Alastair SOOKE
All of this week, the Telegraph’s critics will investigate what is next for their sector. In the first instalment, our chief art critic examines the way ahead for galleries and practitioners
Another three months? Really? The Government’s announcement that museums cannot open before May 17 – long after commercial galleries and even gyms have resumed operations – is crushingly disappointing. Last summer proved that they can function safely. And, for many, connecting with art is a form of “essential” daily exercise: a workout for the synapses, rather than the sinews, of which they have been deprived for too long.
Still, after weeks of uncertainty, at least we have a date. So, once museums are up and running again, how will things have changed? And what effect will the pandemic have upon the art we’re going to see?
For demoralised institutions beset by financial difficulties, the rocky terrain ahead has been apparent for a while. As early as last May, Nicholas Serota, who chairs Arts Council England, told me there would be no return to normal. Ten months on, it isn’t hyperbole to declare that, in the future, we will talk about a “before” and “after”.
With international tourism up the spout, and people still nervous about taking public transport, the old business model for museums – relying on temporary blockbuster exhibitions to generate box-office revenue – is no longer viable. We should expect renewed focus on permanent collections, which may (a silver lining, this) stimulate a renaissance in curatorial expertise.
For a while, too, as the beancounters desperately try to replenish coffers, there will be fewer shows and a less frantic calendar of parties and private views. In the art world, the period leading up to the pandemic already felt like the last days of something bloated and excessive. Now, the profligate frolicking must stop. For long-in-the-tooth museum directors and curators who experienced their “Roaring Twenties” back in the 2000s, hair shirts, not glad rags, will be next season’s look.
Jet-setting in particular will be frowned upon, as people question the environmental cost of art fairs and biennales. Accordingly, we will likely see a new era of localism, as institutions concentrate on audiences closer to home. For instance, the Chisenhale Gallery in London’s East End is working with the primary school across the road. At the same time, curators must not lose sight of what’s happening abroad. “How we work locally while staying connected internationally will be one of the defining questions for the next decade,” says Sam Thorne, director of Nottingham Contemporary.
We are, then, entering a period of slowdown, with a new mantra: do less, but better. It should be a kinder time, too, as former rivals tend the collaborative spirit kindled by the crisis. Does this mean that things will become more boring? Perhaps. The pre-pandemic art world was, in many ways, decadent and reprehensible. It was also glamorous and fun. Of course, art fairs and biennales are manna for freeloaders and party animals. But they’re important nodes where ideas and information get exchanged, too. So, eventually, perhaps, the cavaliers will prevail over the roundheads, and the whole champagne-fuelled shebang will return.
I just hope that, if it does, those smaller, younger galleries and idiosyncratic, grassroots spaces, often run by artists, which are nimble and take risks, will still be around. Because, according to Sarah Mccrory, director of Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art in south-east London, it is the “weird, niche, interesting spaces” that, financially precarious, are under threat. Institutions such as Tate which feel more corporate have been haemorrhaging money, but should survive.
What, though, of art in the wake of
Galleries will have a new mantra: do less, but better
coronavirus? Forecasting aesthetic trends is a mug’s game. Art isn’t produced using an algorithm or designed by committee. And artists tend to be cussedly contrary. Still, perversely, crises sometimes provoke exciting new cultural developments. The killing fields on the Western Front were the breeding ground of Dada and Surrealism. “Artists always respond to deprivation, fault lines,” says Serota. “Picasso made some of his great works in response to crisis, war and loss, and I’m sure artists will do the same today.”
Work raking over Covid-19’s coals is already happening. That said, I suspect the best art to emerge in the coming months will be shaped by the pandemic obliquely. The truth is that for lots of artists, the monotony of lockdown has stifled, rather than stimulated, creativity. And, deprived of access to studios, assistants and fabricators, many have been forced to strip things back. “A lot of artists I’ve been speaking to over the past year have been turning to moving-image work,” says Thorne, “because you can make things inexpensively on your laptop.”
According to Rebecca Morrill, a commissioning editor at art publisher Phaidon, there has also been a marked resurgence in drawing, because it is “very immediate” and doesn’t require a lot of specialist art supplies or equipment. Last spring, for instance, the American artist Rashid Johnson – who appears in “Vitamin D3”, Phaidon’s new compendium of contemporary drawing, which Morrill co-edited – started a series of Untitled Anxious Red Drawings responding to the pandemic.
“I was especially struck by this [trend] when I saw an exhibition of [British artist and Turner Prizewinner] Gillian Wearing’s watercolour self-portraits last October, all of which had been made during lockdown,” Morrill tells me. “Here was an artist known for video and photography, making hand-drawn works on paper.”
Post-pandemic art is, then, likely to have an intimate, reflective flavour, jettisoning the splashy characteristics – slickness, spectacle, shock tactics – associated with the 1990s and 2000s. Above all, there will be a drive for authenticity and emotional resonance. Lockdown has been an isolating experience. Everybody wants to reconnect – but, sick of hanging out virtually on Zoom, they’re unlikely to want to do so on a screen. In fact, I suspect we may witness a backlash against digital tech. Yes, museums, forced during long closures to up their online game, have witnessed enviable spikes in web traffic (VR exhibitions, live-streamed auctions: the last year has witnessed an extraordinary acceleration towards digital.) Some gallery directors even worry that audiences are now so accustomed to consuming art online that they may never return.
But ultimately, art is a phenomenon that – to borrow a common internet abbreviation – occurs “IRL” (in real life). Encountering it in reproduction – whether on a screen or in a magazine or book – is a flattening, diminished experience. Scale, texture, chromatic intensity: these can only properly be appreciated when you are standing in front of an artwork, experiencing it in relation to your own body.
In other words, art needs to be viewed in person. That’s the intimacy, the connection, I’m talking about, which people have really missed. Which is why those in charge of our museums and galleries should be optimistic about the future: because, eventually, we’ll come back.