29 April, 2003
BOOKS: The thinking man’s Ivan Massow
The Eclipse of Art by Julian Spalding
Little red book
Julian Spalding, former director of the municipal museums and galleries of Sheffield, Manchester and Glasgow as well as author of The Poetic Museum (reviewed here last summer), has now written a book called The Eclipse of Art: Tackling the Crisis in Art Today. It’s a slim volume, running to just over 100 pages. Published directly into paperback, priced with becoming modesty and fronted by a jaunty red Pop Art cover, The Eclipse of Art looks and reads less like an art book than as a campaigning super-pamphlet. And this, indeed, is all as it should be, because The Eclipse of Art is, first and foremost, a polemic. Spalding's profile in the art world comes mostly from having set up the Museum of Modern Art in Glasgow during his 'controversial' time as city museums director there, and then leaving that job, and then attacking the increasingly conceptual, decreasingly demotic course the museum took after he left. Thus it may not surprise old Spalding hands to discover that the main thrust of his argument is encapsulated in the title of the introduction — ‘Why you are right not to like modern art’ — a title, incidentally, that in its distinctive blend of confident declaration and slightly patronising projection, sums up a good deal more about this book besides.
Spalding’s goal? He sets out, in his own words, ‘to give people back the power to make up their own minds about what is good and bad in modern art, together with the ammunition to back those judgements up’. And if he doesn’t really manage to ‘tackle’ the ‘crisis’ in contemporary art, his central metaphor is in part to blame. An eclipse, after all, frightening though it may be for those stranded in the path of its cold creeping shadow, will eventually pass of its own accord, leaving bright sunshine in its wake — this, no matter how much the local priesthood insists afterwards that without the bonfires, the drumming and the extravagant sacrifices, that monstrous, unnatural darkness would be with us still.
Need to get out more?
Spalding has, by his own account, ‘never met anyone who told me they loved modern art’. Ergo — and copyright the late Pauline Kael, presumably — such people don’t, or at any rate shouldn’t, exist. (I should perhaps explain that Spalding has chosen to equate ‘modern’ and ‘contemporary’ throughout The Eclipse of Art — with predictably odd results, since despite his contempt for most contemporary art, he not only likes work by Picasso and Matisse, but seems unable to extricate himself from various impeccably modernist habits of mind — of which, a bit more later.) Since several of my own friends, having casually picked up the The Eclipse of Art and scanned the back cover, have erupted into hoots of derision at this point, we could probably swap friends-based anecdote all day, but that would be a dull thing to do.
Personally, as someone who would not even claim to ‘love’ each and every major late-career de Stael any more than I would claim to ‘love’ whole categories of anything else, I don’t find this failure on Spalding’s part particularly telling, but that doesn’t matter, because Spalding evidently does. He goes on to write:
The people who told me that it was my job as a curator to like modern art invariably had a vested interest in so doing; they all earned their living either making or selling, teaching, criticising or curating modern art. Outside that coterie, practically [sic] no one has ever urged me to like modern art, apart from some people in the worlds of media and marketing.
Obviously, Spalding has not succumbed to the siren-songs of these grotesquely biased enthusiasts — oh no! Instead he has steered a proudly independent course. But now he feels ready to help others to steer that course, too. Hence The Eclipse of Art. It is, writes Spalding, a book ‘for those who know they have a right to their opinions but no longer feel they have the right to express them’. Alas it is not quite clear what Spalding makes of those headcases who don’t need to be invited to ‘love’ whole categories of art before enjoying individual examples of it, or the nutters who feel perfectly free to express their opinions through gallery attendance or non-attendance, through splashing out on their own 1948 Pollock canvas, or who sound off quite happily in front of their friends — let alone (and here we may well be in the category of the Loch Ness monster, the unicorn and the attractive Tory leadership candidate) anyone who doesn’t work in media and marketing yet who actually does like contemporary art.
Professionals to the rescue!
Spalding, though, is a curator and museum administrator. Am I a cynic for suggesting that he may have a bias or two of his own regarding the general public’s need for cultural leadership? Certainly he seems anxious to spell out for us why it’s okay not to like modern art, and how this ‘crisis’ ought to be ‘tackled’. Yet at the same time Spalding is clear that that the serious business of sorting out contemporary art does not, in fact, lie with the ordinary punter. One of the most revealing passages in The Eclipse of Art crops up towards the end. It is the most intimately personal passage in the book. It spells out the central role of curators and museum personnel vis-à-vis visual culture:
There is nothing wrong with art in art galleries! Not much art is actually robust enough to survive in the rough and tumble of a public place, both physically and aesthetically; much of it is more intimate and needs the environment of a gallery to be fully appreciated [...] If museums and galleries of modern art did not exist, then much modern art would remain for private consumption only, and we would all be the poorer. Public galleries, then, have an absolutely crucial role to play in promoting contemporary art. Without them, most people would not see modern art at all. The onus is on public gallery curators to select art which they think is profound and lasting, and therefore worthy of public attention. They have to take a fresh view, from their own independent standpoint, and explore new ground, not merely serve as mouthpieces for powerful dealers or collectors or, for that matter, artists who are particularly good at self-promotion.
And we all know who he’s getting at there, don’t we? But here’s the broader point: because Spalding evidently does feel that we’d all be ‘poorer’ without access to contemporary art, it is simply a question of making sure we don’t waste our time on art this is anything less than ‘worthy of public attention’. And who has what it takes to make that sort of decision? Apparently it is for the curators of public galleries to shape taste, to see through the hype, to pick winners — ‘from their own independent standpoint’, unless those nasty private collectors, people who have media jobs, etcetera. And uncannily, this is exactly the standpoint — that of the independent-minded curator — from which Spalding claims to speak. So we should be getting quality insights here into the sort of art that ought to be dished up for us. What, then, does Spalding tell us about art — what it is about, what is should do, where it should go?
Every picture tells a story
The answer is, alas, ‘not a lot really’. Although a definitive account of Spalding’s thinking about art actually does emerge from The Eclipse of Art, it makes you work for it. So let’s gather up the pieces of the puzzle and start to fit them together. Art, apparently,
(p. 11) is ‘essentially a means of visual communication’;(p. 11) must ‘convey content of lasting value’;
(p. 11) must ‘stir our emotions’;
(p. 11) must ‘stimulate our thoughts profoundly and exclusively’;
(p. 11) ‘reveals the nature of our existence’;
(p. 39) always expresses a point of view, and is always the product of a personal perspective;
(p. 39) is ‘a language of expression, and it manifests itself through craft’;
(p. 56) ‘finds lasting meaning in the transient’;
(p. 66) ‘It does not really matter whether art is thin or fat, cold or hot, minimal or baroque; what matters is what it is about';
(p. 73) ‘has always been on the side of trying to create a better world’; and
(p. 99) is ‘an unconditional gift to others'.
But wait, there’s more. We also learn elsewhere in the book that artists admired by Spalding include Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Matisse and Edward Hopper, whereas he’s not so keen on Marcel Duchamp, Jackson Pollock, Joseph Beuys and Julian Schnabel. When it comes to critics, he has a lot of time for John Ruskin, Tom Wolfe, Peter Fuller and Robert Hughes (‘apart from Robert Hughes, there is no one today writing with critical authority both within and without the art world’) but seems to have read enough about Clement Greenberg (if not much by Clement Greeberg, at least the post-1940s stuff) to have taken against the pontifex maximus of formalism. And all these points ought, I suppose, taken in aggregate, to tell us something.
What are we to make of them? Well, let’s start with that point about Clement Greenberg. It will be clear from the list above that content (‘what it is about’) matters a lot to Spalding — form, a lot less so, since it is only a ‘language’ expressing its message with varying degrees of success. In a way, this is fair enough. There is a lot of expressive power in Rembrandt, Van Gogh, even Matisse, and perhaps a bit of narrative je ne sais quoi in Hopper, if you can put up with the inept draughtsmanship long enough to engage with his work. But there is at least one sense in which this seems odd to me. Maybe I’m missing something here, but I’d have thought that the sort of art Spalding dislikes most energetically — conceptual art — is disproportionately focused on content, and not particularly interested in formal concerns? Fair enough, again, not to like conceptual art — I can’t stand it myself — but the more I read of The Eclipse of Art, the more the form-versus-content issue began to look subordinate to preferences regarding the type of content. To put it bluntly, Spalding doesn’t like ugliness, nihilism, squalor, cynicism or what T. J. Clark has called, with reference to Pollock as it happens, the ‘high negativity’ of ‘contempt for nature in all its particularity’. Or to put it another way, the problem isn’t with modernism per se — it’s what you do with it that counts.
We all have our prejudices
Spalding thinks art is important, serious and timeless. He wants art to be about creating a better world, not about money, celebrity or (in Damien Hirst’s words) ‘getting away with things’. The values he sees in art are enduring ones, not matters of taste or fashion. You’d never know from The Eclipse of Art that there was once a time (and not so long ago, either) when educated opinion held that the oeuvre of the Carracci brothers was much more moving and more beautifully painted than that of Vermeer, and that a single Salvador Rosa was worth skips full of Tuscan and Flemish ‘primitives’. All of which has long made me deeply suspicious of claims as to whether great art is, or alternatively is not, being produced in our own time. Whose idea of ‘great’ are we talking about here? And why are we so sure what the future is going to want from the art of the past?
Spalding is also keen on the concept of artistic intentionality, claiming that
the meaning of a work of art is locked into it in the process of its creation. This gives true works of art the power to say so much more than objects lifted out of life or than works which are dependent on a non-intrinsic biographical context for their meaning.
So if I look at a Hopper and it ‘means’ one thing to me, but if Spalding looks at a Hopper and it ‘means’ something else to him, does that mean it is not a ‘true work of art’? And does he really honestly believe that knowing something, say, about van Gogh’s life — whoops, ‘non-intrinsic biographical context’ — has never added anything to his experience of van Gogh’s expressive power, or that it is even possible to put aside any such knowledge when faced with one of van Gogh’s later, stranger masterpieces?
It is, then possible to pick apart the logic by which Spalding gets to what he likes in art, but in a way that is largely irrelevant. Our tastes are informed by all sorts of odd factors, often odder than we know, and as the old saying would have it, there is no accounting for them. So I should probably make clear that I am not somehow sneering at, or even disagreeing with, what Spalding does or doesn't like in contemporary art. I, too, am a pro-painting snob; I, too, am bored by film instalations. My problem here is Spalding's attempts to cobble together some general, objective thesis explaining why his preferences are right and everyone else's preferences are either wrong, or are actually secretly like Spalding's and hence right, but unspoken and hence unhelpful. Here, I think, we must agree to disagree, since I've never really managed to care much about what anyone else likes or dislikes in art.
Who’s afraid of Beryl Cook?
History, though, is another matter. Spalding has clearly put a lot of thought and reading and looking into The Eclipse of Art, and it shows — although unfortunately the errors and omissions can be pretty showy, too. For instance, Spalding goes to a lot of work to build up a narrative in which cultured people in Britain and Europe are scared off from figurative art both by bad memories of the Nazis’ 1937 Entartete Kunst show and by only slightly less bad US government subsidy for American Abstract Expressionism. In other words, by the late 1940s, if you didn’t like weird-looking contemporary art, this either meant that you were an ignorant fascist or a closet communist. And here you really have to read Spalding’s account to see what I mean, but take my word for it — neatness of historical explanation on that level comes at the cost of quite a lot of detail, some of it important — ‘detail’ here including most of what was happening in Europe (for which see James Hyman’s superb The Battle for Realism), the rise of Pop Art and the auction prices achieved every other day for work by Alfred Munnings, L. S. Lowry and, for pity’s sake, Beryl Cook. Someone out there is clearly willing to risk a lot in terms of political street cred in order to buy the retardaire figuration of their dreams!
But then the actual art market is one of the various blindspots of this book, which tends to see things through the distorting lens of high-profile public collections. In fact — and this is a point a lot of people on every side of this ‘debate’ ignore, so I’m not exactly singling Spalding out — the art market (primary as well as secondary) sells a lot of figurative art as well as a lot of non-figurative art. A thousand flowers are already blooming out there, even if Sarah Kent or Sir Nicholas Serota might view many of these as weeds and even if Charles Saatchi doesn’t feel the need to hothouse a few star seedlings. And sure, a lot of this art is not fetching headline-making prices — but neither did work by Vermeer, Hogarth or Cezanne, to pick three random examples. It’s a bizarre omission that The Eclipse of Art never once mentions the fantastic strength of the market in original art over recent years. My suspicion is that genuine public taste, in all its catholic vitality and vulgarity, scares the hell out of people like Spalding. Avert your eyes! Spend some public money! Isn’t there a curator around somewhere who can do something about this mess?
Buy this book
At first, the public coupling of excellent points with frankly deranged ones is disconcerting and even upsetting, but after a few chapters one gets used to it. It is, for example, perfectly reasonable to say that artistic training is important, but on the other hand it is simply mad to claim, as Spalding does (p. 41) that students’ options for choosing between ‘artistic languages’ have ‘narrowed in the increasingly ideologically and commercially restricted atmosphere of modern art’. It’s true that you have to shop around for what you want, but when was that ever not the case? Spalding should also realise that the studio system, that he professes to admire, worked as well as it did not because it was there to teach a language in which individuals could express themselves, but in order to drum into them the tricks of what was very much a trade — ergo, the minute you start emphasising self-expression over being able, say, to paint an acceptable and saleable nude, you are striking at the whole logic of the studio system. If Spalding wants to have his modernist cake he needs to stop nibbling at it.
And indeed, one could keep quoting the oddities ... ‘No one would think of calling van Gogh’s art dated, though it is intensely of its times.’ Really? But then there is a phrase as lucid and fair as the following: ‘the delusion grew, nurtured by those in the art world only, that art had the power to change society by changing itself’, and the book redeems itself again. Or there is another good line right at the end, referring to the ‘licensed uselessness of art’, which is magic — if only Spalding had sat down to think about the double-edged nature of that uselessness, and how completely it has exempted ‘art’ (whatever that means) from the sphere of things about which objective judgements can or ought to be made. Still, it is at moments like these that one feels the real impact of Spalding’s allegiance not only to Ruskin, but to Robert Hughes — moments where bombast and clear meaning, common sense and rhetorical over-extension are right up there, coming round the back, neck and neck, and you absolutely can’t wait to see which of them will cross the finish-line first. And if Spalding lacks the scary visionary ardour of Ruskin and displays art-critical judgement less seasoned than that of Hughes — well, what sane person could really have expected it would be otherwise?
The back cover of The Eclipse of Art refers to Julian Spalding as ‘one of the art world’s most outspoken critics’. This simply isn’t true, although I think both that Spalding would like it to be true, and that the publication of this likeable if faintly confused polemic takes him a step closer towards this perfectly legitimate goal. Spalding may not know an enormous amount about art, but he knows what he likes, and he seems ready to do whatever it takes to universalise this preference, preaching his message of deliverance to the audience for Start The Week and the readers of broadsheet newspaper weekend supplements. Obviously this whole dialectical choreography of praise and denunciation, of writing pamphlets and manifestos — this whole business of acting as if art is going in some particular direction and that it matters where it is going — has long since become one of modernism’s most ancient and revered traditions. So a word of warning may be in order here. However good the intentions, no one gets involved without running the risk of being co-opted by the whole clichéd spectacle, so that by failing to kill modern art the traditionalist critic just makes it stronger. Or something like that, anyway — the point being that if Brian Sewell, David Lee and Ivan Massow didn't exist, some poor Goldsmith's graduate would still be struggling away trying to invent them.
Reading over what I’ve written, though, I am starting to feel a bit guilty. Probably I’ve given you the impression that The Eclipse of Art is awful. But it genuinely isn’t awful — the funny thing is that much of it is very sensible, reasonable, spot-on stuff. In all seriousness, anyone who has any interest in the current state of visual arts in Britain ought to buy a copy and read it — but should also feel free (as if you really needed my permission!) to disagree with whole great swathes of it. That’s at least half the point of this sort of book. As far as that goes, though, I really do think that Prestel should commission a whole series of these books, if possible mostly written by people who, like Spalding, are not exactly art world ‘insiders’, but who still take a strong and passionate interest in this weird little corner of human endeavour. For while I don’t for a moment accept that art is either in a state of ‘crisis’ or needs to be tackled, it is clearly the case that artists, the viewing public and, err, even curators frequently need to be taken by the scruff of the neck and shaken out of their complacency, lethargy or existential despair (delete as applicable). Spalding has made a valiant attempt to do just that, for which he deserves credit. As for the criticism — well, it's all publicity, isn't it?
Julian Spalding, The Eclipse of Art: Tackling the Crisis in Art Today, Prestel, 2003, pp. 128, £12.95.
Compson Blunt continues to work on his much-anticipated play based on the last days of Nicholas de Stael.