Trivialisation may well become the term that best describes life in 2022. Talent is optional. Actual work is unnecessary. This is more than ever, the lottery generation – the right to something for nothing. Those with nothing to say, are saying it anyway.

What set me thinking about this question was actually an ad for something called a Saxmonica [the Ultimate Music Instrument].  The claim of the NZ developers was that it took only a few hours to learn, that no musical ability was required and as per the title MUSIC would be made. As testament there were apparently already 20,000 players worldwide. It struck me as symptomatic of a belief in the ease with which music can be mastered – or at least the Saxmonica- along with just about anything else, including art. There is nothing new about such claims and while there are undoubtedly people who have gone on to be artists and musicians of note, surely there is no substitute for the hours of practise required to master an instrument and make music let alone have something to say as an artist. Social media would have us believe otherwise and while it is culturally gratifying that so many are indulging in the arts and removing the elitist tag, there is a delusion about all of this that is increasingly uncomfortable.

On a par with learning to use the Saxmonica are the plethora of social media sites offering lessons in Abstract painting [with guaranteed success]. Learn to paint like Pollock, or de Kooning, or Picasso or Hoffman in six easy lessons and take on the art world. Perhaps it is easy when all of the groundwork has been done for you. How many times have I heard someone stand in front of a painting and say ‘I could have done that’ with a smug look on his or her face [more often his than hers]. My response, not always said out loud, is ‘well, why didn’t you?’ The reply always goes along the lines of ‘well, look at it’. There is a suggestion that what he or she is looking at is not art in the first place, or at least a degraded version of art, and that secondly [bad] art is easy. I have no doubt that bad art is easy as is imitation. A recent FB artist put up a series of works with the disclaimer that they weren’t Pollock rip-offs when they obviously bore a striking resemblance to the drip and splash school that had proliferated since the 1950s. The artist had probably taken a course in abstract painting in six easy lessons and expected acclamation for the effort. Perhaps more alarming was the number of likes as critic after critic proclaimed genius, natural ability and saleability.

While the idea of originality is as much a moot point as when Rosalynd Krauss wrote about the myth of the originality of the avant-garde half a century ago, imitation or in-the-style-of has dogged art for a century or longer. I recently discovered that in 1832 the French government provided the funds for 152 masterworks to be copied and housed in a museum. No doubt the original artists were well dead by that time so couldn’t object and the imitators were paid for their copies at the going rate, imitation being the sincerest form of flattery.

Perhaps my objections to the ‘ease’ are founded on a lifetime of artistic ‘struggle’ as is the supposed lot of the artist. Even those artists who never went to art school or had any training eventually learned that there was a basis in art to be learned and a Francis Bacon may well have benefited from six easy lessons via Tik Tok but there is more to art and music than just learning scales or chopsticks. As a TV actor once said as part of an episode ‘ I can play all the notes but I can’t make music’. The promise of mastering abstract painting in six easy lessons doesn’t guarantee that the result will be anything other than flashy accidents. So many artists putting up their work for comment and asking for help haven’t understood much beyond the superficial resemblance they have created and claims that their ‘soul’, ‘inner being’ or ‘voice’ has risen to the surface could well be true in their eyes and those critics of the same ilk. I am always amused by critical feedback that advises for instance that a bit more pink is needed or that a shape needs more curves without any more than highly personalised intuition to back it up. The advice is probably valid but it is at least one step beyond the promise of learning abstract art in six easy lessons to understand why it is valid. That step takes a lifetime.

The people who take such courses expect to get their money’s worth but if they expect to become more than just imitators then the process of actually looking at the world needs to underpin everything. No matter how you define abstraction [verb or noun], and a lot of amateur artists have no idea what they are talking about, every example of Abstract art began from observation. Alan Charlton took his childhood in Sheffield with its greyness and rectilinear factories as his starting point. His simplified grey blocks look very imitable and no doubt someone could offer a Tik Tok course to do just that. The work of colour field artist Ellsworth Kelly began in Metropolitan Paris where he was much taken by the shapes of chimneys and refracted colour in odd corners of his world. The fact that such observations led to shaped canvases of one colour was the result of a process of abstraction to produce Abstract art. Frankenthaler and Hartigan, for all of being labelled as pure abstract artists looked to memories of landscape for their most memorable paintings. And so on. Without observation upon which to base Art, it is nothing more than densely opaque therapy. The fact that twenty people ‘like’ it says as much about the artist as the audience – trivialisation masquerading as art criticism.

And right…..anyone could do it.