BOOK OF THE WEEK Self-believers
Does art have any value? It turns out you might have to ask the artists themselves
don’t believe in art. I believe in the artist.” The late French artist Marcel Duchamp’s declaration introduces Sarah Thornton’s avidly awaited follow-up to Seven Days in the Art World . Titled 33 Artists in 3 Acts, Thornton’s latest opus centres on a single question: what is an artist?
Made in a series of deftly morphed interviews, Thornton’s point is as follows: given that “anything can be art, [and] there is no objective measurement of quality”, it is up to artists to “establish their own standards of quality” and “excellence”. Success depends on “immense selfconfidence” and “the conviction of others”.
“Like competing deities, artists today need to perform in ways that yield a faithful following.”
This last observation, given our putatively secular cultural moment, is particularly striking. Are artists the demigods of our age? Or is Thornton merely pulling our legs?
The author’s trick is that she sets up the artist — be it Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons or Ai Weiwei, among many others — the better to compel readers to make up their own minds about the value of the artist’s self-belief and their vision of the world.
Here is a choice remark by Koons: “We are inflatables. We take a breath and it’s a symbol of optimism. We exhale and it’s a symbol of death.”
Here’s Gabriel Orozco: “Warhol was a transvestite. It’s not the same as being a fake.” Or Eugenio Dittborn: “I’m a little bit agoraphobic. I’d like to be in an envelope but I can’t fold myself.”
Wryly amusing, 33 Artists in 3 desecration become sacramental. Ai then goes on to compound the paradox: “Most artists struggle to be recognised but fame misrecognises. The moment you touch success, your sense of being somebody disappears.” It is this giddy moment between the tangible and the virtual which Thornton bracingly captures in her vivid account of an artist’s life.
Carroll Dunham emerges as a figure of humane sanity: “I go into a room alone and make things with my hands. I don’t call up a lab. It couldn’t be more ‘ye olde’. But a world consisting of nothing but information and transmittable images is not going to honour our physical selves.”
Personality is king, and the superstars in the art world know this. “The whole celebrity thing comes out of a fear of death, which is what art has always been about,” says Hirst. “You meet famous people and you feel closer to being immortal in some way.” Is this remark delusional, or what?
Thornton lets the comment slide, and yet, in the framing of her studies of Hirst — the artist pops up on a number of occasions over a span of four years of research — we are left with a nagging sense that an absurdly perverse trick called the art world is being conjured before us. As Jack Bankowsky bluntly states: “Art is about life and the art world is about money. You’ve got to keep the two things separate.” This is a sound and keen thought which proves well-nigh impossible to sustain.
However, despite the crassness of the art market, Marina Abramovic holds fast to the belief that “artists should be the oxygen of society. The function of the artist in a disturbed society is to give awareness of the universe, to ask the right questions, to open consciousness and elevate the mind.” Except that this sage-like vision is later countered by Beatriz Milhazes: “I tell myself that I’m like a bank worker. I come to the studio five days a week and do my job. I pay attention to detail and try not to make mistakes.”
But it is performance artist Andrea Fraser who — for me at least — best captures the drive and reason for art: “Art-making is a profession of social fantasy . . . overvaluing and overestimating possibilities, investing in futures that do not really exist are occupational requirements.” This may read as a cynical exercise in speculation in futures, but, as Fraser reminds us, the “art market’s liquidity” is not necessarily a good thing. Indeed, she declares: “What has been good for the art world has been disastrous for the rest of the world.”
This point severely qualifies Thornton’s assumption that art gifts value to the world, an assumption which has become a sacred truth fuelled by the buzz of creativity and innovation, and the insouciant banalisation of these very precepts.
The title of a Hirst work perfectly captures this cool vacuum we call contemporary culture: “Beautiful, childish, expressive, tasteless, not art, over simplistic, throw away, kid’s stuff, lacking in integrity, rotating, nothing but visual candy, celebrating, sensational, inarguably beautiful painting (for over the sofa).”
Ashraf Jamal