MILAN KUNDERA - The painters Brutal Gesture

1

When Michel Archimbaud was planning this collection of Francis Bacon’s portraits and self-portraits, he asked me to write the book’s introduction. He assured me that the invitation was Bacon’s own wish. He reminded me of a short piece of mine, published long ago in the periodical L’Arc, a piece he said the painter had considered one of the few in which he could recognize himself. I will not deny my emotion at this message arriving, after years, from an artist I had never met and loved so much.

That piece in L’Arc (which later inspired a section of my Book of Laughter and Forgetting), discussing the triptych of the portraits of Henrietta Moraes, was written in about 1977, in the very first period after my emigration, obsessed as I was then by recollections of the country which I had just left and which still remained in my memory as the land of interrogations and surveillance. Here it is:

2

It was 1972. I met with a girl in a Prague suburb, in a borrowed apartment. Two days earlier; she had been interrogated by the police about me for an entire day. Now she wanted to meet with me secretly (she feared that she was constantly being followed) to tell me what questions they had asked her and how she had answered them. If they were to interrogate me, my answers should be the same as hers.

She was a very young girl who had as yet little experience of the world. The interrogation had disturbed her, and, after three days, the fear was still upsetting her bowels. She was very pale and during our conversation she kept leaving the room to go to the toilet-so that our whole encounter was accompanied by the noise of the water refilling the tank.I had known her for a long time. She was intelligent, spirited, she had fine emotional control, and was always so impeccably dressed that her outfit, just like her behavior, allowed not a hint of nakedness. And now, suddenly, fear like a great knife had laid her open. She was gaping wide before me like the split carcass of a heifer hanging from a meat hook.

The noise of the water refilling the toilet tank practically never let up, and I suddenly had the urge to rape her. I know what I’m saying: rape her, not make love to her. I didn’t want tenderness from her. I wanted to bring my hand down brutally on her face and in one swift instant take her completely, with all her unbearably arousing contradictions: with her impeccable outfit along with her rebellious guts, her good sense along with her fear, her pride along with her misery. I sensed that all those contradictions harbored her essence: that treasure, that nugget of gold, that diamond hidden in the depths. I wanted to posses her, in one swift moment, with her shit along with her ineffable soul.

But I saw those two eyes staring at me, filled with torment (two tormented eyes in a sensible face) and the more tormented those eyes, the more my desire turned absurd, stupid, scandalous, incomprehensible and impossible to carry out.

Uncalled-for and unconscionable, that desire was nonetheless real. I cannot disavow it- and when I look atFrancis Bacon’s portrait- triptych, it’s as if I recall it. The painter’s gaze comes down on the face like a brutal hand trying to size hold of her essence, of that diamond hidden in the depths. Of course we are not certain that the depths really do harbor something-but whatever it may be, we each of us have in us that brutal gesture, that hand movement that roughs up another person’s face in the hop of finding, in it and behind it, a thing that is hidden there.

3

The best commentaries on Bacon’s work are by Bacon himself in two series of interviews: with David Sylvester between 1962 and published in the later year, and with Archimbaud between October 1991 and April 1992. In both he speaks admiringly of Picasso, especially of the 1926-1932 period, the only one to which he feels truly close; he saw’ an area there… which in a way has been unexplored, of organic from that relates to the human image but is a complete distortion of it’. With this very precise remark, he defines the realm whose exploration is actually his alone.

Aside from that short period Bacon mentions, one could say that Picasso’s light gesturetransforms human body motifs into two-dimensional and autonomous pictorial reality. With Bacon we are in another world: there, playful Picassian(or Matissian) euphoria is replaced by an amazement (if not a shock) at what we are, what we are materially, physically. Impelled by that amazement, the painter’s hand (to use the words of my old piece) comes down with a ‘brutal gesture’ on a body, on a face, ‘in the hope of finding, in it and behind it, a thing that is hidden there’.

But what is hidden there? It’s self? Every portrait ever painted seeks to uncover the subject’s self. But Bacon lived in a time when the self inevitably eludes detection. Indeed, our most common personal experience teaches us (especially if the life behind us is very long) that faces are lamentably alike (the insane demographic avalanche further enhancing that sense), that they are easy to confuse, that they only differ one from the next by some very tiny, barely perceptible detail, which mathematically often represents only a few millimeters’ difference in the various proportions. Add to that our historical experience, which teaches us that men mimic one another, that their attitudes are statistically calculable, their opinions manipulability, and that man is therefore less an individual than an element of a mass.

This is the moment of uncertainty when the rapist hand of the painter comes down with a ‘brutal gesture’ on his subject’s faces in order to find, somewhere in the depths, their buried self. What is new in that Baconian quest is, first (to use his expression), the ‘organic’ nature of those forms in ‘a complete distortion’. Which means that the forms in his paintings are meant to resemble living beings, to recall their bodily existence, their flesh, and thus always to retain their three-dimensional nature. The second innovation is the principle of variations. Edmund Husserl explained the importance of variations for searching out the essence of a phenomenon. I will say it in my simpler way; variations differ one from the other, but yet retain some thing common to them all; the thing they have in common is ‘that treasure, that nugget of gold, that hidden diamond’, namely, the sought-for essence of a theme or, in Bacon’s case, the self of a face.

Looking at Bacon’s portraits, am amazed that, despite their ‘distortion’, they all look like their subject. But how can an image look like a subject of which it is consciously, programmatically, a distortion? And yet it does look like the subject ; photos of the persons portrayed bear that out; and even if I did not know those photos, it is clear that in all the triptychs, the various deformations of the face resemble one another, so that one recognizes in them some one and same person. However ‘distorted’, these portraits are faithful. That is what I find miraculous.

4

I could put it differently: Bacon’s portraits are the interrogation on the limits of the self. Up to what degree of distortion does an individual still remain himself? To what degree of distortion does a beloved being still remain a beloved being? For how long does a cherished face growing remote through illness, through madness, through hatred, through death still remain recognizable? Where lines the border beyond which a self ceases to be a self?

5

For a long time, Bacon and Beckett made up a couple in my imaginary gallery of modern art. The I read the Archimbaud interview: ‘I’ve always been amazed by this pairing og Beckett and me’, Bacon said. Then, farther on, ‘…I’ve always felt that Shakespeare expressed much better and more precisely and more powerfully what Beckett’s and Joyce were trying to say…’. And again ‘I wonder is Beckett’s ideas about his art haven’t wound up killing off his creation. There is something at once too systematic and too intelligent in him, that may be what’s always bothered me’. And finally : ‘In painting, we always live in too much that is habit, we never eliminate enough, but in Beckett I have often had the sense that as a result of seeking to eliminate, nothing was left anymore , and nothingness finally sounded hollow…’.

When one artist talks about another one, he is always talking (indirectly, in a roundabout way) of himself, and that is what’s valuable in his judgment. In talking about Beckett, what is Bacon telling us about himself?

That he is refusing to be categorized. That he wants to protect his work against clichés.

Next: that he is resisting the dogma tics of modernism who have erected a barrier between tradition and modern art as if, in the history of art, the later represented an isolated period with its own incomparable values, with its completely autonomous criteria. Whereas Bacon looks through the history of art inn its entirety; the 20th century does not cancel our debts to Shakespeare.

And further: he is refusing to express his ideas on art in too systematic a fashion, fearing to stifle his creative unconscious; fearing also to allow his art to be turned into a kind of simplistic message. He knows that the danger is all the greater because, in our half of the century, art is clogged with a noisy, opaque logorrhea of theory that prevents a work from coming into direct, media- free contact with its viewer (its reader, its listener).

Wherever he can, Bacon there fore blurs his tracks to throw off interpreters who try to reduce his works to an over-facile programme: he bridles using the work ‘horror’ with regard to his art; he stresses the role of chance in his painting(chance turning up in the course of the work-an accidental spot of paint that abruptly changes the very subject of the picture); he insists on the word ‘play’ when everyone is making much of the seriousness of his paintings. People want to talk his despair? Very well, but, he specifies immediately, in this case it is a joyous despair.

6

From the reflection on Beckett quoted, I pullout his remarks: ‘In painting, we always leave in too much that is habit, we never eliminate enough…’ . Too much that is habit, which is to say: everything in painting that is not the painter’s own discovery, his fresh contribution, his originality; everything that is inherited, routine, fill up, elaboration considered to be technical necessity. That describes, for example, in the sonata form(of even the greatest-Mozart, Beethoven) all the (often very conventional) transitions from one theme to another. Almost all great modern artists mean to do away with ‘pillar’, do away with what ever comes from habit, from technical routine, whatever keeps them from getting directly and exclusively at the essential(the essential: the thing the artist himself, and only he, is able to say).

So it is with Bacon: the backgrounds of his paintings are hyper-simple, flat- color; but: in the foreground, the bodies are treated with the richness of colors and forms that is all the denser. Now, that (Shakespearean) richness is what matters to him. For without that richness (richness contrasting with the flat –color background), the beauty would be ascetic, as if ‘put on a diet’, as if diminished, and for bacon the issue always and above all its beauty, the explosion of beauty, because even if the word seems now a days to be hackneyed, out of date, it is what links him to Shakespeare.

And it is by he is irritated by the word ‘horror’ that is persistently applied to his painting. Tolstoy said to Leonid Andreyev and of his tales of terror: ‘He is trying to frighten me, but I’m not scared’. Now a days the too many paintings trying to frighten us, and they annoy us instead. Terror is not an aesthetic sensation, and the horror found in Tolstoy’s novels is never there to frighten us; the harrowing scene in which they operate on the mortally wounded Andrei Bolkonsky without anesthesia is not lacking in beauty; as no scene in Shakespeare lacks it; as no picture by Bacon lacks it. Butchers’ shops are horrible, but speaking of them, Bacon says, ‘One has got to remember as a painter that there is this great beauty of the color of meat’.

7

Why it is that, despite al Bacon’s reservations, I continue to see him as akin to Beckett?

Both of them are located at just about the same place in the respective histories of their art. That is, in the very last period of dramatic art, in the very last period of the history of painting. For Bacon is one of the last painters whose language is still oil and brush. And Beckett still wrote for the theatre that was based on the author’s text. After him, the theatre still exists, true, perhaps it is even evolving; but it is no longer the play writes’ texts that inspire, renew, and guarantee that evolution.

In the history of modern art, Bacon and Beckett are not the ones opening the way; they close it again. When Archimbaud asks Bacon which contemporary are important to him, he says: ‘After Picasso I do not know. There is Pop-art show at the Royal academy right now…when you see all those paintings together, you do not see anything. To me there is nothing in it, it’s empty, completely empty’. And Warhol?’…to me , he’s not important’. And abstract art? Oh know, he does not like it.

‘After Picasso, I do not know’. He talks like an orphan. And he is one. He is one even in the very concrete sense of the life he lived: the people who opened the way where surrendered by colleagues, by commentators, by worshipers, by sympathizers, by fellow travelers, by an entire gang. But bacon is alone. As Beckett is. In one of the Sylvester interviews: ‘I think it would be more exciting to be one of a number of artists working together…I think it would be terribly nice to have some one to talk to. Today there is absolutely none to talk to’.

Because their modernism, the modernism that closes the way again, no longer matches the ‘modernity’ around them, modernity of fashions propelled by the marketing of art. (Sylvester: ‘If abstract painting is no more than patter-making, how do you explain the fact that there are people like myself who have the same sort of visceral response to them at times as they have to figurative works?’. Bacon: ‘Fashion’. Being modern at the moment when the greater modernism is closing the way is an entirely different thing from being modern in Picasso’s time. Bacon is isolated (‘There is absolutely none to talk to’); isolated from both the past and future.

8

Like Bacon, Beckett had no illusions about the future either of the world or of art. And that moment in the last days of illusions, both men show the same immensely interesting and significant reaction: wars, revolutions and their set backs, massacres, imposture w call democracy-all these subjects are absent from their works. In this Rhinoceros, Ionesco is still interested in the great political questions. Nothing like that in Beckett. Picasso paints Massacre in Korea. Inconceivable subjects for Bacon. Living through the end of a civilization (as Beckett and bacon were or thought they were), the ultimate brutal confrontation is not with a society , with a state, with a politics, but with the physiological materiality of man. That is why even the great subject of the Crucifixion, which used to concentrate within itself the whole ethics, the whole religion, indeed the whole history of the West, becomes in Bacon’s hands a simple physiological scandal. ‘I’ve always being very moved by pictures about slaughterhouses and meat, and to me they belong very much to the whole thing of the crucifixion. There’ve been extra ordinary photographs which have been done of animals just being taken up before they were slaughtered; and this smell of death…’.

To link Jesus nailed to the Cross with slaughter houses and animals’ fear might seem sacrilegious. But bacon is a non-behavior, and the notion of sacrilege has no place in his way of thinking; according to him, ‘Man now realize that he is an accident, that he is a completely fertile being, that he has to play out the game without reason’. Seen from the angle, Jesus is that accident who, without reason, played out the game. The Cross: the game played to the end.

No, not sacrilege; rather a clear-sighted, sorrowing, thoughtful gaze that tries to penetrate into the essential. And what essential thing is revealed when all the social dreams have evaporated and man sees’ Religious possibilities. Completely cancelled out for him’? The body. The mere Ecce homo, visible, moving, and concrete. For ‘of course we are meat, we are potential carcasses. If I go into a butchers shop I always think its surprising that I was not there instead of the animal’.

It is neither pessimism no despair, it is only obvious fact, but a fact that is veiled by our membership in a collectivity that blids us with its dreams, its excitements, its projects, its illusions, its struggles, its causes, its religions, its ideologies, its passions. And then one day the veil falls and we are left stranded with the body, at the body’s mercy, like the young women in Prague who, following the shock of an interrogation, went off to the toilet every three minutes. She was reduced to her fear, to the fury of her bowels, and to the noise of the water she heard re filling the toilet tank as I hear it. When I look at Bacon’s Figure at a wash basin of 1976 or the Triptych May-June 1973. for that young Prague women it was no longer the police that she had to face up to but her own belly, and if someone was presiding invisibly over that little horror scene, it was no police man, or apparatchik, or executioner, it was a God-or an anti-God, the wicked God of the Gnostics, a Demiurge, a Creator, the one who had trapped us for ever by that ‘accident’ of the body he cobbled together in his workshop and of which, for a while, we are forced to become the soul.

Bacon often spied on that workshop of the Creator; it can be sen, for instance , in the picture called Studies of the Human Body, in which he unmasks the body as a simple 'accident', an accident that could easily have been fashioned some other way, for instance-I don't kow- with three hands, or with the eyes set in the knees. These are the only pictures of his that fill me  with horror. But is 'horror' the right word? No. For the sensation that these pictures arouse , there is no right word. What they arouse is not the horror we know, the one in response to the insanities of history, to torture, persecution, war, massacres, suffering. No. This is a different horror: it comes from the accidental nature, suddenly unveiled by the painter, of the human body,

9

what is left to us when we have comedown to that?

The face;

the face that harbours 'that treasure, that nugget of gold, that hidden diamond' which is the infinitely  fragile self shivering in a body;

the face I gaze upon to seek in it a reason for living the 'completely futile accident' that is life.

Translated from the French by Linda Asher..

Richard Marshall Interviews Matthew Collings

3AM:Tell us about yourself.

MC: I’m 46 years old. I’ve been doing art criticism for… I don’t know how long really -- over 20 years. I never intended to be a critic. I’m a would-be artist who has written books about art and done TV programmes about art, both of which are assumed to have a populist dimension. I’ve had this role of apologist for contemporary art, for Tracey Emin, etc, for about five years.

But the weird thing about it is that I either have never thought about it at all – making art popular -- or else I’ve positively hated the popularisation of contemporary art. When I’m being extreme, I’m capable of thinking that frankly the whole art scene is made up of a bunch of idiots. And I have no desire to get millions of ordinary people to queue up to look at that stuff. Why should they? It’s got nothing much to do with them. To suddenly expect it to be popular is asking the impossible. There really is very little in it for a mass audience and I think this mass audience it’s suddenly now got, knows that really. And they’re not really interested; they’re just along for the ride, for the nonsense. The mandarin people in charge of the Turner Prize, and the media people at Channel 4, and middle-class people who run the art columns on the broadsheets, all assume ordinary people must have this stuff explained to them -- but the motivations for doing that are completely bullshit. It’s for commercial reasons, to get the ratings up.

You could have said 50 years ago that the equivalent people in charge of modern and contemporary art packaged it for the masses because they thought it was good for them, or it would save society, or it was against fascism, or something. But now they don’t even pretend it’s out of decent motivations. It’s just for commercial reasons. In any case, I don’t care about any of that. But as I said, I only think those types of things when I’m being extreme.

The fact is, I am interested in what the grain is -- the grain of contemporary art. But I don’t think that to be involved with that, you have to be involved in a zombie way. I think you can be involved in an intelligent way, and that might mean being sceptical. It might mean thinking against the grain. But that’s only because you’re thinking about the bigger picture. I mean, if I think of Sickert – his paintings are characterized by a little bit of light in a general gloom, and the light makes the whole thing. Now I would defend that, and say it’s important and moving. But I don’t think that’s the whole story of what art can be, it’s just what’s going on in British art in the Edwardian period. I don’t have to go around mindlessly worshipping that little patch of light.

The equivalent in our time is young British art, (the yBas), full of nihilism, satire, surrealism and decadence. That stuff can be pretty good, and I am sometimes interested in it. But again I would feel like I was suffocating if I thought that was all art could be. And because this art is so popular it’s like there’s no air. We’ve got to hear all this mind-destroying stuff all the time about the very narrow issues and concerns of this art, and of the art of the recent past, like Warhol and Bruce Nauman, and so on, that’s supposed to have begun it all. So when I’m gooning on the TV in front of the Turner Prize, and ironically indicating a bit of disapproval, while seeming to be blindly following the agenda; and then in interviews like this actually being quite explicitly aggressive toward the contemporary scene; it’s just to let in some air.

I don’t really mean that I hate those artists or even those moronic zombie curators, with their ghastly pc homily ideas. I went to art school to be an artist. For one reason or another I fell into this journalistic world. But I thought I was just explaining stories about what I knew to be the codes of the art world. I didn’t necessarily agree with the codes, I just felt I could describe them, because I knew them well. I never had the remotest interest in making this contemporary art scene that we now have, which as everybody knows is mostly just crap, accessible to an audience who has no real interest in it anyway.

On the other hand I’m glad to do a bit of thinking aloud about the aspects of the scene which I find to be good, like Sarah Lucas, or the Chapmans, or whoever. And the more sociological aspects -- I find it good to have a few thoughts about that side of things, too, and put the thoughts out into the public world. I try it out in an article, then maybe again in another one, slightly changed, or a book, or a programme. It’s all the same stream, things developing and changing in my mind.

But I now find myself to be this person who meets strangers in the street who say ‘I really liked your programme’ -- about art I actually might not have much interest in – and they say: ‘And it really opened my eyes to it!’ It’s rather moving to be praised like that, or acknowledged, or whatever, but it’s confusing. I don’t revere the art world, or at least certainly not the contemporary art world. But I learned to think in an art context. Art school was my higher education. So all that is an explanation of what I do.

3AM: Your strong views are very clear in your last book Art Crazy Nation but perhaps weren’t as clearly signaled in your earlier stuff, say Blimey!

MC: I can’t totally remember that book actually. But I’ve never felt any different. I always knew what my relationship to art was, if not to audiences of my own work. It’s never changed. Blimey is a kind of amusing, semi-diaristic description in an Evelyn Waugh English surrealism kind of tone, mixed with a Jennings Goes to School tone. But it’s never an apology for the yBas. I think people assume it’s that without having read it. It’s a satirical description. For one thing, it’s a critical book; there’s a definite pecking order, of artists who I take seriously and ones I take less seriously.

Also people read it and get it wrong, maybe. I don’t know. Maybe it really is not what I think it is. But when I say in it about some figure or other, that ‘he is a very good artist’, that’s about playing a kind of game. I assume that if I say something in the book at one point, which is a kind of key to the book, then people will remember it later. But apparently they often miss the connection. Actually one of those key things is specifically about missing connections: I think I say something like: ‘People come up to me and say “The Late Show” is getting much better, because they were on it -- they don’t see the connection!’

It’s not that I’m so complicated or so twisted. I write these books intuitively and they end up more or less how I wrote them in the first place; except the language gets more refined in the re-writing, and the ordering of the thoughts might change. But the fact is, how it comes out in the first place is jaded. Irony is a part of intelligent conversation, it’s not a stylistic choice, like someone daft choosing to make installations; it’s a sign that you’re probably saying something thoughtful. On the whole when I’m ironic, it’s because I really do have a certain distance.

Of course I believe in art, in the sense of some kind of tradition and history which includes modernism and to some extent contemporary art; but I believe it’s a slightly stupid age for art right now. It’s probably the worst age there’s ever been. Since art began it couldn’t have been much worse than this. But I don’t wish I lived fifty years ago, or in 1907 or 1870, or something. We are what we are, formed by our own time, of course. But ever since I started this critical enquiry, whatever it is, the theme has always been the same.

Why is art like this? Whose fault is it? Is it the audience’s? Is it the artists’? Is it art’s? Is it inevitable? There are no easy answers to those questions. So I’m always monitoring my thoughts about art; and often they’re based on input from these sometimes surprisingly illiterate people, who often don’t have much self-knowledge, these yBas. I fall asleep after one minute with them.

They’ve never read a book, they drink all the time, and they’re unbearable. They have a drink and they go mad and act like caricatures. You wouldn’t believe it. Then another minute I’m more humble because, on the other hand, I think, ‘Yes, that is art -- they are the top artists’. So I don’t think that Blimey is much different to this new one. I think the real different one is It Hurts! in that it wasn’t very good. I don’t know why. I think I wrote it too quickly. Or I wrote it off the back of a TV series. The momentum was there for half a book and then it went away again. And now when I read that one through, or bits of it, it’s the one that gives me the most pain.

3AM: The one that brought you to the public eye was probably This Is Modern Art, based on the TV programmes you did.

MC: The first time I was relatively widely known was as a result of that series. Within the art world I was already known because of the ‘Late Show’, and because of Artscribe, which I edited for a few years. If you run an art magazine you’re a bit feared, or at least people often want to suck up to you. But you see I had a bit of a crisis earlier, when you asked me to tell you about myself, because I was sincerely trying to work out what I do, and what the use of it is. And I had a complete existential attack. What could I call myself? And anything I thought of, I found a bit worrying.

But anyway with This Is Modern Art I was recognized a bit, and that was when it became apparent to me that a lot of people saw me as a populariser of a difficult subject, which I really thought myself as being. It’s just that I was naïve: I thought with that series, when it was offered to me, well, they’re going to pay me -- not very much actually -- and I know about this stuff, so I’ll just explain it as clearly as possible. I’ll divide it into these categories – Jokes, Beauty, Shock, Nothingness, etc -- because those seemed to be the themes the general public acknowledged. And I thought that, weirdly, the general public was right: they are the main themes.

You could say if you were boring that the general themes are the body and race and gender and so on, but the real theme now is shock: everything falls out from that. Black humour and surreal not-really-disturbing jokes are part of shock. So I thought you could do a reasonable history of modern art and especially very contemporary art using these themes. And they were interesting ideas. Well, not fantastically interesting, actually, but I had enough interest in them to make them work as programmes.

But then when you start making a TV programme you’re working with loads of people so everything gets slightly distorted, and in the end it’s not quite what you thought you’d started out with. Maybe some of it is better, because of the talent of the executive producers and the camera guy and the series-producer. But it probably wasn’t in the end all totally accurate to how I actually feel about things. But then there it is on TV and suddenly you’re Mr Art.

What on earth are you going to do with all this? I can’t imagine. I’m just rambling!

3AM: Keep it coming! 

MC: I don’t take seriously the current moment of contemporary art, as I say -- but a lot of the artists who are currently in the spotlight I do think are the genuinely good ones. I think the Chapman Brothers are fantastic, very good and intelligent and thoughtful and clever and funny – the things they’re supposed to be, according to, say, the dim lights of ‘Dazed’n’Confused’ they actually are.

And I think the same about Sarah Lucas and to a slightly less extent Tracy Emin, and maybe a bit higher up but sometimes much further down, because he’s a bit amazingly variable, Damien Hirst. But still it’s a low moment, because there’s nothing in society anymore that asks for art to exist, except the market or the celebrity game, which are both trivial things. Or if they are important they’re important in ways that are irrelevant to art.

Obviously it’s economic values that rule now. Celebrity is a trivia side-product of them, in that it’s a popular sign of success. Success has become our main cultural value. We know clearly what it is. Of course art can have aspects of anything but what makes it worth having is what’s soulful, serious and important. The last things you want it to be are sexy and celebrity-driven, or daft and amusing. And those are the only things people want art to be at the moment.

So in Art Crazy Nation, I’m trying to think about that problem and be realistic about it, and sometimes state it more starkly and openly than I did with Blimey, which was a book which had a more sustained ironic tone, or at least the irony was jollier.

3AM: So where would you like to be?

MC: I wouldn’t like to be in the past because that would be mad. You have to be true to your own experiences. Experience shows me that art has a certain comedic character at the moment, and it’s not a noble thing to be in. It’s a daft thing, more or less. But I’m in it just the same.

3AM: Several of your complaints about the trivial nature of the art world echo complaints made about the current state of literature. Steven Well’s Attack! Book project and the works of Stewart Home, for example, are examples of writers who are addressing this. Are you wanting to effect change or are you just a witness to this ironical art?

MC: That’s a very good question. Let’s see – I think I can only answer it by thinking about what good art writing is, for me. People are often shocked at how hopeless I am as a left-winger. Am I going to go on like this, groping blindly, subjectively in this darkness, making a few sort of amusing jokes along the way, or am I supposed to actually do something? The work I’ve been doing for the past five years or so has been mainly writing, and the writing has taken a kind of pleasure-seeking form, kind of indulgent. I might have a jaded attitude towards art but I truly like the writing, the craft of it, and I take it totally seriously.

But it has been, until this point, a weird kind of game of how to objectify this pleasurable thing, in terms of paragraphs and structure, and how to achieve a book-like structure. That’s what all that experimenting is with little sub-headings in bold type: I mean, I think of that stuff as quite lyrical and poetic. That’s why I found Julian Stallabrass’s parody of it, or his designer’s attempt to parody it, in Stallabrass’s book High Art Lite, baffling. In that book, the headings actually tell you what will happen in the paragraph, to help the reader. Which is definitely not what mine usually do.

In any case, with my writing work, there hasn’t necessarily been any developing of a socially useful meta-theory. Surely I should be able to give an account of what we should be doing now, as a society, you might think. Which is what Clement Greenberg was so good at, in the thirties and forties. He thought art was in a certain way and he, as a committed Marxist, would have something to say about it, to further the situation along a bit. I suppose also that’s something Peter Fuller felt about he was doing; though in his last years, of course, not as a Marxist but as an evangelist for that weird kind of conservative thing he believed in.

But I come from a very different background to both of them. Peter was evangelical, and I’m not. Clem was high-minded and educated, and could speak several languages, and was a sophisticated philosopher, and I’m not any of those things. I can only write about art in a way that seems believable to myself by making it up as I go along as a kind of amusing thing, like a kind of art form which is primarily self-expressive. You’d think by now I’d have a few staggering theories that I could give you the privilege of hearing but I haven’t.

When Greenberg was writing in the 30s, and up to when he did the essays that made him really important, he saw the problems of culture, and of culture’s position in society, from a Marxist point of view, as I say. But after that he became a decadent, cocktail-drinking swinger, and remained so for the next forty years. And I think I moved straight to that position. In the last decades of his life, he would point at some paintings of blobs and say ‘Oh, that one’s good, that one’s good, that one’s good, that one’s bad, throw it out.’ But he earned the right to be blasé because of being so rigorous before.

I mention him because I admire him and reread him a lot, even though I’m not like him. And I’m thinking about this problem of whether I’m supposed to actually do something about anything. I admire and re-read Donald Judd’s critical essays. Judd wasn’t a Marxist but just a formalist and a pleasure-seeker. He’d value art if he felt he could say it was ‘interesting’, which was basically code for pleasure. But in the late 50s and early 60s Judd was this very precise and terse and often a bit cruel reviewer of art exhibitions, as well as an artist. And when he occasionally wrote at length about, say, some stripes, it was incredible, really enlightening. He’d say something simple was really complex, and you’d get what he meant. I really admire that.

Greenberg is elegant and Judd is curt, but I like the clarity of both of them. It’s a clarity that comes of being born into a well-off situation, having a bit of high education, and possessing a broad, large understanding of things. I believe all that does make their thoughts about art more resonant and important than anything you might read now in the Sunday papers. Those papers, how I hate them. How people learn about art now is in from the papers. That’s the general tone: saying any old wank about Louise Bourgeois. No one cares if it’s true or not. And there is no equivalent, today, of the Donald Judd or Clement Greenberg type of art writing. I’m not an equivalent, either. But I like their difference to the Sunday papers writing, and I want to be different to that, too.

3AM: What about David Sylvester? 

MC: I don’t think he was ever like Greenberg or Judd. I liked him as a good writer, in a way. But I think of him more as a performer, a great physical beauty and a charismatic guy. If he were in the room here with us, right now, we’d all be really impressed and thrilled, if a bit intimidated. Patrick Heron, the painter, was a very good art writer, very impressive. What made him slightly less good, sometimes – certainly not always since he really was a bit of a genius at writing -- than Clement Greenberg, who he violently hated, was that Patrick was very narrow. He was interested in the problems of yellow, or of wriggly brushstrokes. Greenberg might narrow down to that for half a sentence now and then, in an essay. And eventually he started making his pronouncements as if that was the only kind of thing that mattered.

But he started out with original and excellently expressed thoughts about Kafka, TS Eliot, Jewishness, fascism, society, and so on. It was amazing that he could convincingly, in a really impactful way, put the pursuit of nice colours and brush strokes into that kind of context. But unlike Greenberg, Heron never moved from an obsessive, detailed, microscopic consideration of the surfaces of paintings, and compositional harmonies and tensions, and so on. In terms of his actual art criticism, as opposed to his occasional polemix (which were always very dazzling and good as well, incidentally), that was pretty much the only thing he wrote about. Anyway, I don't see any equivalents of those figures now. And I don't say I'm one myself, by any means. But those are the ones I like. And to return to your question, do I want to change anything? Am I just going to record things or do something about it? I think there’s been a big mistake.

And that is that populism and art are not meant to go together; art is now surrounded by a sort of fake populism. So I think that’s the problem. That’s the ‘it’ I think I’m doing something about. The way I do it is clown for a bit, then find an opening and then be clear, because at that point something makes sense to me. But I haven’t yet made it to the stage where I can just take out the nonsense and go straight to the clear bits.

3AM: Is that because of the material you’re having to talk about rather than your own lack of ability? I mean, one of the things that is strong about your books is that they do make it clear what the codes are and what we’re to do with the art we’re presented with. Even though you’re annoyed that you’ve been seen as a populariser of contemporary art there is this very clear expository dimension to your work. Like, you’d look at the Dan Flavin and say, look, this is a way of taking this stuff. 

MC: Well, with that Dan Flavin thing and with a couple of other artists in This is Modern Art, I’m just letting you know what I’ve learned about them and what is there to think about. And that might include a bit of mystery where, ok, they are really only neon tubes, and it doesn’t take a lot of manual skill, but there are a number of possibilities: you can look at it like this or like that. These are the codes, take it or leave it, it sounds absurd, I know, but there you are.

So in that sense you could say I’m doing a job there of demystification. Even though I’m allowing mystery I’m also, as well as I’m able, within the medium of TV, taking a bit of the wrong mystery away. I know about the subject and I know that to a certain extent at least, it is explainable. But it’s not always possible to be that clear and actually I don’t always seek to be clear in that way. I feel I must do something else sometimes. I’m not quite sure why. I suppose it’s because it feels stifling not to, as I said earlier.

3AM: Do you ever think about doing something different — writing a novel or something?

MC: It always occurs to me to write a real book. But I’ve got an agent and publishers. And every time I say I want to write a book they never say, here’s the money now, get on with it. They always ask me to write the first ten pages or so, and I can never be bothered. So the offer has never been concrete enough for me to do it.

3AM: So if we get back to what you’ve described as your own confusion, having to sort out what is happening and your own role in it, what might we look forward to in the art world? Is this just a bad blip?

MC: No. It’s going to get worse. It’s possible to feel jaded about it now but it’s only just begun. I look at the scene that’s going on at Millbank at the moment, where the new Saatchi museum is shortly going to open, with a big new Hirst-fest, and Tate Modern is already there. And the Chelsea Arts School’s moving down there -- which means there’ll be a whole load of subsidiary things opening down there.

And they’ll all be geared to a Saatchi mentality and a Tate Modern mentality, and those mentalities are awfully empty, except with a little bit of pious, PC fake religious values sprinkled in, in the case of Tate Modern. And that’s going to get huge. It’ll start in a year’s time, when the Saatchi thing opens and in two or three years it’ll be the new mindset for aspiring people. So what we’ve so far seen will be as nothing – what we’ve seen is a very rough sketch of what’s to come. It’s going to be streamlined, fake, goo, pseudo-art that’ll lie on the land for years and years. That’s my vision of it. I think the only hope for anything creative or genuinely expressive, is that there has to be some sort of cultural underground. Because if something is only in the spotlight or striving to be in it, then inevitably it’ll be hollow.

Art is special, where you strive to get something of quality, something amazing, weird, difficult. At least, it seems weird and difficult until you’ve done a bit of work on it. Then you get more at home with it. It’s still difficult but the difference is that it’s worth it, that initial sense of difficulty is what it’s all about. Whereas with anything that’s a popular medium, like rock music, say, it’s designed to be instantly accessible, to not have difficulty. You can find difficulty in it, like finding some difficult bits of obscure rock, but the rock form isn’t fundamentally about that.

So there’s got to be some way for artists to get out of that plastic goo mind-set, and make their own cultural world. Which will be quite a difficult thing to do, because nothing can survive that isn’t popular, now. But also by definition, to be genuinely cultural and not just a private obsession, it’s got to be capable of at least a relatively broad appreciation. I can’t think of an historical situation where all this has happened – it’s a new problem. Art has had a wide public aspect before, of course, but the wide public world had some gravity and dignity. It’s as almost as if we’ve now got to admit that what art was, it can no longer be. In ten years time we’ll probably admit that it no longer exists, that we really have broken away from any need for it.

We really are too depraved and idiotic as a society now for art. Actually that was my joke theme for that last Turner Prize programme, straightforwardly declaring difficulty out and Madonna and celebrities in. But in the future that will be reality not a joke. Maybe we’ll all get more interested in the past. Rather than just nostalgia, we’ll develop a serious fascination with real museums, and we’ll treat Tate Modern as a branch of entertainment, which it essentially is.

3AM: It’s a very high art view of art you’ve got. High Romantic, anti-bourgeois, Baudelaire and all that. Someone like Stewart Home might say that it’s a function of the ruling class and the society, capitalism, but on the other hand what might be bad for art might be good for society. You know, it might be a function of democracy.

MC: The end of what you said is right because these are all the results of democracy. But Stewart, hmmm…I think he’s genuinely interested in what it might be to be avant-garde. I was saying earlier that there isn’t an historical period that you can go to for advice.

In terms of avant-gardism – well, avant-gardism doesn’t work now, because the avant-garde we have is an official one and therefore a pseudo one. You can’t be against the system if you are the system. You can’t be ahead of the system if you only exist because of the system, to serve it, that is – the system is ‘avant’ of you.

So, for example, we can’t have an Apollinairian idea of Cubism, something marvelous and connected to poetry, science, progress, ethics, everything: a fantastic thing in the air that some avant-gardists have absorbed by osmosis, and these artists are somehow ahead of the system. There’s nothing in the air now except irony. And that’s something that everyone is in tune with, not just artists. They had that notion of progress, which included democracy. We have progress but not an ideal of it. If anything we have a fear of it as much as an ideal. And also our versions of progress and democracy are that we have a system where many of us can afford car radios now, and we more or less accept they’ll be nicked all the time.

My last series had a lot of chat in it about Romanticism, but in a nutshell it simply said that culturally we are not Romantics but we pay lip service to Romanticism. We still say we admire individualism, intensity, deep feelings, and people who are special and above the herd. But we are ambivalent about this because essentially we know we aren’t Romantics. When art is good now it's because it expresses that ambivalence vividly. And when it’s rather grotesque and distorting and hideous, it’s when it thinks it can be Rembrandt, kind of Rembrandt for executives.

That’s what the problem with Lucian Freud is. The artist having a lot of pseudo deep feelings, when we know perfectly well he doesn’t, because none of us do. So I like art to be good and have some aesthetic loveliness about it, and there isn’t much of that about, and I can see why. But I don’t deplore that there isn’t much around, and curse everyone. Well, I do, but I don’t then say the answer is that we’ve got to do a fake Rembrandt. I mean, that Queen painting must be the ugliest painting I’ve seen in my life. How could anyone take that seriously?

3AM: Adrian Searle liked it.

MC: I think he felt pressured. I think he feels I’ve got the job of being the fool, so he must define himself by being the serious one.

3AM: How difficult is it to work against that goony stereotype?

MC: I kind of accept it. I’m only able to write in a certain way. I can only go in a chip-choppy way, paragraph by paragraph, a bit here and a bit there.

3AM: But you have a definite style now.

MC: To me all the books are very different — with one, I wrote it very quickly, I never looked up, and I almost can’t bear to look at it now because it’s so giddy. Although, actually, there are some excellent bits in it which often get quoted, and I find myself almost admiring whoever wrote that…I mean myself. And then another one is It Hurts, which isn’t quite right in a different way. Blimey was the first one and I do think it’s good, although very shoddy in its typos and wrong captions and so on, just like all the others. With the last book the cover keeps falling off.

You can imagine what that feels like, for an author. On the whole, when they work, I think it’s because of humorous understatement. I worry sometimes about the idea that I’m a complete goofball – I think it said something like that in the review in ‘Art Monthly’ of ‘Art Crazy Nation’. But if it’s so there’s nothing I can do about it. If someone said here’s a hundred thousand pounds, and they put me on a desert island, and they said here are the hula-hula girls, plus all the cocktails you want: and now write how you really, deep-down want to write.

Well, I still wouldn’t be able to come out with the literary ideal that I admire, which is a bit of Ford Madox Ford, Evelyn Waugh, Clement Greenberg, Donald Judd, Edward Wilson’s journals, bits of David Hockney’s first autobiography, bit of Rimbaud, and so on. Plus the lyrics on all Bob Dylan’s records. And the Doors, and the four classic Stones albums.

Actually I think I have occasionally matched the fantastic inspired genius of putting that line ‘…I’ll be in my room, with a needle and a spoon…’ in the context of a country song. But the rest is all completely beyond me. I just couldn’t do it. It’s not in me. I think the serious points are sometimes expressed OK. But there’s probably an awful lot of blubber.

3AM: Michael Bracewell, talking to me about your books and your programmes, thinks they’re very serious. 

MC: I take that as a compliment. I know I can’t be convincingly earnest, though. If someone can then that’s good, but I find in general it’s not a happening thing at the moment. Patrick Heron is a good example of someone who can get round that. You could never call him exactly earnest, because he has this shrill kind of enthusiasm, which you used to be able to hear in his talking voice, but is there also in his writing. But he could be serious while appearing to be light, which is what I’m getting at, what I’d like to be myself. He was writing in the forties and early fifties, and if you’re interested in this narrow subject of aesthetic, abstract painting, well, he is the master: he is lucid, elegant and beautiful about the mechanics of a painting. But I don’t have the vocabulary and perception and focus to do that.

My TV programmes have been serious in intent. They all have different contexts in which they were made -- different material conditions – but there are general things that unite them all, similar restrictions. TV by its nature is a team thing. So those aspects of a tone of voice, individual integrity, and so on, they’re the first things that come under attack, basically because no one knows your real wavelength, or wants to get bogged down with thinking about it. They want a presenter because it’s a ‘voice’, which is a TV-plus, in terms of the documentary genre, but everyone wants to control the voice and change it a bit. They’re a bit horrified by the real voice.

And when you’re writing a book, although there’s editorial comment and guidance, to some extent, it’s nothing like the distorting pressures of TV work. So a lot of my tone of voice, and so on, and the compressions of meanings, when I do those TV commentaries, and the pieces-to-camera, are approximations of myself. I’m trying to compress it, to get it to fit. But the question is, is the ‘serious’ intent, either with the books or the programmes, to say that art is good and everyone should get involved in it -- because that’s not at all my intention.

I think art is a difficult thing that people should only get involved in who want to, and if they do they will immediately see it’s something worth doing some work on. I don’t have to say ‘Do some work you lazy gits!’ I can say ‘This is what I think’, and they can respond if they want. That was my experience of learning. I don’t see why I should now do something I personally would certainly not have liked anyone doing to me, which is coming over all earnest. Where I sometimes experience difficulty, is with art that takes difficulty and profundity in its stride.

In the last two series I’ve done Goya and Delacroix, and Friedrich, and in those cases I don’t really have much to offer that isn’t already out there in history books or art books, or in the clichéd imaginations of middle-class people. So then I have to be quite careful, and I do slightly rely on people in TV, my colleagues, to notice when I’m becoming falsely earnest, or waffling. With contemporary art they often want me to waffle more, whereas my inclination is to be blunt because I think I do see what is good about what it is that, say, the Chapmans do, and I can do justice to it in a few words.

3AM: You are an artist yourself. 

MC: Yes. I went to art school in the mid-seventies and I’ve never stopped leading the life of a painter, except that I can’t do it all the time now, sometimes for months I can’t do it. I’ve been writing and doing TV. I like that of course but I regret that I can’t do everything.

Patrick Heron had to give up writing in order to paint. He was a gifted abstract painter and a good art writer, and he had to give up writing because doing it meant he wasn’t taken seriously as a painter. But maybe also he gave up writing in order to make himself more serious as a painter -- it’s not just a question of the world taking you more seriously. It’s difficult to do serious painting and write as well. At least, that’s my excuse, my reason why I haven’t advanced as a painter. 

3AM: So do you see yourself more as a writer than as a painter?

MC: I’m paid for writing and that’s my position in society. But I want to do more painting. I’m going to find out in the next twenty-five years if it’s possible to do both. I hope it is. I suspect it isn’t and I’ll accept it if that’s the case. I’ll keep on painting but no one will give me a good review or buy my paintings. It might be for the right reasons that they don’t. Because in my writing I can see how to make that craft thing work and I can see where it’s going, and what the thoughts are. I don’t have that equivalent sense with painting.

I’m still in relative darkness, because I haven’t put in the hours. There’s not been the continuity, the struggle, and the feedback from people, which I’ve had with writing. I certainly wouldn’t say that my relative failure as a painter has anything to do with what I was saying earlier about this being a bad moment for art – I can’t blame that! It’s my own dilly-dallying.

Richard Marshall is a talented writer and acts as an editor for 3am.

Fight for art’s sake

The sea changes happening in the art scenario have never been much spoken about. How far apart are ideals from the actual causes?

Buyers might end up having works that have absolutely no value.

There exists an inherent conflict when one tries to reconcile the academic and the business aspects of art, particularly in the case of contemporary Indian Art.

One very obvious development in today’s art scene is the aspect of marketing, something that I have brought up earlier. It is a very crucial aspect of Indian Contemporary art and there are moments that I have felt totally averse to the idea of s omething that is considered to be a powerfully effectual tool for commodities that range from toothpastes to designer clothes, seeping into the very fibres of Fine Art. This is owing to the fact that it is a field, which to me, is still strongly rooted in subjective and academic criticism in order for it to remain a vibrant platform within which an individual or collective artistic expression is conceived, developed, debated and ideologies ascertained.

Of course, it’s not as if dealers, collectors and artists themselves have not used such tools in the past to gain a public audience.

At the turn of the 19th Century, public perception associated financial success with the aesthetic quality of the works, a scenario that is being played out in urban India today.

Also there were artists at that point in history, particularly Picasso who was known for his shrewd business acumen apart from being a master genius. Unfortunately, things are happening at a rather fast pace, especially in terms of demand that certain galleries and dealers expect artists to mass produce their works. While this occurs within Contemporary Art in the West, there have been many learning curves through which the world could differentiate between great, good, mediocre and bad works. None of the contemporary artists in India is being given the time to grow and eventually establish their artistic practice because of vested interests both in the West and within our own country.

Therefore, while some Western artists have fallen because of speculation and overpricing owing to market driven hype, a point in case being Julian Schnabel, strong historical development over years and years of Western Art saw to it that the entire market didn’t crash and vanish.

Therefore, while a certain degree of promotion and publicity have to be developed to support an artist, it is being used a tad too aggressively at a very delicate and fragile stage in the country’s current art scenario.

Contemporary concept

There exists a strong historical backbone that supports Classical Indian Art unlike Contemporary Art. With the latter the attention came by way of money, the only means by which new buyers and more importantly the mass audience are being initiated into the concept of the contemporary.

While some of the influential players within the dynamic, young contemporary art scene propose to do something about it, often suggesting the path to be taken, time and again it comes across as being shallow. This is because of the example they set with their own practice.

Let me recount something that took place recently at The Asia Society in New York during The Asian Art Week — a smart and obvious marketing tool, one could say, whereby we have a week that will be a one-stop-shop for collectors, investors and the occasional art aficionado to permeate their being and satiate their need (be it financial or passion) for art that is ‘All-Asian’! The tag did not perturb me as much as the lack of straightforward dedication to the cause of Indian art the so called “experts” brought to the forefront in the discussion. The dialogue was meant to shed light on the future of Indian Contemporary Art.

The panel included, Dr. Arani Bose, businessman, director and gallery-owner of Bose Pacia Gallery, New York, Melisa Chiu, museum director of Asia Society, Artist Atul Dodiya and Dr. Hugo Weihe, head of Indian and South-East Asian Art, Christies, NY. There were some valid points that were being made by the panelists, but as expected they seemed to offer nothing more than words. There isn’t much one could expect from these individuals who are for most part more attuned to the business side of art rather than the aesthetic, except, to a certain extent, Atul Dodiya. This, like one other panel discussion on Indian Art that I’ve been to, fell short of my expectations.

Let me explain why I find myself exasperated. For most part they desperately try to project a genuine need to support the growth of Indian art and artists from an academic and art historic point of view. Dr. Arani Bose brought out some valid issues faced in terms of contextualization and how categorizing in terms of cultural background is considered to be, in his words “Ghettoization” when it comes to Asian art.

However, different rules apply to Western art, where, say a German artist is considered International as opposed to just being German. He brought out how there was a lack of support for developing institutions and infrastructural support that produced critics, theorists, academics and, of course, artists that would sustain a steady growth. Wise words until Dr. Bose suggested the solution. He strongly felt that getting some of India’s new billionaires to invest in setting up the much needed foundation for sustained development would be a good start.

However, he failed to mention that his own gallery is guilty on many occasions of putting financial gain ahead of any other aspiration. How else can one explain their handling of an artist pair the gallery represents — Tukral and Tagra? The duo had their solo show in the New York gallery, which opened in April 2007. Within a year of their show the artist’s works were up at three auctions.

Provenance for these works only included exhibition history. Provenance is the history behind a work of art that is extremely intrinsic to the process of quantifying the monetary value of a work of art.

For example, German artist Gustav Klimt’s 1907 portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer boasted of a provenance that included its unique history involving a battle between the Austrian government and a family heir of Ms. Bauer. The niece claimed that the work, along with five others, was seized by the Nazi’s during World War II. This aspect of the painting’s history made it an extremely valuable piece in terms of art history thereby playing a major role when it came to pricing the estimates and ultimately shaping the outcome of the final bid — a world record of $135 million dollars.

The work is now part of the Neue Galerie in New York which focuses on Austrian and German Art. Every work need not have such an illustrious past but the point to be noted here is the value of art history. Of course, one can argue that contemporary art is created in the present and a number of Western contemporaries sell for exorbitant prices. However, one needs to understand that Western art has a longer “history” on its side, and for young India, contemporary history goes back to only a mere 60 years to the late 1940’s when the Modern Art movement took shape through The Progressives.

It reiterates how young the Art scene is in the subcontinent which is not a terrible situation to be in.

However, with the pressure to make quick profits comes the danger of expediting the production of art works as if it were coming out of factories for mass consumption. How could Dr. Bose encourage putting up Thakral and Tugral’s works for auction if his intentions are to support his artist’s growth? It also makes one question if the artists themselves are conscious of what they are getting themselves into.

What with value?

Does it not occur to them that if their prices rise when they are beginning to establish themselves, only because it’s financially prudent, what happens when the fiscal aspect dies? Buyers might end up having works that have absolutely no value since they do not stand at a strong position art historically — which I reiterate is the single most powerful aspect that determines the value of a work of art. And this will affect the careers of these young artists who otherwise might have potential but were misguided in terms of how they could develop their practice.

That is not what Indian Contemporary Art needs. And galleries such as Bose Pacia to an extent might be guilty of doing so by encouraging this terrible pattern of putting up their artists for auction when they have barely exhibited for more than a couple of years.

Mind you, the likes of Dr. Bose and Dr. Weihe are well aware of the fact that majority of the players within the Indian Contemporary Art scene is in it for the money. What irks me is their assumption that all of the audience is blissfully ignorant of this fact.

Apart from uninspiring didactic statements, there were quite a few glaring contradictions in the discussion. One of them revolved around art critics in India. For some reason the only name the panelists could suggest both during the discussion and when an audience member posed a question, was Geeta Kapur. I have deep respect for Ms. Kapur, who is a pioneer of art critical writing in India but the fact that they did not mention any younger writers who are up and coming showed their lack of interest in even acknowledging their existence. It is all well to say we need to encourage the new but if the “experts” themselves can’t go beyond one name it’s beyond absurd.

Dr. Weihe who is a knowledgeable and sincere person fell short of my expectations. There was hardly anything insightful he offered. Dodiya’s experiences as an artist, and how it amused him to see the attention he got from his neighbours, who didn’t know or care for art before the entire buzz, was a good way of explaining the manner in which some sections of Indian society view art today. One attends panel discussions such as this with a hope of hearing people within the industry who have the power and influence to shape the future of Indian Art offer some concrete, genuine, truthful insights.

The problem is that everything isn’t defined in terms of “Black and White”. Unfortunately, some of these players do not care to admit that and continue to be strongly business minded in their practice, whatever the consequence may be. Nevertheless they project themselves as championing the cause of critical and historical support, when their actions speak otherwise.

-Meenakshi Thirucode -The Hindu

"Banks fall over, art triumphs."

This week started with an ominous bang. It was "Black Monday" for bankers, financiers and investors at all wealth levels as a big chunk of the U.S. banking system imploded. The week has been tough on the Republican presidential candidate and war-lovin' (which means deeper debt-spendin') Senator John McCain, too. The George W. Bush clone has found himself scrambling to criticize the mismanagement that led to the demise of Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch, blaming the latest, alarming developments on "unbridled corruption and greed," even as - typically - he avoided reality and steered clear of recognizing that Republican policies since the Reagan era that have deregulated American corporations and let them get away with just about everything, including not paying their fair share of taxes, have been hugely responsible for the greedfest Wall Street's money movers have long enjoyed. Until now.Hirst's "The Golden Calf," a bull preserved in a tank of formaldehyde, with its head crowned by a gold disc, sold for the equivalent of almost $18.4 million at this week's auction in London. Despite the widespread, painful fallout from "Black Monday," at least one big risk-taker has scored triumphantly in the money game, proving that it still can be done - with art, though, not with stocks or subprime mortgages or debt-to-be-repaid of dubious value acquired from countless secondary or more-distant sources.

That's the British artist Damien Hirst, who brought to a two-part Sotheby's auction sale in London on Monday and Tuesday a batch of his older works and some all-new works. (The auction bore the title "Beautiful Inside My Head Forever.") In doing so, Hirst broke with a long-established protocol in the international art market, according to which artworks are normally sold at auction by collectors who had purchased them from commercial galleries or from earlier auctions. In bringing his works to auction himself, Hirst completely bypassed his usual dealers at blue-chip galleries in London and New York.

As the Sun, referring to the artist who is "best known for suspending a shark in a tank of formaldehyde" inimitably puts it in a headline, Hirst's Sotheby's success was a case of "Shark 'n' Awe." The controversy-loving British tabloid reports that Hirst "smashed records by raking in £111 MILLION [$198.7 million] from an auction of his crackpot artworks. The payday was TEN TIMES more than the previous high for a sale of pieces by a single artist, Sotheby's said." The results of the sale "stunned Hirst," who had "feared the [current, worldwide] credit crunch would scare off collectors." The 43-year-old artist observed: "I'm totally amazed that my art is selling while banks are falling."Earlier this month, British artist Damien Hirst posed in front of his work, "The Incredible Journey" (a zebra in a tank of formaldehyde), which was offered for sale in this week's auction.

The Sun adds: "The top-priced item in the two-day auction was 'The Golden Calf,' one of the artist's notorious works featuring pickled animals. It went for £10.3 million [$18.4 million], the highest price paid to date for a Hirst at auction. A dead tiger shark in a tank called 'The Kingdom' sold for £9.5 million [almost $17 million]....And even 'The Abyss' - a collection of [cigarette] butts - fetched £1.8million [$3.2 million]." Other Hirst works in the sale featured butterflies. Last night, the Scotsman reports, Hirst "said 'people would rather put their money into butterflies than banks' after economic gloom failed to dampen enthusiasm for his work."
One bidder in the Sotheby's sale said of Hirst's artwork: "It is iconic, inherently British....His work challenges people, and visually it is stunning." However, Reuters reports, Hirst's creations are "not to everyone's taste." The news agency quotes Charles Thomson, a co-founder of theStuckist figurative-art movement, who remarked: "The art world has gone stark, raving bonkers. It is akin to a fever, a plague people have caught. It won't last forever." The above photo, not from this week's London auction, shows Hirst's "Away from the Flock" as it was displayed earlier this year at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Commenting on the Hirst auction after the first night of the sale, Sir Norman Rosenthal, the former exhibitions director at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, told the Guardian: "Banks fall over, art triumphs."
Of the activity in the Sotheby's salesroom on the first evening of the two-part sale, the Guardiannoted: "Like asteroids on an inexorable collision course, the spectacular sale had converged on the most spectacular bank collapse of the century: in the buzz of chatter in Italian, German and French before the sale, the question was whether there would be any millionaires left in the swirling clouds of space dust for Hirst to pick off. There were, but they were hiding at the end of telephone lines or in the private boardrooms sheltering some of Sotheby's very favorite customers....On the big lots, the bidders in the room, almost all with mobiles clamped to their ears as they gambled somebody else's money, dropped out pathetically early at about the £1 [million] mark, leaving the battlefield to the anonymous voices on the banks of phones."As he took in the results of the second session of the Sotheby's auction, Hirst said: "I guess it means that people would rather put their money into butterflies than banks - seems like a better world today to me." (Sun).

Open eyed dreams...

We must sleep with open eyes,

we must dream with our hands,

we must dream the dreams of a river seeking its course,

of the sun dreaming its worlds.

we must dream aloud, we must sing

till the song put forth roots, trunk, branches, birds, stars,

We must dream backward, towards the source...

We must row back beyond infancy, beyond the beginning

-Octavio paz