Busy doing nothing

When walking round Tate Modern recently, I found myself asking the same question: "Is that an exhibit?" I found myself staring at a neat row of heating grilles in the floor, but there was no label near it on the wall. My confusion sprung from the fact that I had just been looking at Julian Opie’s H (1987), which consisted of an exact replica of an air-conditioning vent propped against a wall. Fortunately, it had a little rail around it and a label beside it, so I knew that this exceptionally dull object was an "exhibit", and not something the heating engineers had inadvertently left behind.

It is one of the myths of modern art that you can make art from anything, and I suddenly imagined a gallery with exhibits made entirely of heating grilles - showing how conceptual art had changed over the decades. And that’s what I drew: grilles arranged on the floor like Carl Andre’s notorious "Bricks" in the 1960s; grilles hung on a wall with a poetic title, like Michael Craig Martin’s glass of water on a shelf which he called An oak tree, of the 1970s. I called my grille A wallflower. Then a painting painted to look exactly like a heating grille, like Gary Hume’s paintings of painted doors in the 1980s and, lastly, the agro-conceptualism of Hirst and Emin in the 1990s. I called my suspended grille Down with the F***ing Working Classes. And then, in the corner of my imaginary gallery (which looks uncannily like Tate Modern - there’s even a bored attendant leaning against the door), I drew a neat row of real heating grilles in the floor, taking care to remind my readers, should any be regal, that these particular grilles were not an exhibit.

I wrote The Eclipse of Art not just as a witty exercise, but because I want to change modern art. I’m serious. I want regime change in modern art! I’m fed up with the art that’s rammed down our throats in public art galleries. I want to see artists creating art that is profound and moving, beautiful and lasting, not just plonking objects they’ve found down in art galleries and calling it art. The trouble with found objects is that you cannot tell, just by looking at them, what the person who found them and put them in a gallery was thinking and feeling when they did so. But expressing feelings and thoughts through visual means is what art is.

If you came across a bin bag or a stack of bricks, or an unmade bed in the street, it would never occur to you that it was art. But if you saw a painting by Picasso there, or by Matisse, or a sculpture by Rodin, you’d know it was art, because what else could it be? Art exists as art wherever it is - it doesn’t need an art gallery. But found objects such as Damien Hirst’s inflated toy model (which he sold for 1 million) or Duchamp’s urinal (a limited edition replica of which the Tate recently bought for nearly 1 million) only exist as art when they are in an art gallery. That’s how tenuous their artistic content is.

But it’s not enough just to point the finger and say, "Look! The Emperor of Modern Art has got no clothes - or is, at least, down to his last diaphanous loin cloth." If you want to change things, as I do, you have to understand what’s gone wrong with modern art. Who took the Emperor’s clothes? How is it that someone as well informed as Sir Nicholas Serota, the super-director of all the Tates, can have got it so disastrously wrong?

The problem with modern art is that it’s a world built on myths and false assumptions. It abounds with a totally inadequate conception (if I can use that much abused word) of what art is and could be. The Eclipse of Art is an attempt to discover who stole the Emperor’s clothes and why. What happened was a bit like the icing on Billy Bunter’s cake that disappeared over night; there wasn’t just one culprit, but many thieving hands who each took a bit thinking no-one would notice. The result is that art has virtually disappeared today.

There are culprits to be found in education, where the creative skills of visual expression have virtually ceased to be taught. There are culprits to be found among gallery curators, who no longer look broadly across the whole spectrum of art to seek out the best art wherever they can find it, but now "collaborate" with a tiny handful of "internationally accepted" artists, to create "installations" in their "spaces".

There are culprits to be found among the followers of fashion who argue that modern artists have to use modern media such as videos or computers and that the traditional craft skills of art, like painting and carving are as out-of-date as the wooden plough. One only has to look at the tremendous revival of interest in cooking - the most ephemeral of all the crafts - to see how hungry people are for the distinctly personal touch.

There are many culprits, as one would expect, among the theorists of art. I will give just one example here: John Berger. The main thesis of his still immensely popular book Ways of Seeing was that painting was a product of male capitalism, that it died in 1900 and good riddance to it. Photography, he argued, was the new, egalitarian artistic language of today. One has only to look at the paintings of Frida Kahlo, who was neither male nor a capitalist and didn’t die before 1900, to realise how wrong he was. Photography adds to the language of art, it doesn’t replace it.

And there are many culprits among artists themselves. I will only mention one here, because he had such an influence in Scotland, through the efforts of Ricky Demarco: Joseph Beuys. He was a master of the found object. He left a trail of dried flowers, felt hats, sticks and fat, bones and wood, mud, sledges, stuffed animals, torches and toenail clippings in galleries of modern art around the world. Tate Modern has more galleries devoted to him than any other single artist and the National Galleries of Scotland has just acquired a huge collection of his "multiples" - found objects in editions!

All this detritus was symbolic of a remarkable event in Beuys’ life. He told all who gathered round him (he had a mournful charisma) that when he was flying with the Luftwaffe in the Second World War, he was shot down over the Crimea in deep snow. His life was saved by nomadic Tartars who wrapped him in felt and fat to keep him warm and nursed him back to health in their tents for several weeks - hence the felt and fat in his art, as symbols of rebirth.

Last year, however, the German artist Jorg Herold took the trouble to visit the site of the crash. He interviewed and videoed those local people who still remembered the event. Beuy’s Stuka did crash on 16 March 1944, but when the villagers came out look at it, though the pilot was stone dead (but still strapped in his seat and with his pipe gripped in his teeth), Beuys, the rear gunner, had jumped clear and appeared unharmed apart from a wound above his eye. No-one spoke. What would have been the point? The villagers didn’t understand German, and anyway Beuys was the enemy and he didn’t speak Russian. So they left him to his fate. He was picked up within a few hours - German military records prove he was in a mobile hospital the next day. He was discharged shortly afterwards and sent back to frontline duty. According to this research, there was no long epiphany of saviour, there were no Tartars, no tents, no fat, no felt, and not one flake of snow.

But if Beuys made it all up, doesn’t it just prove he was being imaginative - and isn’t the job of the artist to be imaginative? Yes, but to a purpose. What do his bits of felt and fingernails (the most highly priced in the world) mean if the event they refer to was not real? But if you sense that the Emperor’s already lost his clothes, there’s worse to come. Beuys believed that art wasn’t visual at all.

He claimed to have saved a catalogue of the work of the German sculptor Wilhelm Lehmbruck from a Nazi bonfire of degenerate art and literature - a most unlikely act, incidentally, for someone who’d joined the Hitler Youth against his parent’s wishes. Beuys liked Lehmbruck’s etiolated figures of mournful youths because, he said, their meaning couldn’t be grasped by looking at them. They were meant to be understood by means of "hearing, thinking and willing". How you listen to a sculpture, he didn’t explain. But if you can’t believe what Beuys says about his art, and you can’t believe the evidence of your own eyes when you look at it, what are you, the viewer left with? Nothing.

It’s that nothing I want to see the end of in modern art. The Eclipse of Art is my heartfelt plea for the revival of creation of art. This is not a plea for the return of traditional languages only. Paintings and sculptures don’t automatically become works of art when they’re put in frames or on stands, any more than a found object automatically becomes art just because it’s put in an art gallery. Art’s more difficult to create than that. But only when we strip away our blinkered preconceptions about what makes art "modern", will great art get the chance to flower again.

Julian Spalding is former Director of Glasgow Museums and Galleries. His forthcoming book The Eclipse of Art: Tackling the Crisis in Art Today, is published by Prestel on 22 April, price 12.95.