First published, 20th September 2013
Damien Hirst once said: “I can’t wait to get into a position to make really bad art and get away with it. At the moment if I did certain things people would look at it, consider it and then say ‘f off’. But after a while you can get away with things.”
Mind you, he also, more infamously suggested:
“The thing about 9/11 is that it’s kind of like an artwork in its own right. It was wicked, but it was devised in this way for this kind of impact. It was devised visually. . . You’ve got to hand it to them on some level because they’ve achieved something which nobody would have ever have thought possible, especially to a country as big as America. So on one level they kind of need congratulating, which a lot of people shy away from, which is a very dangerous thing.”
Hirst is reportedly Britain’s richest living artist, with his wealth valued at £215m in the 2010 Sunday Times Rich List.
Hmm. Sometimes Wikipedia can read like Wikileaks.
My next novel is about art, the art world, and artists, and creativity. I can’t remember whose idea it was (perhaps my editor?) but it seemed sensible, at some point, to include a few art images in the book. Chasing around art galleries, collections and artists for copyright permissions might also help my own creative process…
It didn’t take long before I found myself fully immersed in a fact-fiction fusion. I discovered two things. The first was that, though I am not a fine artist, sculptor or photographer, I felt more convinced that the creative processes that I wanted to explore in my book, at least at the deeper levels, are essentially the same across all disciplines. The interplay between the minds of creative individuals and their social, cultural, economic and political environments holds common features. The second was that the world of the artist I had conjured up in my writer’s hermetic and solipsistic world did bear some resemblance to reality. So that was nice.
Portrait of a Landscape is the most important creative experience I’ve had so far as a writer because it taught me to appreciate rather more than I had before, that the process of creating is more important than the product created. In the book, one of my characters articulates this thought far better than I could:
“…art only exists when it’s being made. It’s like a flower. Once picked, it starts to die.”
Actually, I might go one step further and suggest that art as a process is the only thing that really matters…um…I mean for the artist. Perhaps I mean that to be a good artist, you should only be concerned with the process of creativity (‘process’ underlined). And by that, I mean that the products – the stuff that gets left behind – are or should be irrelevant. In our materialistic, consumer culture, of course, the processes of creativity are trivialised, made irrelevant by the product. The art world is part of the industrial landscape after all.
What am I saying? I’m saying that the words ‘art’ and ‘creation’ refer to different things. We live in a world where acts of creativity are getting harder to perform but where the products of creativity are increasingly demanded by the rich. Gauguin, Mozart, most writers die penniless. Their works generate millions of dollars.
Moral outrage? Kind of no, not really. Of course, to start with, it’s always important to distinguish between value and price. A Rembrandt is valuable because it is the result of an authentic creative process requiring skills, experience and understanding that are extremely rare. It is valuable because it is valued, at least by those with brains to be able to appreciate such things. A Rembrandt is not valuable because it can be exchanged for a large sum of money. Well, there’s the contention.
Certainly the whole YBA-Saatchi-Hirst circus that got ushered into town with the Reaganomification of western culture would have it that value and price should be shackled together. The two are fudged with the word ‘worth’. “What’s it worth?” replaces “What’s it mean?” as the key knee jerk response to whatever’s hanging there on the gallery wall. Of course, that confusion transfers easily to people. A person’s worth is determined by their financial status, income, material possessions and economic contribution to society. In capitalist cultures the poor artist is a worthless human being. A rich banker is worthy of respect and admiration not least of all because he can afford to hang Monets on the walls of his houses. It’s that sort of topsy-turvy, whacky world we live in.
But what of wealthy valuable artists? Have things got so bad that the authentic creative artist is always shit poor, the cynical self-promoter of commercial crap is raking in the dollars? Where are the rich, genuinely great artists?
I don’t think there’s a perfectly inverse correlation between financial worth and artistic ability but I’m convinced there’s a statistically significant relationship that ought to make modern culture blush with shame. But it doesn’t. It all comes down to agents, managers, promoters, marketing intermediaries and all the host of other parasites that turn creativity into commercial gain. It’s the publisher who takes 80% of the writer’s book sales, the gallery that takes a 50% cut, the record label that dictates what the recording artist can or cannot do. Capitalist culture doesn’t need to blush just so long as profits are maximised. So much for any great justification. Literary agents, publishers or owners of art galleries would just as happily peddle soap powder. The commercially minded are, of course, blind to the value of creative acts. They are the Major Majors of the world into whose hands we pass what should be most treasured.
Portrait of a Landscape alludes to the effect of commerce on the once vibrant artist colony in New York:
Jack began to see something. He nodded slowly.
“Okay. Okay, I got the end bit, maybe. Figures on the margin. Sara Choixu. By the way, is that her real name, you think?”
Amy smiled.
“Of course not. They’re all made up. It’s a marketing thing.” She leaned forward conspiratorially. “Look, the City’s just a huge gut we call Fifth Avenue. The mouth is Washington Square and its ass is Central Park. See?”
“Arse.”
“Ass. To get from one end to the other, you need to get noticed, the right gallery, the right people, the right marketing, reviews, blah blah yadda schmuckadda, and the right name. Helps if it’s unpronounceable like with no vowels in it. Get the right combination and your work moves smoothly along the canal. If there was anything authentic at the point of ingestion, that’s leached out when it gets to the other end, by which time they’ve turned it into shit. Expensive shit.”
Amy looked down.
“You sound angry.”
“You mean mad? Sure. I’m mad. The ass end is killing the truth end.
No one decent can live here. It’s too expensive. The good guys have been banished upstate. The edges.”
The effect of capitalism is also being felt in more popular cultural circles. Media awards ceremonies are becoming so anodyne and dull in America that promoters are scrabbling to bring in ‘naughty boys’ like Ricky Gervais and Russell Brand to fibrillate the numbed. The invention of ‘urban’ culture is another attempt to shock interest into the artworld fashion markets with a sort of Derelicte pastiche of what the Mugatus of society think is ‘for real’. The tyranny of capitalist culture isn’t evil, it’s dull. Very, very boring. There is no bludgeoning so much as blanding to death.
How did this happen? It possibly started when industrialisation replaced Augustan patronage at the turn of the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries. At least before then there was a direct connection between patron and artist. Every great estate had its shivering hermetic poet, writer in the lofts, painter in the converted stable, its unpaid composers…hmm. No. It’s always been crap being creative. Cultural life is only ever enriched by the poor. And when the artists are banished, the city begins to die.