on Fine Art

from a question put to the institute of international visual arts : question time - Feb 2002

a comforting - because it seems so traditionally positioned - polemic of year 2000 - Demolish Serious Culture!!! asks

was ist radikal-demokratische Kultur - und wem dient sie?

and states that it is better to get along without contemporary art on the grounds that

...the economic and ideological control of institutions turns contemporary art into a feeble reptile bloated with gas - a depoliticized greedy lying half-educated but horribly power-hungry ambitious elitism dealing with neo-liberal politicians and financial bigwigs - dealing in images objects see-through underwear plastic puppets and...tolerance projects for a multicultural communications market

might the panel - consisting as it must do of representatives of that appetitive and self-regarding caste rightly deplored by authors of polemics everywhere - consider the following points of view - and do they think that these points have any value within the context of the discussion?

culture - particularly as represented by that component of the visual arts traditionally and probably redundantly referred to as fine art is now so trivialized as to be no more engaging of mind or heart than a supermarket clubcard voucher - becoming either

(a) a visual joke of the kind that is somehow representative of an adolescent rebellion of the suburban third bedroom kind carried on into middle age and beyond - often rather well produced - a fact which tends to emphasise its triviality

or

(b) has been subjected to a contextualization process - monitored by essentially middle class arts organizations holding community values dear - to become public art - the provision of which has so missed its way as to become a fortunately not everyday saga of pitiful errors of judgement - just as the horse designed by a committee became something other than a horse - redolent of awful sentiment - of northern angels - or concrete inside out books - like some Lewis Carroll conceit - mawkishly memorializing the Holocaust

or even

(c) annexed by entitled specialists - something of a moveable snack - for who in this country now remembers our once politically engaged Atkinsons? I am referring really to those who parlay an apparent entitlement bestowed by - say - race or class - so that a European of Asian ethnicity can propose that she comments first as an Asian woman or an artist who lives an otherwise blameless bourgeois life teaching in higher education can claim to work from the perspective of the working classes on the grounds that her great grandmother was a striking match girl

might the panel also consider that cultural and media education - which appears to have now subsumed a once very flawed - more or less craft-based - art and design education - has formalized and modularized every innovative move made in the arts into an academic process which celebrates the accretion of modification within a matrix of shared assumption - and may no longer be education within any known sense of the term? consider the proliferation of new media courses which adopt the products of a poorly informed software industry - all special FX and simulation McNarratives - to offer a form of intensive farming - a foot in mouth exercise if ever there was one

finally might the panel also consider the notion that what cultural significance may be taking place occurs elsewhere - all too easily missed by the purblind? that rather as the game of cricket is known by some to be one whose intricacy and subtlety is comprehensible only to the Indian mind - and only accidentally invented by the British - so the Victorian civil service - and its Borges-ian descendents - boards and councils and working parties...both hierarchical and rhizomatic - may be the only cultural artefact to survive into an age of Monsanto modified consumerism and a state of semi-permanent childishness set in a shiny sea of wishy-washy contextuality

for myself I remain convinced that despite ex nihilo nihil fit the work of art that refers to its articulation first - to the commonality of the art of work - is to the eructative expression of the self as is the flower to the weed

Jeff Instone
Artist without Portfolio Office of Special Plans unRest( )