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Through the Looking Glass
Art Appreciation 101
Margaret Mascarenhas
I’m filling in for abstract artist and art critic Swatee Kotwal who is
on leave this month, with a subject she and I have been discussing for
some time: what differentiates good art from bad art? What is the
criteria? Who decides?
In 1995, Keio University professor Shigeru Watanabe, and two colleagues
published a paper showing that pigeons could learn to distinguish
between Picasso paintings and Monets – a study that earned him a Nobel
prize. More recently, he trained pigeons in art appreciation, teaching
them to differentiate between 'good' paintings and 'bad' paintings,
using colour, texture and pattern cues to predefine an aesthetic set of
values. In the study, watercolour and pastel paintings by children were
first categorised by a panel as either 'good' or 'bad'. The pigeons were
put into a holding area where they could view a computer monitor
displaying the images, and taught to recognise pre-selected 'good' art
through food rewards. Recognising 'bad' art was not rewarded. The birds
were then shown a combination of new and old, 'good' and 'bad' painting
images. According to Watanabe, “The results suggest that the pigeons
used both colour and pattern cues for the discrimination and show that
non-human animals, such as pigeons, can be trained to discriminate
abstract visual stimuli, such as pictures and may also have the ability
to learn the concept of ‘beauty’ as defined by humans.”
The idea that your children could be learning art appreciation from
pigeons is surely a disturbing one, but these next stories turn the
whole raison d’etre of art criticism on its head.
In 2005, the following news item appeared in The Australian:
“MORITZBURG, Saxony: A German art expert was fooled into believing a
painting done by a chimpanzee was the work of a master. The director of
the State Art Museum of Moritzburg in Saxony-Anhalt, Katja Schneider,
suggested the painting was by the Guggenheim Prize-winning artist Ernst
Wilhelm Nay. ‘It looks like an Ernst Wilhelm Nay. He was famous for
using such blotches of colour,’ Dr Schneider confidently asserted.”
It turns out the painting was actually the work of Banghi, a 31-year-old
female chimp at the local zoo. But this wasn’t the first time the
hallowed practitioners of art criticism were comically exposed as
emperors with no clothes. The most notorious case occurred in 1964 when
Ake Axelsson, a Swedish newspaperman from the Göteborgs-Tidningen,
installed several paintings at the Gallerie Christinae, claiming they
were the oeuvre of avant-garde artist Pierre Brassau. Almost immediately
the work began to draw critical attention. Critic Rolf Anderberg wrote
this eulogy: "Brassau paints with powerful strokes, but also with clear
determination. His brush strokes twist with furious fastidiousness.
Pierre is an artist who performs with the delicacy of a ballet dancer."
(Time.com) Pierre Brassau turned out to be a four-year-old chimp named
Peter from the local zoo.
Excuse me while I roll my eyes and laugh hysterically.
Toward the end of his life Picasso was putting his name on ashtrays, a
number of which were proudly collected by Richard Attenborough. But is
it art?
The infamously subversive Marcel Duchamp, as Kotwal wrote in a previous
column, initiated the use of “ready-mades” in his art installations, the
best known of which was a prank submission of a urinal called
“Fountain,” under the pseudonym R Mutt. In response to this article and
the pictorial depiction of “Fountain”, one horrified reader heatedly
objected to the publishing of such an image, deeming it inappropriate
for family viewing. Though this image is one of the most well-known in
modern art, and though the traumatised reader entirely missed the point
of the article, which was to draw attention to the bizarre arbitrariness
of critics who would define such work as “art”, his visceral response to
the visual representation exemplifies my own contention: that
occasionally the ordinary viewer, without benefit of an education in art
history or aesthetics, can be the more reliable critic. (Though I will
not endorse the notion that the right to critique includes the right to
suppress, as we have seen in the case of MF Husain)
What is art? And what is the role of an art critic?
I was taught, and still am inclined to generally accept the view, that
fine art (like literature) is essentially a deliberate arrangement of
elements in ways that affect emotions, senses, perspectives, in ways
that provide a new insight and/or experience, and in ways that transcend
the limitations of the chosen medium and strike a universal chord. To
elaborate, I would say that for something to be called art (or
literature), it should have goals besides pure self-expression, and
should do at least one, but preferably some or all, of the following
through the use of skills and ability in handling the building blocks :
• communicate ideas
• explore the nature of perception
• generate strong emotion
• stimulate insight
• possess an aesthetic value
• possess a cognitive value
• facilitate intuitive rather than rational understanding of something
What then to make of Damien Hirst? Perhaps the most recognised bad-boy
in the global artist community, his celebrity is entirely dependent, not
on any traditionally recognised set of manual or even intellectual
skills, but on his capacity to generate shocking and provocative
concepts—concepts, which are in fact executed by a swarm of employed
artisans, a practice now being employed by a number of our own
home-grown artists of repute. Add to that the blurring of the line
between artist, curator, gallery owner, collector, auction house, and
critic, and the nexus between all, some of whom play two or three of
these roles simultaneously and quite actively.
Confused?
If we define the role of art criticism as defining a rationale for art
appreciation, making art accessible, and highlighting emerging talent,
this blurring of the line can be dangerous, in a way that undermines
artists, corrupts the creative process, and hoodwinks the public. It is
not a secret that international elite coteries comprised of established
artists, curators, collectors, gallery owners, auctioneers, and critics
exist, whose primary objective has less to do with aesthetics or the
discovery of emerging talent and its nurturing, and more to do with
helping each other to stay on top of a frighteningly recessive market.
In such a market turf war it is no wonder so many nay-sayers and
newcomers are either summarily ignored or beaten back with sticks.
Of course, there is nothing new about art becoming the cultural capital
of the wealthy, both as status symbol and commodity. And to be fair,
most art education programmes and private museums are gifts to the
public domain by the super-rich. Traditionally artists have required the
patronage of the elite in order to work, which of course has generally
been subject to certain biases, tastes and preferences of whomever is
paying. But lately patronage by the big names in the international art
world has assumed a circling shark quality. A number of shark observers
have applauded New York-based Tino Sehgal’s successful manoeuvre to take
the “ownership” of art away from the purchaser, by creating performance
artworks that can be sold at phenomenal prices but leave nothing behind,
not even a receipt, as a veritable coup d’etat. But though he has
managed to raise his personal bank balance in an ingenious way, he
hasn’t exactly contributed in any way to the democratization of art, the
mantra of the street artist.
Closer to home, an especially depressing development for the emerging
artist and ordinary viewer alike is the burgeoning of facile “art”
critics with neither the credentials or the appropriate analytic
ability, much less the honesty to actually “critique”, in the Indian
press. In one of his recent blogs, Abhay Maskara, collector and owner of
an up-and-coming gallery in Mumbai, ridicules in particular the latest
propensity for listing “top artists” in the media. He says, and I agree
with him:
“The real danger of these prophecies is that the reading public is left
with too many ‘invisible gaps’ to fill and s/he is never really sure of
why the artists selected actually deserve a place on some infamous list
that has been thrust in their face.(sic) I think ‘list-makers’ have a
certain kind of responsibility to articulate more clearly the criteria
(as loose as it may be) that informs any such selection… Throwing a list
of names together and seasoning it with one example each from a variety
of sub-categories such as ‘modern artists’, ‘contemporary artists’,
‘women artists’, ‘diasporic artists’, ‘video-artist’, ‘performance
artist’. ‘curator-artists’ may be convenient but it is certainly not
convincing. Even if one were to condone the generation of such lists and
look for parallel examples from the world of music or cinema, we will
see that even a ‘greatest hits’ chartbuster or a box office generated
‘top films’ blockbusters is based on some logic that is not gravity
defying.”
We shouldn’t actually rely on the event pages of the daily news for
informing ourselves about art. And newsmedia that truly want to inform
the reading public, as opposed to merely titillate, should hire art
writers who actually know what they are talking about, or at the very
least are prepared to do their homework. As for the general public,
unless buying exclusively for investment purposes, I would say, take a
class, visit galleries, read art books and art magazines, and even top
ten lists, if you so choose. But when you buy, always choose an artwork
that moves you, even if you’ve never heard of the artist before. (ENDS)
http://goanetblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/through-looking-glass.html
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First published in Goa Today, Goa - April 2010
Goanet A-C-E!
Arts ~ Culture ~ Entertainment