Artistically speaking, there is no doubt that world looks different now than it did even twenty years ago. This has nothing to do with external stimuli such as a pandemic or global warming but has everything to do with the role that artists have to assume and the way that art is perceived. Once upon a time, artists knew their place in the world. There were rules of production both in a technical sense and a symbolic one. From the Renaissance to Davide and Ingres, the framework of inspirational subject matter of either a religious or secular nature grounded art and artists in a perceived need of society. Art was a mirror to a society in need of direction. At other times art became a tool of the state in a very direct sense. The social realism of the Soviet and Nazi eras was an attempt to amplify a particular way of looking at the world through control of emotion and subject matter. It was essentially conservative and allowed little or no development or change in style. Cartesian logic didn’t come into it. The lived experience was dictated and everyone was expected to have the same lived experience in the same way. Of course, there was nothing new about this. Medieval religious power derived from exactly the same thing.

The 20^th century saw major shift away from this sort of thinking. If you wanted to indoctrinate entire populations there was a more effective way – television. The power of television in its early days was that the same message could be broadcast to a lot of people simultaneously. With an example of the Olympics reaching an audience of billions by the 80s [ given differing time zones] the messages of cooperation, fair competition and ethical behaviour promoted a vision of a better world. Individual countries saw the possibilities of cultural dissemination and identity, particularly where television was introduced as the first mass medium. The influence of America in this regard has been well documented with American English, social rites and the nature of the family broadcast around the world to sponge-like teenagers.

But television is not visual art. For a start the audience is much smaller and more selective. Art is and was seen as a purveyor of a different kind of culture, one practiced and collected by an elite. While specific eras produced art that linked with attitudes and events, boundaries of country and specific cultures rapidly dissolved. There are now abstract painters in every corner of the globe for instance and the work looks similar no matter where it comes from. Two recent examples that I have been looking at are the work of Portuguese South African Maico Camillo and German artist Ina Gerkin. Each delves into their own private world of phenomology for subject matter and expresses it in abstract terms.

Before the end of the 19^th century there was an underlying message of an ethical and moral nature in painting and sculpture. Art itself played a role. Turner looked for God in Nature; Constable sought an imagined rural idyll; the Impressionists, disparate as they were, still looked for beauty in the landscape and light. The modern era, however, has seen little of value in religious doctrine as a subject and lecturing the audience about their indifference to moral or ethical behaviour has become a redundant activity taken up willingly by advertising and totally undermined by the film industry. The belief that art can still have a political role remains for some in the form of those seeking to reverse climate change/promote equality/provide a spiritual basis for life. Those that seek to shape the discussion through curated exhibitions are further evidence although the selection of a theme for an exhibition or a competition has more to do with having a coherent visual display than a deeper meaning.

The move towards individual fulfillment in the late 19^th century and away from institutionalised art spawned everything from the Impressionists to the abstractionists with a wide variety of divergencies into eras and approaches where even the artist became irrelevant [except maybe as fodder for the media] or was simply removed from the equation thanks to an emphasis on industrial processes. Ironically, the removing of the identity of the artist in works by someone like Judd spawned a whole industry of critics who sought to resurrect that identity in order to understand the work. Inevitably, the most strident of independent voices all succumbed to absorption into an ever-widening pantheon of modernity where a Salon De Refusees mentality became mainstream The questions now though are what role does contemporary art play and where does the contemporary artist fit into the world?

The objective of the artist for much of the 20^th century was to demonstrate a worldview [Heidegger], the root of which was the truth of their own gathered or intuitive knowledge. The language through which they chose to do this varied enormously. The perceptual language of the visual artist is and was understood as the interface between the artist’s subjective experience and a universal, collective truth. However, while this conceptual development and language liberated artists to engage in the widest range of media, technologies and disciplines, it has also had the opposite effect of rendering both the artists’  methodologies and the artist as redundant.

Art is not simply a matter of creating some novel effect with paint or any other technology regardless of an attitude in the wider world beyond the studio that everyone is an artist and whatever they produce is art. Art is a profound conceptual experience which derives from an understanding of a specific visual language. No matter which medium or technology the artist chooses to explore, art remains a conceptual experience and the concept arises in direct relation to the work itself.

In the recently published book about Gerkin, the attempts to add labels to her work around the theme of landscape, demonstrates not just the discomfort with a heart-on-the-sleeve personal worldview on the part of the artist but a need to rationalise art for commercial relatability. Abstraction is seen as safe when it resembles landscape [how many attempts were there to find cornfields in the work of Pollock?]. Humanity and its problems are far distant. Art as a perceived need of society? There is probably now no perceived collective rationale.

What actually constitutes contemporary art in the 21^st century is defined by two closely-related ideas. On the one hand there is politically-determined opportunity as seen through biennales and curated exhibitions and on the other, the individual artist’s ability to make a living and sustain their product and practice within the marketplace. The artificiality of the curated exhibition does provide a platform, but the limits placed by galleries and online marketplaces in terms of ethos, leaves much to be desired. You could also say that public arts opportunities are politically motivated to in some way redress the imbalance within and between social spheres and the need for spectacle to replace what was once addressed through faith and shared cultural values. In other ways the state and the biennale are looking to reclaim the hearts and minds of the masses who are increasingly swept up in the superficiality of social media.

Artist Tacita Dean said recently that ‘the biggest problem for artists is balancing a need for the market with a detachment from it. The demise of public funding and the overbearing existence of large, commerce-oriented galleries that even museums rely on these days, has distorted the capacity of artists to work freely. We are increasingly mollified by commercial obedience. There needs to be plurality again: other ways, more confusion, fewer defined routes.’

The figure of the artist has also been steadily eroded. Eccentricities of behaviour and mental challenges which were used to categorise artists, no longer have any impact in a world devoted to the doings of celebrities whose only claim to recognition is that they are recognisable. The figure of the artist once carried weight but there is a growing trend to see the artist as less relevant than discussion, debate and circulation of critical ideas in the broader community. Although the artist has been freed of the burden of providing a role model for the communication of culture [if we can even determine what that is] in the collapse of twentieth century conceptions, the value of artists and artistic production rules have all but been abandoned. Artists can do whatever they want, say whatever they want, use any material or approach but unless their existence is sanctioned by a commercial enterprise or governmental institution doling out grants, they remain anonymous. They are accountable only to themselves.

The artist has been liberated from discussions of medium, genre and style, but now faces the question of public accountability of a different kind. When it was Davide, the questions of accountability came from a narrow, art-educated group attached to the Academy who determined acceptability but today, everyone is a critic via the homogenising effect of the shopping trolley. The questions facing the artist are not about what they can do, much less how well they can do it, but rather the extent to which their work can appeal to the broader buying community? The role of contemporary art should be Vision because without vision, as a society, we become lost in the mundanity of the everyday. The role of art is to guide us through that everyday

So where to the artist? There are more art practitioners today than ever before with a burgeoning online market set up to sell their works, but the designation ‘artist’ is of ultimately no more value than yesterday’s newspaper, now rebadged as fish wrapping. The inbuilt obsolescence of the daily newspaper as either a source of news or a moral guide is on a par with the photograph of your most recent meal on Instagram or a selfie and holds about as much value artistically. Art is disposable and artists are two a penny. The idea of Vision hardly comes into it. In media terms, artists generally rate no mention unless it is a to present a note of controversy in promoting yet another art prize as sensation or as an institution congratulating itself. I have to admit that I don’t know what the answer is as I live in hope of creating something that may pay the bills but that also assumes a life beyond the marketplace.