I recently spoke to a young artist, barely out of art school, who believed that her work could alter or shape people’s thinking about animals and the environment. Looking at her work consisting of animals in fields, I wondered how she could believe it when art history told me the exact opposite. Barring specifically political work such as WW1 posters and advertising I can see little that had any lasting effect in spite of inflated claims by a group such as the Futurists or the social movements that we saw in late 60s America. Probably the reason WW1 posters had any effect was a naivety or at least an unfamiliarity with the tools of persuasion. Today’s image-saturated market and a century of such tool use has leant not so much an understanding of how the tools work but a numbness of indifference.

Facebook and other social media giants have worked out the mechanics of information specificity and addiction and there is a belief that a major election can be swung in favour of a candidate using the same targeting methods. Essentially what they are doing is creating a specific society of similarly minded people and feeding their prejudices. But can this work with art? Yes and no. From Picasso’s portraits [both eyes on the same side of the head] to Pollock [a child could do that] to Andre [that’s not art it’s just a pile of bricks] prejudice has been fomented and exploited by the media to sell more newspapers. The sheer negativity of all of the stories reinforced the idea that in some way artists are all frauds and tricksters quietly laughing into their sleeves at the stupidity of ‘normal’ people who after all know good art when they see it.

Perhaps that’s part of the problem as well. The canons of beauty and relevance invoked in the past that exact imitations of the world are preferable to ones that only come close, is still a measuring stick. When I visited the Canberra showing of Impressionist works a while ago the very mobile audience who thought they were in a supermarket aisle, seemed disappointed that what they were seeing didn’t match what was produced at the local amateur art society where more superior gum trees, sunsets, fluffy animals and pictures of flowers could be found. None of the patrons were considering how their opinions about art might be modified or that some ideal state had been reached more than a century ago when bucolic resonance had peaked. Their reading of the catalogue summed up what they should know and disseminate as knowledge but altering opinions with a view to future communal behaviour – I don’t think so.

What artists seem to be doing best in the current climate is mining their own personal or cultural heritages. Beyond the doomsayers who look to climate change and resource depletion as indicators of the immediate future, there is little idea of what even the next hour holds. So, can there be someone we can call a precurser in today’s art world, someone who can lead a movement for change? I doubt it. Artists are locked into a state of parenthesis where the past [dead or simply forgotten] and the future [unknown] leaves them stranded. Propaganda though is a different matter. When posters supposedly led an entire generation to their deaths in the trenches of WW1 and a leader of a major western power is elected on the basis of his ability to lie and obfuscate, what chance has the solitary artist? Didactic art is long over. In the days before mass literacy, gossip and the pulpit spread the message and shaped public taste and social or religious conviction. Art played a part in medieval illumination, stained glass windows, Gothic cathedrals or even through political icons such as the great moralist paintings of Jacques-louis David but those times are long gone. Art and artists are seen as the fringe and not the mainstream despite the proliferation of artists on Facebook all claiming originality and a legitimate voice.