A few years back I visited a filmmaker friend whose home is decorated with artwork from Port-au-Prince. The semi-abstract masks hammered from oil drums impressed me. In spite of the Haiti’s perpetual troubles — or perhaps because of them — street artists were producing work that radiated a comic, defiant spirit.
My friend’s partner had bought these eye-catching works — from artists off the international gallery grid — for a few hundred dollars total. In contrast, a Francis Bacon triptych depicting artist Lucian Freud netted $159 million CAD in November 2013, making it the most expensive artwork ever sold at auction. Then this February, another portrait by Francis Bacon sold for $78 million CAD at a Christie’s auction in London, well over it’s pre-sale estimate price of $52 million CAD.
At the same auction, the reflective sculpture “Cracked Egg (Magenta)” of a big cracked egg by American artist Jeff Koons fetched $26 million CAD.
Ironically, as institutional, big-money art has become more juvenile over time, the lingo around it has become, if anything, more pompous and complicated. (Anyone who’s stood in a gallery puzzling over the text accompanying a piece of art will know what I mean.) Artspeak may be exhausting bafflegab to the casual museum-goer, but for posers and scenesters it’s the write stuff.
As an experiment for this column, I picked a copy of the voguish journal Art Forum from the local newsstand. I opened it to a random page and found this:
“This limbo, I argue, constitutes non art. But for this limbo to acquire theoretical consistency, a fourth factor is needed: the explicit denial of all artistic qualities — and I mean denial in a quasi-Freudian sense, that is, an involuntary admission of a truth in the guise of its negation. The word no must be uttered, and its true, unacknowledged meaning must be “yes.’
The context doesn’t really matter (a study of the late nineteenth century art scene). The important part is that this passage communicates exactly nothing. Either I’m a dimwit or language of this kind is a sophisticated fraud.
The speculative art game of high-end auction houses has long been one of the favoured recreations of the hyper-wealthy. And it’s the job of the fine arts managerial class — curators, critics, academics and public relations gnomes — to clothe the works of art emperors like Jeff Koons in clever jargon.
The occasional child or adult who shouts out ‘he’s naked!’ can safely be ignored. They don’t have Artspeak decoder rings.
Of course, this kind of lingo goes back a long way. In author Tom Wolfe’s slim 1975 book The Painted Word, he describes an a-ha moment that came to him while reading The New York Times arts section in his bathtub. The ‘text’ — that is, the word from on high by art critics, publicists and curators — was required to properly interpret any given piece of art. “In short: frankly, these days, without a theory to go with it, I can’t see a painting,” he wrote.
Then as now, art theorizing demands run-on sentences thick with pseudo-profound paradoxes and radical posturing, punctuated with enough obscure terms to stump a Scrabble champion.
In the epilogue to his short book, Wolfe imagined twenty five years in the future, when paintings by the big names of his time — Pollock, de Kooning and Jasper Johns — would be reduced to small reproductions on gallery walls, dwarfed by “ huge copy blocks, eight and a half by eleven feet each, presenting the protean passages of the period,” from the East Coast’s three reigning art critics: Greenberg, Rosenberg and Steinberg.
“Every art student will marvel over the fact that a whole generation of artists devoted their careers to getting the Word (and to internalizing it) and to the extraordinary task of divesting themselves of whatever there was in their imagination and technical ability that did not fit the Word.”
Wolfe overshot the mark for comic effect, but not by much. I think back to those Haitian masks in my friend’s apartment, and I wonder why I find them so immediate and vibrant, yet often find the institutional art scene here and other North American cities dull as dishwater. Could it be partly because people living in the margins of the developed world don’t labour under the painted word, unlike many graduates of expensive art schools?
geoffolson.com
