ANOTHER VOICE
There's more than a can of soup between Cezanne and Warhol
CHARLES MOORE
At a dinner party quite recently, I found myself sitting next to a young woman who told me she was an artist. Her latest work was made of neon tubes, I think she said. The purpose of art was to 'disturb', she told me. For want of any better reply, I said 'Why?' She looked, well, disturbed. It seemed that no one had ever asked her that question.
I have been thinking of our exchange as I have read the current war of words on modern art. Giles Auty, Spectator readers will not need reminding, is — I oversimpli- fy — against it, along with, say, 85 per cent of the people who go to art galleries, and 100 per cent of those who don't. Richard Dorment, art critic of the Daily Telegraph, is for it, along with, let us say, 95 per cent of the people who run the galleries, control state spending and teach in the art schools.
Mr Dorment is a distinguished historian of traditional art — he is the biographer of Alfred Gilbert, for example — so he should not be dismissed as one of the fatuous cheer-leaders of a particular avant-garde gang. He argues that an art critic can only do justice to modern art by explaining its huge difference from the past, which means the critic has `to start each review from the beginning'. Contrasting Cezanne's views of Mont Sainte-Victoire with Andy Warhol's soup can, he writes:
One is an imitation of nature, almost the last gasp in the Renaissance idea that a picture is a window into another world. The other is not a glimpse into a fictive world, but some- thing lifted almost unchanged from our own world and thrown back at us from the gallery wall, now utterly different from what it had been before the artist touched it.
It is possible to like both, says Mr Dor- ment, but only if the viewer, aided by the critic, 'realises that basic ideas about what constituted art [have] changed at some point between the two'.
Surely it is precisely because people do realise that the basic ideas have changed that they are so angry. They do not say of a work of modern art, 'This is a bad painting', as one says of most of the traditional paint- ings of sunsets, cottages, etc. that are on sale in tea-shops and commercial galleries in provincial towns. They say, 'This is not what I consider a painting should be.'
Mr Dorment attacks the traditionalist critics for dismissing the Warhols etc. as 'stupid', 'aimless' and 'silly' instead of say- ing 'what the artist does, why he does it, and whether he succeeds or fails'. He goes on: 'Were these guys writing about politics or sport, they would be out of their jobs tomorrow.' It is true that a correspondent reporting on, say, President Mobutu's rule in Zaire should explain that Mobutu's basic idea of what constitutes politics is different from that of, say, Mr Douglas Hurd, but it would surely not be out of order to point out that Mobutu's view is barbaric, cruel and corrupt. Hitler's policy was to kill the Jews. But explaining what it was and whether it succeeded or failed was not the only thing to be said about it. So with art. If there is the 'Renaissance idea' and there is Warhol's idea and never the twain shall meet, once you have explained this, which side are you on? How can you possibly maintain any coherent notion of art if you support both? If we admire Cezanne, why should we accept Warhol as an artist at all?
It is possible to guess at the source of Mr Dorment's frustration, and even to share it. I suspect that his own view of art is tradi- tionalist, and that he recognises the aes- thetic merits, in traditional terms, of many 'avant-garde' artists, and is infuriated by people who write the whole lot off en bloc. He thinks of past periods when great artists were despised and rejected and is horrified at the idea that this might happen again. And Mr Dorment must surely be right. Artists cannot all be useless simply because they call themselves 'avant-garde', any more than all left-wing writers are useless. One's talent is different from one's set of opinions. For example, it seems to me that Richard Long, whose work is constantly puffed by the modernists, is an interesting artist nevertheless.
But Mr Dorment's plea for tolerance will fall on deaf ears so long as the situation which he supports persists. There have been numerous eloquent denunciations of modern art in the press in recent weeks — by Brian Sewell and Hilton Kramer and Martin Gayford and John Simon, as well as Mr Auty — and their strongest point is not their criticism of the art itself but their attack on the status it now demands and the power it now wields. It is just posturing nonsense to talk of yourself as 'avant-garde' if you know that by working in that style you can win the Turner Prize and get into the Tate and a hundred museums in Amer- ica and appear on Channel 4, whereas if you eschew all that you will stay poor. Damien Hirst's shark in formaldehyde is not courageous or challenging: it is as safe a bet in the current climate of critical taste as was Millais' Bubbles in his.
Indeed, the whole idea of national gal- leries and museums, of temples to art and repositories, chronologically presented and collated, of aesthetic treasures, is surely repugnant to the modern view of art. Yet the modernists fight to get their work into such places, and men like Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate, eagerly oblige. They are trading, literally, on the deep belief that art is serious and uplifting and 'a glimpse into a fictive world' in order to secure a home for work which rejects that view. How they must laugh at their work selling for hundreds of thousands of pounds and being cordoned off with ropes and watched over by attendants.
The biggest laugh is that capitalism pays. BP sponsors the Tate, for example. Mr Dorment notes that Brian Sewell, attacking the gallery's latest rearrangement, called on the company to withdraw its money. Mr Dorment thinks this 'particularly shocking'. Why? Why should a public company, statu- torily and morally bound to act in the inter- ests of its shareholders, give their money for work which makes a monkey of them? If BP feels its shareholders benefit from a display of corporate altruism and artistic taste, it should give the lot to the restora- tion of mediaeval churches, not to keeping Gilbert and George in a style to which no one who claims to be at the 'cutting edge' of art should wish to be accustomed. Mod- ern art should go back to being poor but honest; then one might begin to take its claims seriously.
Until then, we shall have the phe- nomenon of the young woman at the din- ner party, steeped in the deep convention- ality of the 'unconventional', and as pathetically anxious to 'disturb' as her grandmother, learning to sketch bowls of flowers, would have been to please.
What is to be done? Hotheads may want to go to the Tate and smash up all the stuff, but that would only confirm Mr Serota in his belief that he is a brave opponent of philistinism. I suggest that a large party of us remove all the offending objects and place them politely but firmly on the pave- ment outside. If challenged by Mr Serota, we shall employ the language of his kind: 'We are making a statement,' we shall say, 'about the place of the artist in modern society.'
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