British Art Now
I have tried before on this blog to address the thorny question of 'what is art?', something which often comes to mind when visiting the RA Summer Show and eavesdropping on other visitors. I have been thinking about it afresh, however, as in the last week I have visited both the new Dairy arts centre in Bloomsbury and the New Order exhibition at the Saatchi gallery that showcases the crop of what Saatchi considers the next YBAs.
There has been a lot of hype in the press about both exhibitions. Dairy is a space established to showcase art owned by Frank Cohen and Nicolai Frahm, who have been building their collections over years but only just resolved to show them. They have been mooted as the new alternative to Saatchi, with collections of similar breadth and cutting edge characteristics. The space in Bloomsbury is certainly striking, keeping a rugged, industrial feel covered in white paint. But I felt that with the opening work by John M Armleder it felt a bit like a well-funded degree show. Lots of colour and 'edgy' ideas displayed against walls with added pattern to create a non-white-cube feel. It didn't really do it for me.
The Saatchi gallery is showing 17 young artists as the 'new order' in British contemporary art, of whom I had only previously heard of James Capper who has recently had a show at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Some of the works were striking, Sara Barker's large yet delicate aluminium geometrical structures have the feel of both Giacometti and Ben Nicholson, and Rafal Zawistowski 'Twelve Popes' was surprisingly arresting, showing twelve individual portraits of popes in bright, thick, abstract oil, glowing against a pale halo and a sheer background. Again the rest left me pretty cold.
Both shows have been thrown into relief however, by a seminar that I attended in Cambridge on Wednesday, where Alana Jelinek, an artist and post-doc at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, talked about the disciplinary clash between artists and museums. She argued that art as a discipline has its own historical conventions and systems against which 'good' work is measured, with which both museums and artists themselves need to engage. This, she suggested, will help rebalance the power of the art market. The New Order show makes me feel uncomfortable because with it Saatchi is giving these artists a new power in the market based on what he thinks is 'good' 'art.'
So is 'art' by definition 'good'? If it is one is it necessarily the other? I still don't know. But I do know that you recognise art when you see it. Downstairs at the Saatchi Gallery they have Richard Wilson's 20:50 on show again, a simple and unsettling installation which fills a room with the still, reflective surface of a mass of sump oil. It is extraordinary and mesmerising, and makes you want to stand quietly, drinking in the effect. That, I think, is what art is.