Thoughts After A Visit To The Tate Modern

I went to the Tate Modern recently. I had to book, but I don't mind. It stops me changing my mind when I wake up and the weather is c**p (again).

It's a very different collection of exhibits from the last time I went, in the Before Times. A few of those exhibits were accompanied by some socially-significant rhetoric, but mostly it originated from the artists. (*cough* Joseph Beuys *cough*)

But now, it seemed to me, everything has to relate to one of a well-known handful of Good Causes. Pollution; climate change; all the complaints of feminism; war; poverty; immigration; capitalism and its related -isms, such as consumerism; Britain leaving the EU...

Just one example, a 1952 photograph by Mitch Epstein, taken in West Virginia.

And here's the blurb that goes with it.

I will spare you a line-by-line review. I wrote one, but it's more painful to read than it is to write. Its implication is that the photograph is valuable as a work of art because the photographer addresses Good Causes in the right way.

I demur.

To ask the timeless question: what is art? Anything can be, because of or despite its creator's intentions. One condition is that a work of art should be self-contained. It can refer to other cultural items, as with Claude’s 1648 Landscape with the Marriage of Isaac and Rebecca

and the viewer's appreciation of it can be enhanced by knowing the references. I have no idea who Isaac and Rebecca were, and why they might be in that landscape, but I can look at Claude's painting for quite a while. The landscape alone holds my attention.

My appreciation of the painting as art does not and should not depend on the references.

Epstein's photograph is, for all its technical skill, not an image I find engaging. Knowing that it had one social message for him, and that the curator has linked it to others, may make me look a little longer to see if I agree, but I've moved on in a couple of minutes.

Claude's intention was to produce a decorative and absorbing landscape, and he threw in the marriage group to give it a sense of scale, and because maybe it would mean something to the client who commissioned it. Epstein's intention was to produce what amounts to low-key agit-prop, and if the picture was captivating, then so much the better.

Claude is an artist, Epstein is a journalist. And to re-affirm: journalists can produce art, but despite their intentions, not because of them.

The difference between museum blurbs and those of auction-house catalogs is striking. If you've never read a contemporary art auction catalog from Christie's or Southeby's, it's quite the revelation. A major work for sale is put into the context of the rest of the artist's output; the circumstances of its creation are set out; any cultural references in the work are tactfully noted, as if jogging the purchaser's memory; it may be compared and contrasted to work by other artists; and, of course, its provenance and exhibition history are carefully noted. Those guys know how to sell a painting.

If I'm going to spend money on it, I want to know that the painting is genuine, and what is its story. And I need to like it as an image. Because my interest is the image, not the interpretation, I do not care about the artist's views on this week's social issues, or his or her morals. I care about the quality of the work.

The "Good Causes" approach puts the artist's opinions and moral character front and centre: artists with the 'wrong' opinions, or an unfortunate period of their lives associated with the wrong causes, don't get shown. The quality of their work is not judged on its ability to hold and entrance the eye, but on the "issues" it "addresses".

If you really cared about pollution, you would put the money towards cleaning it up or preventing it, not buying an art-work that tells you what you already believe. If the Tate really believed it, maybe it could donate some of its vast riches to cleaning up some pollution, and leave a blank space on the wall with the blurb "We spent your taxes on preventing this beach getting dirty again, instead of buying a photograph of it when it was dirty, and leaving it dirty."

Though, if we put up the documentation of the work clearing and protecting the beach, wouldn't that be a performance piece?

Sounds like a win-win to me.