Considered opinion has it that a community of about 500 people who all know each other and can remember all of the individual names and histories, is ideal. This equates to the notion of the medieval village as a self-sustaining entity with common purpose. Individualism is tolerated only in so far as it benefits the community. The assumption of course is that everyone in the village believes the same things and is willing to suppress individual behaviour that might threaten the collective – something that has driven education for half a century while paradoxically encouraging individual growth. That figure of 500 might also apply to the average number of ‘friends’ on FB – another kind of village – or even the number of people on your mailing list.

In the art world the notion of the collective has risen and fallen away around the world in recent years with art prizes such as the Turner and the Sobey in Canada encouraging the idea and curators attempting to cash in with an event such as Documenta 16 which collapsed under its own unwieldy weight of individual contributing artists and unwanted racial side issues. The art world, or at least critical opinion, has been trying to group artists together since the Renaissance with only limited success. You could be a Classicist, a Romanticist, an Impressionist or a Cubist provided that you lived within spitting distance of the French Academy, the Café Guerbois or ensconced on a Bateau-Lavoir and showed signs of at least sharing ideas. Most modern movements were gone in a flash. It was also, and still is, a way of marketing art through convenient labels in that collectors and the general public find it easier to understand labels than the art they purport to describe. One thing is certain however, lumping artists together may be a successful marketing ploy but it does individual artists little good to be labelled at all in that being identified as a Cubist, for example, may well limit further artistic growth in the public eye and attract wholly unwelcome judgements when ideas and style change as they inevitably will. Individual growth is encouraged but only as far as it doesn’t threaten credibility or saleability.

There has however been a viable reason for promoting art collectivism in recent times because being part of an art collective is not just about aesthetics but can be motivated by concerns around social justice and social or political aims. A lone voice has a lot less impact than that of a crowd as we see repeatedly in a capital such as Paris when crowds of up to a million banner-wielding would be opinion-shifters have taken to the streets. The collective voice in the mainstream gallery sphere has played a similar role ­­in bringing into the light marginalised groups who were not only under-represented in national collections but actively avoided by the mainstream. I read today of a major US museum about to promote the work of women artists in an effort to forestall public criticism, so the collective voice does have impact.

The public perception of an artist though seems to remain as a romanticised solitary one:  being misunderstood [the solitary starving genius], the garret [a top floor or attic room, especially a small dismal one] and the eventual discovery in old age [ why did no one recognise his genius earlier?] The one thing that links all of these preconceptions is the opposite of the village or the collective. Real Art is created in isolation and is rooted in suffering. The ‘sufffering’ artist is not so much a cliché as a prerequisite it would seem. Unless as an artist you are suffering you cannot possibly create worthwhile art. There is even a time quotient attached to the idea. I met a patron at an art opening who asked me if I was a ‘full time’ artist. In his opinion, only those who suffered all day and every day were worthy of consideration. No doubt though he wouldn’t have recognised the art collective as artists at all no matter how many collective hours they put in.

And he isn’t alone in preferring individualism over collectivism. It is one thing to divide the Turner Prize by twenty or so but quite another to establish provenance in the marketplace – which is where Blockchain and NFTs come into the picture. What a pity this technology wasn’t around in Vermeer’s time in that it would have saved a lot of argument about ‘newly-discovered’ works from the master who produced so little and has been endlessly copied. A quick check of the blockchain would have solved everything for the patron, collector and museum.

So where does this leave artists if collectivism and movementism have come and gone and collectors and curators actively seek out only that to which they can put a label? – just where they have been for some time – working in garages, converted bedrooms and garden-shed studios in isolation [Atelier is a more pompous sounding term] displaying art in the corners of coffee shops or giving it away to relatives while they build a social profile which distinguishes them from the crowd rather than fitting in with the collectivism of the village idea.

The world is getting larger, or smaller, by the minute depending upon whether you can find a suitable peg on which to hang your art and enough people on your email list to invite to an opening or to whom you can send your latest blog entry. But then again, the internet village is no different than the medieval village. Selling art is a matter of who you know and unless the lord of the manor is on your mailing list even the collective voice of public opinion is of little value unless you are part of an art collective recognised by a Turner prize where you can have artist friends gather around and sympathise.