Given three hundred years from now the baby boomers, millennials and Gen Z will be long gone and the ultra-rich will be camped on Mars thumbing their noses at the have-nots. ‘Comedian’ may well be an apt description.
Are these the natural filters we have come to accept Novelty, boredom and death? Perhaps we of the 21st century can’t see the wood for the trees and will have to wait a century or a millennium to find out what has survived and what was worth preserving but who, or what circumstance, actually render that decision, if indeed it is even rational, remains a mystery.
The internet has democratised access to the visual arts but is the result an advance in culture or has it reduced culture to its lowest common denominator
The candidates for this year’s Turner prize all work with their political and social pasts, injustice, prejudice and colonialism as the reworking of history seemingly exists to teach us lessons. While art has always been utilised as propaganda, those lessons essentially fall on deaf ears.
A recent controversy over the work of Damien Hirst has brought the idea of conceptual and finished dates into question.
If there is a direct link between art and democracy it is that under any democratic society artists have the collective right to be poor, put upon, misunderstood, barely tolerated and to complain vociferously.