Last year I was in Versailles and, taking a wander around the palace, was confronted by the non-art of Jeff Koons.
It takes someone who is not an art critic to notice that this below is not art at all, but an inflatable balloon dog.
And this is a lobster hanging from the ceiling, attempting to make a sufficiently audacious appeal to irrelevance to render it “art” – to art critics at least.
Elsewhere one could find a large porcelain Michael Jackson and a collection of old vacuum cleaners in an acrylic box; they were cheap looking vacuum cleaners whose value had been unnaturally inflated by the Koons label. Other Koons detritus was scattered randomly about the palace with the intention, presumably, of discouraging visitors from prolonging their stay.
The jarring contrast of seeing shoddy drivel in such a magnificent setting prompted me to ask one of the guides how this could have happened: he shrugged his shoulders sympathetically and admitted that one of the town councillors is a friend of Koons.
At least it cleared one thing up for me: modern art is simply about aggressive marketing and shameless self-promotion. It has nothing to do with how Leo Tolstoy, for example, defined art in his essay “What is Art”:
“The activity of art is based on the fact that a man, receiving through his sense of hearing or sight another man’s expression of feeling, is capable of experiencing the emotion which moved the man who expressed it. To take the simplest example; one man laughs, and another who hears becomes merry; or a man weeps, and another who hears feels sorrow. A man is excited or irritated, and another man seeing him comes to a similar state of mind. By his movements or by the sounds of his voice, a man expresses courage and determination or sadness and calmness, and this state of mind passes on to others. A man suffers, expressing his sufferings by groans and spasms, and this suffering transmits itself to other people; a man expresses his feeling of admiration, devotion, fear, respect, or love to certain objects, persons, or phenomena, and others are infected by the same feelings of admiration, devotion, fear, respect, or love to the same objects, persons, and phenomena.”
Theodore Dalrymple has this to say about the Versailles atrocity:
A controversy recently erupted in Sweden over an article published by the philosopher, Roger Scruton, in a magazine called Axess. He argued in it that Western art no longer had any spiritual, let alone religious, content; indeed, it had become afraid of the beautiful, from which it shied away as a horse from a hurdle too high for it. The result was a terrible impoverishment of our art.
There was a good example both of art as financial speculation and as silly game at Versailles recently, where some of Jeff Koons’ sculptures were shown in an exhibition. I am no great lover of Versailles myself: it strikes me as pompous and overblown, and its formal perfection does not make up for this. Still, no one can fail to recognise its magnificence, and its peculiar unsuitedness to the display of Koons’ cheap and childish artefacts (I mean cheap in the moral, not the financial, sense, of course)
It is here that Scruton’s argument becomes illuminating. The successful modern artist’s subject is himself, not in any genuinely self-examining way that would tell us something about the human condition, but as an ego to distinguish himself from other egos, as distinctly and noisily as he can. Like Oscar Wilde at the New York customs, he has nothing to declare but his genius: which, if he is lucky, will lead to fame and fortune. Of all the artistic disciplines nowadays, self-advertisement is by far the most important.
This is reflected in the training that art students now undergo. Rarely do they receive any formal training in (say) drawing or painting.
I like the way Evelyn Waugh put it in Brideshead Revisited when Cordelia Flyte and Charles Ryder, a painter, had this exchange:.
“Charles,” said Cordelia, “Modern Art is all bosh, isn’t it?”
“Great bosh.”
Great bosh.
Anglican Samizdat 