Review of the decade: Art - Silly money chasing silly art

Published on Monday 14 December 2009 18:02

In part two of our review of the decade, our art critic describes how profile and price labels came to outweigh all other considerations, boosting the reputation of shallow work by the likes of Damien Hirst

• Anish Kapoor with his artwork Shooting into the Corner

TRYING to find a single image for art in the Noughties, I kept on coming back to the spectacle of countless gleaming yachts moored stem to stern along the quay in Venice for the opening of the Biennale in 2007.

There had always been a few there for the occasion, but the year before the Crash there were so many that they were parked three deep in places and some were turned away. Silly money chasing silly art. With too much money with nothing useful to spend it on, art ballooned, soaking it up li

Compounding the silly-money effect, there has been the rising phenomenon of instant celebrity. Reputations are made simply by media visibility. There is no need for merit of any kind, but once made they become a tradeable commodity. In art, the consequences have been dire. Taste and judgment are redundant when it is reputation that is traded – buy a bit and enhance your own – and the artwork is only a token of the exchange.

An artist with a reputation can do anything at all. Anish Kapoor filled the Royal Academy with graphic enactments of defecation and matching sculptures of fossilised turds. The public paid good money to come and gaze in respectful awe and wonder. Not an eyebrow was raised at his infantile preoccupation. The Emperor was squatting with his imaginary trousers down, and nobody said a thing.

Damien Hirst personifies both the fungal growth of art on silly money and the way reputation has usurped achievement. He has grown immensely rich, but his art is only his reputation commodified. It has no other significance at all.

I had a fascinating conversation a little while ago with a young artist who had worked in his art factory. He ran it like the chairman of any corporation, calling in from time to time to see that things were going according to plan, she said. The artists who actually made his art were not particularly well paid, but the product sold well and for very large sums. Our National Gallery even bought an example, but this girl and her colleagues lost their jobs when the recession bit and Hirst, like any sensible capitalist, sacked a chunk of his workforce. His behaviour, and, by analogy, the whole inflation of the contemporary art market, was indicative of and exactly paralleled the collapse of the relationship between money and real value that brought about the recession. Art is the mirror of its time.

• The Scottish Parliament building: the glorious aesthetics were forgotten in the lengthy row over its cost

Here in Scotland at the beginning of the Millennium, the relationship between money and aesthetic judgment was equally vexed, though typically we got it the wrong way round. In the furious debate that surrounded the building of our parliament, it was always the money that was the issue, not the aesthetics. The quality of Enric Miralles's building, its practicality, its fitness to represent our aspirations as a nation, or indeed our right to expect those aspirations to be expressed at all, scarcely entered the debate. In all the argument about cost, we seemed entirely to overlook the fact that what Miralles had planned for us was a sophisticated and ambitious building designed with insight and imagination to embody those aspirations and give them a practical and articulate form. So far have values changed; after all the fuss we can now look back and reflect ruefully that Sir Fred Goodwin's pension, pooled with the bonus pots of a few of his chums in our ruined banks, could probably have paid for the whole thing.

It was not all negative, however. Early in the decade, a commission was set up under James Boyle to frame new, more adventurous cultural policies for us, and on St Andrew's Day 2003, First Minister Jack McConnell made a remarkable speech. "I believe we can now make the development of our creative drive, our imagination, the next major enterprise for our society…" he said, but his speech came to be known by the acronym of the day it was delivered, SAD, the sad speech, and indeed the First Minister's aspirations were firmly crushed by his philistine cabinet and the Cultural Commission's report was put on the shelf. The SNP did better. They found money successively to secure for the nation Dumfries House, the d'Offay Collection and, crucially, Titian's Diana and Actaeon, one of the greatest pictures ever painted and a vital part of our imaginative capital.

• Diana and Actaeon was bought in a joint deal between the NGS and the National Gallery in London

These welcome interventions demonstrate that we are not a philistine nation. Nevertheless, we do also clearly have some A-grade philistines among us. Accolade for philistine of the decade must go to Ian Davidson, MP, for his outstanding contribution to the Titian debate. It was his view that his constituents would never have heard of Titian and, anyway, what interest would a painting by a dead Italian hold for them? And to clinch the argument: "It was not even as though it (the Diana and Actaeon] had been painted by Jock McTitian."

In spite of such interventions, the painting was acquired jointly by the NGS and the National Gallery in London, and that is something to remember with satisfaction. It is also satisfying to recall that in Glasgow the CCA reopened in 2001, transformed architecturally, and the second phase of Tramway opened in 2003. In 2006, Kelvingrove reopened too. The building was brilliantly restored, but the awful displays are a study in how to patronise an audience while diminishing great art. There was a dummy run in 2004 for this politically correct crassness in an exhibition of the Burrell Collection called One Million Days in China. It was the worst exhibition of any pretension that I have ever seen.

For the best exhibitions of the decade, I have to go south to some of the V&A's landmark shows, Gothic for instance, or Encounters: East Meets West, and these were matched recently by the opening of the V&A's new Medieval and Renaissance galleries. They are not only beautiful, they change our understanding of history. Here, we are promised that the rehang of the SNGMA, the first for 25 years, will do something similar as it evolves over the coming year.

While Glasgow regained Kelvingrove and the CCA, it lost the McLellan Galleries, its premier exhibition space, closed and leased as studios to Glasgow School of Art. In Edinburgh, however, the National Gallery's Weston Link cleverly added valuable space without disturbing a supremely sensitive site. The refurbishment of the RSA, completed in 2003, reinstated that building as a world-class exhibition venue. A massive 172,000 people visited the opening exhibition, Monet: the Seine and the Sea. Subsequently, Ron Mueck commanded record attendances for a contemporary artist (128,635), but Douglas Gordon bombed (12,033). Our public is discerning.

Meanwhile, in London, 266,000 saw the major Titian exhibition – a capacity crowd. These figures demonstrate something I have often argued: in paid attendance, the visual arts beat all other participatory events by miles. Politicians should bear that in mind as, over the coming years, budgets are squeezed to pay the reckoning for all that silly money.

REVIEW OF THE DECADE

Duncan Macmillan on Art: Silly money chasing silly art

Fiona Shepherd on Pop and Rock: The accent is on pop's brogue traders

Kenneth Walton on Classical: Years of change

Jim Gilchrist on Jazz and Folk: Young talent keeps the torch burning

Joyce McMillan on Theatre: Black Watch leads triumphant march forward

Alistair Harkness on Film: Technical hitch