small who make some impact on the art world. The Art Newspaper alone is proof, if proof were needed, of the great scope and diversity of the art world. Record auction prices and odd-seeming examples of contemporary art are just the tip of a vast and growing iceberg — or is it a volcano?
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