Once upon a time I had a conversation with a West Australian artist who enjoyed a great deal of success in his home state, nationwide, and had at least one book written about him. His name is seldom heard these days. His house, and a covered walkway to the house, acted as exhibition spaces and on the afternoon I was there, visitors and admirers came and went. His one word of advice to me was ‘you must exhibit’ after I had expressed doubts about exhibiting at all on the back of yet another exhibition where nothing had sold. He had a firm belief that a work of art had to be seen in the flesh to be appreciated and before anyone would buy it.  Step forward some twenty-five years and all of that has changed. Online galleries exist in profusion and people are more than happy to buy without ‘seeing’ while physical galleries complain about not being able to make a living. He is long dead and exhibiting is still fraught with frustrations – at least in galleries. Many have suggested that the gallery system has also been dead for a long time, or at least the version of it where an artist is tied financially to a gallery, and that whatever limited success is achieved through exhibiting in galleries does not benefit the artist so much as help to pay the bills of the gallery owner. All of that may well be true but where does that leave the artist? I guess it all depends upon what you expect.

I read this morning about Jason Boyd Kinsella, a Canadian who at 50, two years retired from advertising and now an artist, commands $500,000 per painting on the open market and his gallerist is ecstatic having valued his work at no more than $10,000. His portraits of geometric shapes hardly break new ground – every Cubist had already been there from Picasso, to Braque to Leger – and yet the article claims that he is ‘making up his own rules’ and is therefore collectible. It makes little or no sense to me. Given that people all over the world collect everything from beer cans to Dinky toys just for the sake of collecting, apart from rarity, just what distinguishes the good from the bad in art terms or what gallerists think will sell from the dross. Increasingly I have no idea.

If you go back to the early days of the Royal Academy in London, there was a line marked on the wall of the main gallery at eyelevel. To be ‘on the line’ was a sign of favour with Academy officials. They determined the winning formula. To have your precious watercolour up near the four-metre ceiling at the annual summer show guaranteed poverty for the forthcoming year. Buyers wouldn’t touch with a bargepole any artist who didn’t have this tick of approval. Some enthusiastic benders of rules found a simple solution. Paint big. If the painting stretched half the length of the gallery and reached from floor to ceiling, that solved the problem. You were certainly noticed and commented on even if no one bought the work or had a place to hang it. In visibility, there was hope, and artists are generally an optimistic lot.

Visibility these days comes from the likes of Instagram. There are any number of artists who can count their Instagram followers in the thousands including Kinsella who was contacted by the British Gallery in London a week after his first post on his new account and had a solo show a year later. Followers generally aren’t buyers. Followers are mute reminders of the need for self-gratification on the one hand and self-congratulation on the other and yet for some reason Kinsella ‘clicked’ with cashed-up millennials in Asia. But stylistically he shares similarities with auction ‘darlings’ like Javier Calleja, Huang Yuxing and Allison Zuckerman, ‘all of whom have found success with bright palettes and graphic imagery that translate well to a computer screen’.

So, that may be the clue. The computer screen and the ability of the computer graphics card to translate colours and enhance a work of art as an image should be the first port of call for artists and not the physical exhibition where ‘friends’ turn up to drink the free wine and spout platitudes about the art on the walls. The global definition of friend was eroded long ago by social media and is merely a statistic of social success these days. How to classify the online buyer though is a whole different matter. They are by definition strangers and regardless of their credentials as art connoisseurs are making that all-important connection by means other than the elbow handshake popularised during the pandemic.

When many global art fairs were cancelled during said pandemic, the market was forced to evolve digitally and the switch certainly caught on with people wanting to buy art without leaving their living rooms. In many ways the digitised image and the online gallery eroded the physical power of art to make a meaningful connection and yet not only is a site such as Bluethumb doing great business but the digital market in general is doing well with the much-lauded approximations of art, the NFT. It reminds me of a phenomenon I encountered two decades ago where a stage production filmed on the stage and destined for TV exposure was only any good if it fitted a television screen and this was in the days before wide screen and HD. Considering that said stage productions were performed and shot on very wide stages, it was the centered and unadventurous stagings that won out in the then 4:3 world of analogue.

So, what as a society of artists are we to make of all of this? The Kinsella phenomenon may be a one off and within a year his name will vanish from the best seller list as have so many others but there is a nagging feeling that once the treadmill starts moving, stopping it may be more than just pressing the off switch. Success breeds success. The compendium of notes artists from a decade ago that I was reading yesterday contained only one name that I recognised. Whatever the rest are doing is anyone’s guess – probably still producing art in garden sheds and hoping. Perhaps their lack of ongoing success [ or me reading the wrong books and magazines] is simply due to them no longer fitting the approved format. If I was to admit to increasing cynicism in my old age, I might also suggest that originality is hardly a qualification these days when derivative style is all the go. But then again, maybe I’m just getting old and still haven’t quite got the hang of viewing the world via a computer screen.