Showing posts with label Huge Lane Municipal Gallery. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Huge Lane Municipal Gallery. Show all posts

13/03/2014

Sean Scully and The Bullshit of Hype



On Friday May 5th 2006, I watched the Irish/English painter Sean Scully being interviewed by Pat Kenny. Sean Scully who had lived in New York for years was being interviewed on The Late Late Show (Ireland's Tonight Show - without the humour and a lot of serious debates) on the eve of the opening of a whole room devoted to his art in the newly expanded Huge Lane Municipal Gallery, Dublin. It was a cringe-making interview and in a way I felt sorry for Scully. Serious and I mean really serious big art world artists like Scully do not appear on stupid popular television shows - not only because popular culture does not want them, but because even if they do - serious artists find these kinds of interviews - centred around childish notions of 'genius', 'the greatest artist in the world' and discussion of the ludicrous and vulgar price of their paintings insults the seriousness of the high minded artist. I cringed when Pat Kenny the host of The Late Late Show pointed to one of Scully's abstracts 'Yellow Yellow' and delighted in informing the audience that it was worth €400, 000. I nearly vomited when Barbara Dawson director of the Huge Lane described Scully to Kenny and the audience as 'one of the greatest artists in the world' and 'the greatest abstract painter alive" - pass the fucking bucket! I could have listed a hundred artists alive that were better than Scully and thousands more who were infinitely more interesting to look at.


But I continued to watch and my ears pricked up when Pat tried to get Scully to describe his paintings. I had painted quite a few abstract paintings in my time and I had always found them hard to describe to the common man. So I was eager to hear the feted multi millionaire and art teacher describe his abstract works. What a fucking let down! Scully squirmed in his seat and trotted out bullshit about how Beethoven's music was abstract, how our memories are not literal but in fact abstract and other very lame and unoriginal clichés. Where was the mystical gibberish of Kandinsky or the “I am Nature” intensity of Pollock which were at least more convincing? Scully’s explanations of his abstract art were no more intelligent or convincing than the ramblings of some spotty, sincere teenager. 


Scully had in fact had a blessed existence in the art world - Robert Hughes loved his work - Now I loved Hughes as a critic and a writer - but his judgments concerning contemporary art was depressingly narrow minded - for example Hughes hated Basquiat, Schanbel, Celement, Koons, and Hirst. Part of Scully's success I thought was the aura around Scully the “black belt in karate”, youthful gangster and thug with a painful sincerity about the deep meaning of his paintings made up of rectangles of muted colours butted against each other on expensive French linen canvas stretched on thick 3" stretchers. In an art world of pathetic effete whims that had never had a cat-fight never mind a bar room brawl - Scully was intimidating. Surely someone so imposing, anguished, and sincere was making art of serious import! But he wasn't. He was a lucky chancer who had turned out hundreds of monotonous abstract canvases without any real intellectual invention or for that matter passion. Scully's work told us absolutely nothing about the world in which we lived and was in fact a parasitic reheating of early modernist abstraction - but without any of the spiritual meaning, originality or iconoclastic edge of the originals. 


So why was it that he had come to mean so much in the Irish art world? Because Ireland's art elite was desperate to fabricate a visual tradition for Ireland and would do anything to get it - or fake it. In 2000 the Huge Lane installed the Bacon studio - creating a myth of Bacon's Irishness (Bacon left Ireland at the age of 16 and his parents were English) with Scully they took a man born in Ireland but who grew up and studied in England and had lived as an uber rich art celebrity in England, America, and Germany but never Ireland - and enshrined him as an Irish master! 


Growing up as an artist in the dissolute and dead art world of Dublin in the 1980s-90s was depressing. Real art happened in Paris, Berlin, New York and London, and all we had was magazines like Artforum to inform us of what was going on elsewhere. Even if we didn't believe all the hype and bullshit surrounding art world stars like Beuys, Warhol or Koons - we had no real way of judging for ourselves. Like dogs in a kennel we ate what we were feed and knew no better. How could one judge the quality of Schnabel, Basquiat, or Barney on the basis of a few tiny photos and a few paragraphs of philosophical bullshit in the art magazines? It was impossible! But one of the good things was to live in a country with no vested interest in art. None of us had any part in the fabricating of art myth and were immune to its effects. All that had changed by the turn of the millennium. Ireland wanted its own artistic heritage and with that came the fabrication of myths about artists of very average ability.