Civilisation has always been measured by its art. What we know of ancient Greece, ancient Mesopotamia, ancient Egypt, ancient Meso America comes from the monuments they left behind. All of the great civilisations rose and fell but for each there was an artistic highpoint even when we have no record of who the artists were or even if they saw themselves as artists as opposed to artisans or craftspeople. The so-called Dark Ages, that period from the collapse of the Roman Empire to the beginning of the Renaissance, has little to recommend it in artistic terms and is mainly remembered for a lack of social cohesion and endless violence.
While we still might not have the technology or expertise to build an Egyptian pyramid the fact is that we have more artists per square inch of earth than ever before in history and there are multiple institutions whose job it is to promote and preserve art for whatever reason. That fact alone should suggest that we are in the midst of not just an enlightened society but a great civilisation. But are we? The knowledge to assess art products doesn’t seem to improve in spite of the depth and breadth of access granted through the internet and social media. Art practice and art criticism is an optional extra in high schools and cultural standards are being dictated by generations with little knowledge. The social media proliferation of resin pourers, so-called abstract artists, portraitists copying photographs and the whole gamut of ‘spiritual’ painters blithely present their work for acclamation and surprise, surprise, the gratification flows in the form of comments such as ‘wonderful’ and ‘you’re so talented’. At best they are craftspeople but even that is overstating it.
But has it ever been any different? The production and consumption of Art before the 20th century was down to a small elite. The general populace neither took part nor cared. It took a later generation to recognise both the value of artistic output and the ideas it explored and there are plenty of examples of artists ignored in their time and unrecognised until some erstwhile scholar could look back from the distant future. We might never have known of a JS Bach in that he came to define a specific period, not only in history but in terms of the expression of universal ideas through music but for his promotion two hundred years after his death. And then there was Van Gogh quietly painting in the fields around Arles. He might have been gratified by the acclamation but he certainly wouldn’t have been expecting it.
There is a reason I bring all of this up. This is the era of instant fame, self-congratulation, built-in obsolescence and the belief that anyone can be an artist regardless of training, skill or ideas. Now don’t get me wrong. There is nothing wrong with people wanting to create and I would be the first to encourage it but the necessary filters to judge what is worth keeping and what is not have been farmed out to the general populace via Facebook on the one hand and curators/competition judges/public collectors on the other without ever stating what standards are being applied.
Against this ever-increasing noise though there was a quiet undercurrent. Artists such as John Virtue, Frank Bowling, Sean Scully, Alan Charlton and the late Patrick Heron among others, all came out of the 60s melting pot of London art schools and worked the next five decades without attracting the attention of the general public in the way that the Saatchi Sensationalists did. Theirs was an art of contemplation. While the likes of a Damian Hirst gets continually reproduced, a Gerhard Richter attracts extortionate prices for his work and and an Ai Wei Wei finds ways of getting himself into the headlines, is it these artists who will stand the test of time or simply become footnotes to history rather than being recognised as a vanguard to a contemporary version of civilisation? The 80s is forever condemned to being defined by the gaudy concoctions of Jeff Koons and the 90s by a shark in formaldehyde and the soulless reconstructed planes of Keiffer. Even now some two decades later, it seems as though art and artists were raking over the corpse of civilisation rather than defining it.