November 2008

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‘A man’, as Oscar Wilde wisely remarked, ‘Can’t be too careful in the choice of his enemies.’ This saying has suddenly become an ominous one for contemporary art because – quite suddenly – it doesn’t seem to have any opponents any more. There is an occasional outburst, of course. Just the other day someone wrote to The Daily Telegraph enquiring whether the report of Tracey Emin’s election to the Royal Academy at the end of March should not have been reported on 1 April. But these angry cheeps only serve to emphasis how eerily quiet this spring has been – a season in which the sound of philistinism has been absent from the land. The great chorus of hatred and execration for modern art that used to break out on a regular basis has simply disappeared. Now it is the lone voices of dissent that are in an embattled minority.

In the UK, a few birdwatchers protested against a battalion of Antony Gormley sculptures on Crosby beach, but – as I remarked last month – their protests were swept away by a national tide of support for the iron men. Only seven years after Tate Modern completed its vast headquarters on Bankside it has announced an even larger extension – with 60% more space (Fig. 3) – piled up like a stack of gleaming nursery bricks as imposing as St Paul’s (though admittedly, less dignified).

Fifteen years ago, on their walks around London Gilbert & George would ask passers-by to name a living artist, and few if any could think of a single one. Now, G&G acknowledge, that’s completely changed. Damien and Tracey RA are as well-known as soap-stars or even footballers. The cultural war about modern art is over, finis, won, the result an overwhelming defeat for the forces of reaction. The only exception is the kind of protest that is about content, not form. Disrespect, apparent or real, towards religious imagery can cause a storm. Last month in New York the exhibition of a six-foot, naked sculpture of Christ crucified – Sweet Jesus by Cosimo Cavallaro (Fig. 2) – was cancelled after protests. Both the medium, milk chocolate, and the nudity of the figure gave offence (Michelangelo of course also got into trouble for representing Christ without a loincloth). But formally, the sculpture is utterly conventional.

At first I was pleased about the rout of the philistines, but the more I reflect on it, the more worrying it appears. In its heroic age, of course, modernist art was popular with almost nobody, and didn’t always want to be embraced. ‘Art for the people?’ exclaimed Degas, ‘What a dreary idea!’ – not a view that would go down well with either the management at Tate Modern or Britain’s Labour government, which pays for Tate.

In the first half of the last century it was not only stuffed-shirts such the Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph who hated modernism (he believed that Oskar Kokoschka deserved to be shot for making people look the way they did). In her posthumous memoir My Love Affair with Modern Art (2006), Katharine Kuh – a doughty supporter of avant-garde art in the hard years of the mid-20th century – describes how she held an exhibition of work by Paul Klee in her little gallery in Chicago. One day ‘an elderly man and heavily- set woman studied the show, all the while hissing “Schrecklich! Schrecklich!”’ They turned out to be the great writer Thomas Mann and his wife. The view that modern art was a ghastly practical joke was quite normal as recently as the early 1990s. Then, Nicholas Serota, director of Tate, was so alarmed by the hostility to new art in Britain that he convened an informal committee – Jay Jopling was a member – to attempt to fight back.

All that changed in the three years between the ‘Sensation’ exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1998 and the opening of Tate Modern in 2000. Nowadays, modern art has almost no enemies. In the last half decade, the title of Capital City of Modern Art has passed – rather rapidly – from London, to Leipzig, then to New York. Now, the buzz among insiders is that Los Angeles is the place. Some of the artists thrown up in these centres, so dizzily succeeding one another, may be of lasting value. Names that might become household ones in the future include those of Dana Schutz and Barnaby Furnas, both based in New York, and Christoph Ruckhäberle from Leipzig. Then, of course there is the huge supply of new art coming from China.

But one thing that none of these new stars produce is outrage. They are collected avidly; hardly does a new name appear than one reads of exhibitions selling out, and prices spiralling vertiginously upwards. The world is full of fans of modern art – whose responsibilities, as laid out in Owning Art: The Contemporary Art Collector’s Handbook by Louisa Buck & Judith Greer (2006), are similar to those of converts to a religious cult. The new collector must submit to numerous rules: don’t buy for investment (frowned upon); don’t sell anything without first notifying the dealer you bought it from (which might drive down the value of the artist’s other work). Employ conservators. Keep an archive. Owning modern art, one gathers, is not something to be lightly undertaken. It is an honour and a responsibility.

How different things were for Katharine Kuh, who in the 1930s could scarcely pay her monthly rent of $50 from the profits she made on exhibitions of Miró, Klee and Kandinsky – and was regularly visited by overweight and ‘much behatted’ ladies from a local movement called ‘Sanity in Art’, who would protest so vigorously that sometimes she had to call the police.

Such reactions, paradoxically, were a sign of strength. Violent emotions are aroused by powerful things. The detestation many felt for modernism from Manet to Pollock was a good sign. Negligible art does not make you angry, but real originality may do so. Similarly, those nasty headlines that so alarmed Serota and friends in the early 90s were actually a prelude to the triumph of Britart. They were the British media’s way – rough perhaps, but real – of paying attention. So the absence of enmity to contemporary art today is just a little worrying – as Gilbert & George are quick to point out. The current situation could easily be reversed and living artists become unfamous yet again.

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