Thoughts on "Playing to the Gallery"

Komar and Melamid - "America's Most Wanted Painting" 1994-1997

I have recently started reading "Playing to the Gallery" by Grayson Perry. This is half because I like Grayson Perry, and half because the operating of art markets, tastes and gallery spaces is something I know little about.

As is purpose of this blog, I often find it reassuring to write down and have a proper record of what I've learnt and my ideas. Essentially, I like making glorified notes. However, I want to try a different approach this time to the one I took in my last post. I will be the first to admit it might have been a bit verbose, or not massively coherent. This time, I have decided to list the key quotes and ideas  by Perry I identified  in the first chapter - that is "Democracy has Bad Taste - and see if I have any ideas about these of my own. Obviously this is mainly Perry talking, not me. That said, I think it's interesting to really focus on specific ideas!

This will be done in a chronological order, as they were written in the chapter. I have added subheadings that I hope summarize the idea. Obviously this is in no shape or form comprehensive and there is so much you could write about any one of these topics. The aim is to keep this relatively quick fire and simple!


On the Art World, and the methods of judging art: 

"Historically, the art world has been fairly inward-looking because it can operate as a closed circle."

I took this for meaning something along the lines of the art world being content to gate keep itself. I think there is some inherent belief that by looking inward and focusing on the ideas they already know and understand they can create their own sort of consensus that other artists are force to recognise. Meaning, artists need the art world (at least to some extent) but it does not need them.

"But many of the methods of judging are very problematic .... I mean, we have financial value, popularity, art-historical significance and aesthetic sophistication."

This is probably quite literal. The methods of qualifying art are limited (although they are probably similar for most material things) and don't really account for a work in a multi-faceted way.

The Notion of Popularity

"It's as though having such a popular art exhibition isn't to the taste of someone whose job it is to advance the taste of the people in this country. So the large audience and its tastes are often a bane to those who wish to expand the field of what is thought of as good art by the public."

Popularity restricts divergence from what is seen as the "popular". If something amasses enough popularity it becomes difficult to get people to look somewhere else. Although this is to suggest there is something wrong with popularity - if popularity is what generates a sense of accessibility to art and helps break down some of the monopoly the conventional "art world" holds, then surely it is a good thing.

Komar and Melamid Russian artists - took idea of popularity literally and based a piece of art off a questionnaire given to public: "In looking for freedom, we found slavery."  (America's Most Wanted Painting). 

I think this can kind of be seen with two ways: Firstly, that you cannot necessarily take individual components of a work that would be "pretty" in their own right, put them together, and expect them to work. Secondly, kind of going back to my last point, that the notion of popularity often creates a very stubborn consensus around one sort of thing. Whilst, giving an element of choice to people and some credit to popularity as a means of valuing a work is a good thing, a lot of aesthetic norms are already so ingrained popularity often works to serve the existing art-world status quo, or does not focus on anything outside them.

What does it mean for a painting to have "Beauty"

"To judge a work on its aesthetic merit is to buy into some discredited, fusty hierarchy, tainted with sexism, racism, colonialism and class privilege. It's loaded, this idea of beauty, because where does our idea of beauty come from?"

This probably speaks to itself. The notion of beauty or many of the aesthetic norms we see are so
tainted by old historical machinery and prejudice, that to acknowledge what beauty is might mean some implicit acceptance of all that. Is it possible to disentangle those two things?

"Proust said something to the effect that 'we only see beauty when we're looking through an ornate gold frame.' What he meant was that our idea of what is beautiful is entirely conditioned: things we regard as beautiful do not possess some innate quality of beauty, we have just become used to regarding something as beautiful through exposure and re-enforcement."

Nothing is inherently beautiful, we have just been told what is.
 
The Self-Conscious Artist

"The worrying about what others will think about our aesthetic choices is part of the self-consciousness that is in the DNA of modernism".

Maybe he means that as part of a wider society's anxiety and self-awareness we become increasingly attuned to how everything reflects on us - aesthetic choices etc. As a result these become very narrow; we only want to give off a certain image. Self-awareness about what we are showing/ making and why becomes a lot more important in the context of social consensus.

"As an artist, the ability to resist peer pressure, to trust one's own judgement, is vital, but it can be a lonely and anxiety inducing procedure.


By resisting a norm that has been so deeply ingrained and reinforced by the mainstream, you become, intrinsically, outside of it.

Understanding Methods of Validation


"The key to validation is to understand who is doing the validation, who is bestowing their good opinion, their money, their attention and time, who is giving value to certain artists and works of art."

Basic heirarchical things, I think?? If we can understand who is at the top of all these deciding factors, we can decide kind of everything else around it. It is who, not what! The personal tastes and influences of a select few unlock the **key** to validation.

"Such is the power of the curators that they are bound by a code of ethics that says they mustn't themselves collect, buy for their own private collection, work which is in the field that they are overlooking in their professional life. Because then they are in a position of very great power."

If they bought something, it would be a catch 22. They would be subscribing to something very particular which would then somehow hinder their own capacity to make new *decisions* and forge new aesthetic *pathways*.

"The art that ends up, today, in a public gallery didn't get there by public vote. It's been through a series of juries... it's been given the right nods and the knowing winks. This consensus is very necessary because there aren't many people in the art world who have the confidence of a totally fresh good eye."

They have to fall back onto this "advanced" art world consensus often in the absence of tastes completely unhindered by so many cultural and historical standards.

"And it can be very hard on artworks, the weight of that consensus."

Make or break type stuff - because you have to conform to it, to an extent, to receive that validation. Even if you don't want to.

Developing Historical Value and Respect 

"When you see sculptures that belong to a particular moment, they have been important, but now they are dusty. They have no patina" - Timeless art has capacity to build historical value - relates to Buller. Art for a specific time and purpose does not have same power as it did because it peaked in its time of conception.  

Some art belongs to a specific moment, and goes dusty and stale and irrelevant when that moment is over. Patina is the force that creates timeless art - it's the series of acknowledgements and "nods" (as Grayson says) that deem a work still relevant, and timeless. It can then build historical value. Or, alternatively, it is artwork that was not built for a specific moment and can then transcend that. Thus, art for a specific time and purpose does not have the same power it once did because it peaked in its moment of conception.

"I have a horror of becoming trendily fashionable because then there's the inevitability of becoming unfashionable."

This idea that if you go "in" taste, you then have to at some point come out of it. Perhaps he is suggesting its better to maintain a happy medium on the popularity spectrum, where your art avoids complete commercialisation and can maintain some continuing status and validation.


Gate Keeping Art: A "Serious" Matter

"Now this International Art English began in the 1960s in art criticism, it enhanced the authority of some writers to evaluate art and, as we have read, this is a precious capability to have. It became the language of seriousness; it bestowed a patina of complexity on artworks." 

Yet more gate keeping! If you create specific jargon that is inaccessible to others, you reinforce your own status as the all seeing eye. It's not that other people can't understand the ideas you're presenting, you've just presented/ described them in such a way that they think they can't.

"The all realised the power of this elite global language, and adopted it so they might be worth listening to"  

The only way to kind of gain this status bestowed by IAE is to start using it, thus it becomes significant as: inaccessible-ness x gate keeping = monopoly power reinforced and cubed.


"The very impenetrability of IAE means that a non-fluent speaker might question their own judgements as not being educated enough." 

I kind of touched on this just above. I also wrote in some rough notes ages ago that "by attempting to learn it, you join the echo chamber and close the door behind you".


Questions about Authenticity and Mass Production 

On mass produced art works: "These artworks ARE consumer goods."

There reaches a point, after so much mass-production, where art loses the authenticity that helped deem the artwork "art" in the first place. If it becomes so easily reproducible then it is similar to many other consumer goods. Is this a bad thing?

"Things which are handmade could become overly fetishized - people who get hung up on "the idea of authenticity or artisanal uniqueness."

Mass producing art work that may be good in its own right creates this kind of monopoly and power around genuinely authentic work. People start to reject anything outside it again? You don't want the "handmade" qualities of a work to overshadow everything else about it.


"If artists reject aesthetic judgement as buying into the system, by what criteria should we tell if they're good despite being energetic?"

The biggest problem with this artistic consensus is that is so powerful we genuinely have nothing outside of it to judge art by. Thus everything just feeds back into it again, because it is the only method of comparison we has - and I don't think that could actually change that given how catch 22 it is.



 The Struggle of New Art 

"For the art world, because so much of this art deliberately resists being commodified, it lacks the empirical validation of the market. It therefore depends more than ever on the validation of critics and institutions, who also often house and pay for these projects. And because contemporary art is being made now, most of it is rubbish."

Art being made at this moment has not acquired its timelessness yet - it's yet to be decided whether it belongs to this specific time or not. And, art that rejects the financial judgement of the market is forced to rely on the nods of critics - somehow making the bounds for what is deemed "good" even more narrow".

"I think we come to art somehow accepting the system that got the art into the museum, or the gallery, or wherever."

The power of the art world's systems and machinations is that they dictate, literally, (at least the Western) whole art world to some degree. You cannot acknowledge a work that is completely separate from all this, so we have to have acceptance.

Final note

The art world sounds very bad in all this, but the truth is, we have nothing outside it. It is very difficult to think of anything better than the methods of validation it already has because even the better sounding ones (popularity) have some major cons. I think this practise of deconstructing it and working from inside (and also outside it) it is very helpful. In lieu of any serious alternative, I think the best we can hope for is self awareness.

I'm sorry everyone.

Quotes from: Grayson Perry, Playing to the Gallery, Penguin, 2014