It all seems a bit like desperation ….or death throes. An article this week expounded new ways of promoting art – augmented reality, machine learning, interactive holography, non-fungible tokens, and digital self-determination with the prediction that next nine years will hold the potential to make these advances commonplace. No doubt the innovators will expect the artists, assuming that there will still be artists, to fall into line. Predictions about the future of art are legion from the death of painting to the recently reported sale of a blank canvas for an extortionate sum. If it isn’t curators applying their own peculiar logic, it is critics applying theirs, but in this case, the world of IT once again looking to decide the future of art.
One of the peculiarities of artists is their stubbornness. I have been reading an excellent biography of Francis Bacon. When the American abstract painters landed on British shores in the 1950s with a Pollock exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London and a touring exhibition that did the rounds of Europe, the death of figurative painting was loudly pronounced but Bacon continued on [ he hated abstraction by the way] regardless. I doubt he would have wanted anything to do with the current art market either or have understood that computers and art could share the same space.
The idea of experiencing art through social media suggests more than innovation, more than a new direction. Since the last great idea [I hesitate at calling anything since the 70s a movement] it has all been appropriation, sampling and quotation. A time of consolidation perhaps, a time of nostalgia perhaps, an era bereft of artistic direction, probably. We can only hope that this is the beginning of the end but somehow I doubt it. 25-year-old Art Historian and TikTok sensation Mary McGillivray attracts millions of views worldwide through her social media channel @_theiconoclass, McGillivray in conjunction with Coffs Harbour Regional Gallery. has resented Still Sundays, a series of ten, 1-minute videos, where she unpacks still life art in the gallery’s current exhibition. All very admirable. But just who is she talking to? Teenagers? The one-minute generation who are bored with anything longer? In the last week I have been to three gallery openings and barring a screaming child up long past its bedtime and a couple of artists in their 20s, there was almost no one under the age of 50 in attendance. Perhaps I live in the wrong part of the world and rural NSW is the cross-generational cultural hub of Australia where everyone participates in the ARTS. I think that the point is that artistic titillation doesn’t naturally lead to artistic appreciation on any other than a superficial level.
McGillvray said, ‘Whether you like the artwork or not, it provokes a reaction and opens up a dialogue, and that’s what and art does.’ A recent episode exploring Jacob Canet-Gibson’s work Seven Eight Two received 875K+ views alone. Gallery Curator Chloe Waters added ‘In the gallery, you may have walked past this seemingly simple work, yet it is the one that has sparked an enormous response online’.
There is dialogue and there is dialogue. Meming a ‘fact’ from last night’s news or the most recent social media post is not understanding on any other than a gossip level. A McGillvray quip or quirky summation may well live in the memory for at least five seconds and be infinitely repeatable but the abysmal ignorance of Art in general is akin to that surrounding Covid where soundbites are taken more seriously than sound information. At one of the afforesaid openings I was presented with ‘statistical facts’ by a gallery-goer as to why he was not going to be inoculated [of the several billion people inoculated, several had died] and why presumably he wasn’t having a dialogue with me about the art on the walls. I have yet to work out why he was there at all unless it was to find a captive audience for his biased views.
All of these attempts to open up art to a wider public are to be applauded but whether any of it will make a difference is debatable. Viewing art as a holograph or labelling it as an NFT is little more than novelty. Cynically selling [and buying] a blank canvas is just one more example of bananas taped to wall and an invisible sculpture. I can easily place all of them in the same basket as chimpanzees and elephants painting. It will make the odd headline but in the end be just one more attempt to subvert the course of art, if it can be said to have a course outside of manufactured movements and the pushing of racial and gender parameters. Other than Damian Hurst claiming close affiliation to NFTs, most artists struggle to deal with a social media profile at all let alone headline-stealing novelty. The double-edged sword of media popularity [check your bounce rate at least every day] or even being interviewed by all and sundry demanding answers to the questions the public demands to know about, are all distractions. Bacon was famously distracted by seedy night life and the casinos of Monte Carlo when he wasn’t trying to drink the pub dry. Imagine how he would have coped with dealers using holographs and augmented reality to sell his work let alone widespread interest in his personal life beyond a supportive group of art lovers.
As far as I am concerned, put all the nonsense aside and let artists do what they do. Having said that though, I now have to attend to my weekly Instagram update and put out a tweet just in case my adoring public [all twenty-six of them – should I be worried?] think that I am failing in my duty to the 21st century and the next nine years.