Arts Review: Artist Rooms

Published on Monday 23 March 2009 19:07

< strong>Artist Rooms *** Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh< /strong>

Crane was writing 120 years ago, at the end of the only period before our own in which art became a high-end commodity and a market-led activity. Indeed, partly because of the inspiration of Crane, William Morris, and others in the Arts and Crafts movement, it was generally assumed for much of the period between our own time and theirs that artists did not expect to get rich; that they were driven by ideals, not by money.

It has all changed. Now we have artists as capitalist-entrepreneurs, though you might have thought that was an oxymoron. Damien Hirst raised more than 50 million by selling his art himself through Sotheby's. After that, his response to the dawning recession was, like any good capitalist, to pay off his workers – the people who actually make his art. Crane was clear about that, too: "Without due recognition of the equality and unity of all art workers, and their mutual interdependence in building the great structure, we shall raise no enduring monument to be a delight to ourselves and a memorial of us to those who come after."

Personally, I have never got much delight from Hirst and I don't think I am alone in that. But if so, what sort of a memorial "of us to those who come after" is the D'Offay Collection, in which Hirst figures very prominently? As though to raise that very question, he dominates Artist Rooms, the first exhibition to be made from the collection, which was bought jointly by the National Galleries of Scotland and the Tate Galleries a year ago.

There are six artists in this first show, but more than 30 are represented in the whole collection. It will only be exhibited in the form of one-person shows, however, or Artist Rooms as they will be called. There are shows in Edinburgh and at the Tate sites in London, and also in a rolling exhibition programme that includes galleries across the country from Stromness in Orkney to St Ives in Cornwall.

Hirst is only the most conspicuous of his generation to be the living antithesis of Crane's ideal not-for-profit artist-worker. As a dealer, Anthony d'Offay handled a good many of them. He studied in Edinburgh, then started dealing in London in the 1960s and began forming his own collection. The big boom in contemporary art prices did not begin till later, however. In fact, if you drew a graph, the rise in contemporary art prices would, I suspect, closely match the rise in inequality: the ever-widening gap between the wealthy and the rest of us over which both the Tories and New Labour have presided with such complacency.

Escalating prices posed a real problem for our museums and galleries – they felt their collections should be representative, but they simply couldn't keep up. That is why the NGS and the Tate felt they had to take the opportunity of acquiring D'Offay's collection. It covered their own wealth gap, although it did not do so cheaply. D'Offay's collection was a "gift" that cost us 26.5 million – the sum he spent building up the collection; it has been valued at up to 125 million.

If it does cover the gap, this show suggests it is nevertheless more of a mixed bag than we might have supposed. A dealer may actively collect and there is no doubt that D'Offay did. But a cynic might also reflect that if a work in a gallery doesn't sell, that same dealer has three options. He can send it to auction, but the result is likely to undercut his prices; he can keep it in the store, but risks it becoming a sort of toxic asset (being apparently unsaleable, it may drag down the rest of that artist's work). The third and best option for the smart dealer is to buy it himself. That way, at least it has an apparent market value, but is still there to be sold if the chance arises.

That of course would be a very cynical view and there is no doubt much in this collection is of real quality – for instance, it would be worth taking a trip to the Pier Art Centre, Stromness, Orkney (19 June-5 September) to see the Bill Viola works, and that part of the deal – taking such topical art around the country – is certainly an invaluable enterprise.

Hirst dominates this first show in Edinburgh. The first thing you see is a shiny glass case full of surreal-looking medical models. Apart from displacing them from their intended environment in medical education, however, Hirst adds nothing to their strangeness. Away from the Flock, a lamb in formaldehyde, is more classic Hirst, though on the same theme. The lamb is a Christian symbol, of course, but the suggestion that it is somehow also a medical specimen proposes a crossover between religious ideas of redemption and the power of modern medicine to save life, if not actually to redeem it. There is a butterfly painting here too, a symbol of life's transience.

There are pill paintings and a medicine cabinet. Again medicine intervenes, intercedes even between life and death. That opposition is stated rather baldly in a large glass case that is filled with fish mirroring their matching skeletons. Both are actually dead, but one is in the living form, the other in death's familiar image.

Andy Warhol is represented here by a group of portraits, printed in multiples of four and then stitched together. The effect is at once fragile and enigmatic, life and death again, perhaps, but in a much more poetic way than Hirst's rather bald, unsubtle metaphors.

Francesca Woodman took tiny, mysterious pictures of herself, usually naked. They seem to suggest the elusive poetry of an adolescent's search for identity for Woodman, who died aged just 22.

Vija Celmins is represented by a series of prints in different and often archaic media. There are mezzotints of spiders' webs and starry skies, and wood engravings of the surface of the sea. They are beautiful, but also unremarkable when you compare them to the quality that often-anonymous printmakers achieved in the past when these were everyday media.

Ellen Gallagher's art reflects her experience as a black artist. One work here is indeed a big black picture; little figures like coffee beans march across it. She uses the same motif in another painting too and we are told it represents, not coffee beans in fact, but the caricature lips of blacked-up white musicians. But if I need to be told that to understand the picture, is it really worth the telling?

A series of Gallagher's collages in the manner of Eduardo Paolozzi is principally composed of modified advertising material for cosmetics aimed at black women – hair-straighteners, skin-lighteners and the like. It is a fascinating study in the sociology, even the economics of racial self-image, its manipulation and all that that implies. Nevertheless, this is really single-issue art and no matter how serious the issue may be or how much we may sympathise with the cause, single-issue art is likely to plod, and I am afraid this does.

The final artist in this group is Alex Katz. His pictures – lightly painted landscapes and portraits – are small and charming, but they are also unremarkable. Katz's claim to fame seems to be that he went on painting simple, representational works when around him in New York other artists were changing the language of art forever. Plenty of other artists did what he did too, however, and many a great deal better.

If this first selection is a little underwhelming, nevertheless the wider collection is certainly "a memorial of us to those who come after". What it says about us and our times future generations will decide, but at least now it is there for them to judge.

&#149 Until 8 November. For more details on Artist Rooms, visit: www.nationalgalleries.org/artistrooms