Panicked Confessions of a Modern Art Agnostic

"When I discovered readymades I thought to discourage esthetics, in Neo-Dada they have taken my readymades and found esthetic beauty in them. I threw the bottlerack and the urinal into their faces as a challenge and now they admire them for their esthetic beauty."

Marcel Duchamp quoted in CalvinTomkins, Duchamp: A Biography, London: Pimlico, 1998, P.414.

“The artist does not exist except as a personification, a figure of speech that represents the sum total of art itself. It is painting that is the genius of the painter, poetry of the poet – and a person is a creative artist to the extent that he participates in that genius. The artist without art, the beyond-art artist, is not an artist at all, no matter how talented he may be as an impresario of popular spectaculars. The de-definition of art necessarily results in the dissolution of the figure of the artist, except as a fiction of popular nostalgia. In the end everyone becomes an artist.”

(Harold Rosenberg, The De-definition of Art: Action Art to Pop to Earthworks, Educating Artists, New York: Collier Books, 1973, P. 13.)

Long before I understood art – I adored it. I developed my taste before my intellectual, socio-political, or sexual understanding. I spent many years as a child and teenager looking at art in museums and art books but reading far less about them. Mostly, I judged a painting’s quality long before I read about its theory or the artists biography. That is why I place an artworks visual impact, skill, and humanity far above intellectual concerns. I have loved art intensely since a small boy, but by my twenties, I grew to have an equal hatred for the art world, other artists, and contemporary art. While I have always revered Greco-Roman sculptors and fresco painters, the Gothic, Baroque and Romantic artists and the Expressionist Abstract-Expressionist, Neo-Expressionist and Outsider artists. I have always been sceptical of most Modern and Contemporary Art and thought a lot of it a con. As a child, I had a naïve and pure reverence for art history and the canon. The strange thing about me was that I was a young man who admired the old masters. I loathed both free art and free love, and the orgy of contemporary art was not something I wanted any part of. To become a great artist, I knew was an almost impossible task, but at least it was a transparent process that demanded just technical, intellectual, and imaginative excellence - and was impartially judged by a consensus of connoisseurs, critics, historians, and artists over time.                     

          

 

My ideas about art were formed in the solitude of childhood. I lived only for my art, for my fantasies about my art and myself as an artist. I came to value art that offered consolation to those in suffering and alienation. I felt that art that expressed the extreme tragedy of existence, could console those who suffered twice over, first by circumstance and second by the surrounding tsunami of grandiose and idealistic culture of those in power.

As a youth, I was convinced that only by mastering drawing and painting could I earn the right to break the rules. I judged my work and that of others not on conceptual terms but on the quality of their execution. So, it would always gall me later, to see others whose skills were less than mine, doing well as artists. Often, I did not know why I bothered working so hard on my craft and art, when poseurs, charlatans and con artists succeed far more than I did through attention seeking stunts, professional flirting, and social media whoring. It took me a lifetime to realise that in contemporary art there were no rules, and it was all about what you could get away with. I have sadly learned that nothing breaks your heart like art.

            

Growing up, I was brainwashed by decades of hype surround American art or more particularly the New York art world. It was only in middle age that I began to realise how mislead I had been. I realise now, that because there is almost no social welfare safety net in America, you must work like a dog just to stay afloat, and constantly risk facing destitution if you fail. Therefore, for struggling American artists in particular, the pressure to succeed commercially, and quickly in the art market is fantastic. Thus, post-war American painting is too often just a succession of cunning, commercial, one-shot styles, and gimmicks, that are full of theatre, but have the emotional resonance of infomercials. 

            

In my trawls of the bookshelves of NCAD library from 2007-14, I ended up spending most of my time in the German and Austrian sections and very little in the English, American, or French shelves. I came to believe that; post-war American painting was vastly overrated; English art rightly underrated; a lot of French art overrated because although they had many geniuses who created gave authority to the Paris art market, they also legitimised far too many mediocrities and chancers; and German and Austrian art was vastly underrated because of bigotry against anything German because of Germany’s appalling racial, political and military history, in addition to a general loathing of Northern European art from the Gothic period onward, and because Germanic art was often so transgressive. However, I felt that Vienna was as important a capital of Modernism as Paris, some of the greatest artists of Modernism were German, and the best painting in the world since the late 1960s had come out of Germany not America. Meanwhile, I came to believe that Fauvism was the most overrated artistic movement of Modernism, and Henri Matisse was the most overrated artist of the twentieth century. I simply did not believe that ramping up the colour and design of a painting to eleven, was as great an achievement as Picasso and Braque’s invention of Cubism and deconstruction of form. I felt Matisse was the Bartolomé Esteban Murillo of twentieth century painting, sweet, charming, and sentimental, but never revolutionary, transgressive, or profound. I felt that the reason so many fey aesthetes in the early twentieth century rated Matisse so highly, was because he pandered to their bourgeoise love of beauty, order, conformity, and aesthetic escapism. In a century of vast technological changes, socio-political upheaval, female emancipation, vicious political hatred, two World Wars and genocide, the lovers of Matisse could quietly muse on the meaning, of a brushstroke of emerald, set against a patch of cadmium orange, or the curves of a passive and complaint female nude, set off against an oriental pattern. 

              

When I was a teenager and in my early twenties, I read a lot of pretentious novels and poetry, went to a lot of pretensions arthouse and foreign films, and looked at a lot of pretensions contemporary art, because I thought I had to know about these things to be taken seriously and not be embarrassed in snobby company. I was terrified of being found-out or humiliated by snobs. During my lifetime, I have met many people in the art world who like to intellectually humiliate people, but they were usually third-rate minds, and most of the creative and intelligent people I have met were nothing like them. But now I think that a lot of the arty things I engaged with, were a total waste of time. Joyce said of his very difficult masterpiece Ulysses: “I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality.” (Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, Oxford University Press, New York, Revised Edition (1982), p. 521.) Personally, I think the desire to mystify academic readers with cryptic references is a disgraceful ambition for any artist. I managed after three attempts to read Ulysses, but I never want to revisit it, and I feel the same for a lot of the pretentious art I attempted to understand as a youth.  

            

Growing up, reading serious tombs on Modernism, I thought that the originality of Modernist artists was extraordinary. I believed that to come up with an original idea was the hardest thing in the world. But now I have a much more jaundiced view of Modernist originality. Because I now think that after centuries of artists working within tradition and according to standards of skill, craft, reason, and morals, it was not that difficult for artists who had abandoned all standards to ransack the house of Fine Art. How much of Modernist artworks were truly innovative and how much was just a chaotic vandalism of all standards is up for debate.

              

So, I have serious misgivings about art world insiders today who reduce art to ideas. I have no respect for contemporary art world figures who cannot look at an artwork without first reading its theories, and believe that art must be difficult, unpleasant, and cryptic. Of course, all art starts with an idea of some sort or other, even if it is only to emulate something that has already come before. But art is so much more than ideas, it is also about a process of discovery that can lead one in surprising directions. And the results can contradict one’s plan or open a pathway to something unforeseen. If Modern Art was just a history of ideas, we could just hang manifestos on the walls of museums. Moreover, while the zealots of the new-fangled idea, love to muse on all the astonishing optimistic meanings of the new idea, they do not want to hear all the negative criticism such ideas provoke in the mind of the sceptic. For most curators and critics today, the enjoyment of content and beauty, and the display of drawing and painting skills of an artist, are no longer of any importance, compared to the supposed philosophical meanings of blank canvases, tedious videos, and sloganeering texts. They prefer difficult and unpleasant work that no one really loves or understands - because it increases the importance of their own philosophical interpretations. In their snobbish war against cliché, and sentimentality, and old-fashioned notions of talent or skill, they serve us up cryptic objects and canvases to practice self-hypnosis. They deplore ‘skill-based art’ and the ‘mechanical’ process of painting, and they care not one jot, for art as an object of virtuoso skill, beauty, pleasure, or revelation – because to them artworks are merely illustrations in art theory books. With their pocket-sized beginners guide to Modernism in hand, they reduce art history to a list of politically correct heroes, and politically unacceptable villains - winners and losers.

               

So, art world insiders hated the Musée d'Orsay when it opened in Paris at the end of 1986, and exhibitions like 1900: Art at The Crossroads in 2000 in The Guggenheim Museum in New York, and Royal Academy in London. Because the Musée d'Orsay and the exhibition 1900: Art at The Crossroads displayed the early Modernism Masters alongside the Salon painters they fought against. The juxtaposition of the academic Salon painting of the late nineteenth century with the Modernist painting of the young rebels of Modernism, allowed the student of art history to compare their respective subjects, themes, ideologies, and techniques. Personally, I found such a comparison justified the Modernists, but I also found fascinating Salon paintings, that were orphans of art history, but which still had some painterly or iconographic interest. But art world insiders, did not want the public to be able to make up their own minds! The art world hated the idea that people would love art they hated - so they wanted it banished from sight. Their left-wing Liberalism was shown to be elitist and dictatorial, and their claim that such egalitarian exhibitions were a corruption of democracy, because the human spirit needed left-wing Liberal ideals was absurd. Only Robert Hughes put his fingers on the two important lessons from 1900: Art at The Crossroads, firstly that the Salon artists of 1900 were hailed as the greatest artist of their day and festooned with awards, just like so many of the contemporary Neo-Salon artists were in 2000, but most of the Salon artists had fallen into historical oblivion, like most of the Neo-Salon conceptual contemporary artists of 2000 would in a hundred years’ time. And secondly, that the Salon artists of 1900 could at least draw, and they had more talent and skill than any of the supposedly important Neo-Salon conceptual artists of 2000. That is why any real student of art history, had so much to learn from both the Musée d'Orsay and exhibitions like 1900: Art at The Crossroads. 

               

I did not start out hating Modern art. From the age of ten, to about the age of twenty-seven, I was little more than a sponge soaking up every work of art I saw without discrimination. There were artists working in the conceptual field I briefly admired and spent a few weeks or years contemplating like Duchamp, Ben, Klein, Manzoni, Warhol, Beuys, Kippenberger, Koons, Hirst and Emin. However, eventually I found their work become transparently vacant and not worth any further attention. The success of the vast majority of this conceptualism was a combination of the Emperor’s new clothes, mad money, media hype, and manipulation. It was frankly devoid of any real talent or imagination. I realized that while Duchamp, Warhol and Beuys were artistic talents of a small kind, their work was inimitable, and had caused a dreadful debasement of artistic standards. Their real ‘genius’ was in their cynical manipulation of the art world, fashion, and the business of art.

             

I also realised over time, that many famous artists like Warhol were more interesting as people than artists. Time and time again, I allowed my fascination with artistic personalities like Modigliani, Warhol, Dalí, Augustus John, August Strindberg, Tracey Emin, and numerous others, override my concern with their formal deficiencies. I enjoyed the soap-operas of their lives but got little inspiration from their art. Yet, I am not alone in that. Art history is littered with minor celebrity artists whose colourful lives and fame interested people more than their art - but now are almost totally forgotten. Yet, since at least da Vinic and onwards to Rubens and up to Picasso, even true geniuses have been clever enough to know that their personality was as important as their talent, in promoting their art, and ensuring the viability of their business.

              

So, by my late twenties, I realised that only certain kinds of art continued to surprise me and repay revisiting, and 90% of that art was either broadly realist or expressionist paintings, drawings, prints or sculptures. My art was fundamentally anti-Modernist. The story of painting from Cézanne to Cubism to Mondrian and the move towards abstraction meant nothing to me. The idea that there was nothing left to paint after Kazimir Malevich’s White on White painting of 1918 (a crooked white square on a white background) was absurd to me. For me, the greatest artists of the twentieth century had been figurative painters like; Pablo Picasso, Richard Gerstl, Oskar Kokoschka, Egon Schiele, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Max Beckmann, Willem de Kooning, Julian Schnabel, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Lucian Freud. And the greatest painting and artworks of the Twentieth Century had been portraits and nudes. Born at the end of the Twentieth Century, I still fanatically believed in many outmoded concepts of art like the Western male Canon of artists, and a practice primarily focused on drawing and painting. My art represented a lifelong combat of my primitive sexual ego against the impersonal power of Modernist High Art, modern independent liberated women, and the tyranny of Post-Modern political correctness. Growing up, I could idolize Modern Masters like Picasso and contemporary art stars like Basquiat and Schnabel, whose work was great because it was technically skilled and formally original, but today the choice of a hero is a truly dismal affair with token minorities who are applauded merely because they have won the Olympics of suffering. 

             

Only a small fraction of the art I admired was abstract painting, conceptual, video, or photographic art. It seemed to me that greatest artist appealed both to intellectuals and the public and possessed both skill and emotional depth. So, generally, I loathed the disembodied nature of conceptualism because for me the greatest pleasure of art was witnessing the mind, eye, and hand of a master craftsman at work. I sought out art that moved my heart and not just my intellect. For me emotional connection is the greatest strength of art, and nothing conveys feeling better than drawing and painting. Moreover, as I began experiencing the real workings of the art world (as opposed to its doctored history in art books) I began to see how talentless, egotistical, and opportunistic most artists were. I have been accused of all these things, but frankly, if you think I am egotistical, talentless, and opportunistic then you have no real measure of my talent, dedication, self-criticality, honesty, and integrity, and you have obviously never met many other artists. 

                

I adore skilful art, I revere the old and modern masters, and I live for my own art. However, I utterly abhor the art world, which I now see for what it really is, a bourgeois playpen, academic mill, and commercial cesspit. Because as well as being an artist, I am also a philistine, and there is a lot about art I abhor.  When reading arty novels, watching arty films, listening to arty plays on the radio or watch arty bands on TV, I experience the utmost nausea. I loathe novels, plays, and movies in which people speak like poets, ponder existence like philosophers, fuck like operatic porn stars, and basically live utterly unbelievable lives. So much art, writing and philosophy is mental masturbation of the worst kind, or more dangerously, a grand distraction from the real cruelty, injustice, and absurdity of existence. Yet what else could these privileged artistic people express, since to them their lives are profound, meaningful, and touched by God, they have no concept of what it is like to be on the outside of the élite denied at every turn and reviled, pitied, sought to be corrected or the values of their souls weighed. 

It has long been understood in art criticism, that there is no objective, scientific basis to artistic judgement, it is purely based on subjective experience, expertise, and study over time. The best art can ever do, is form a consensus of taste built up over time by artists, connoisseurs, and critics to judge the genuinely great works of art from the merely critically or commercially fashionable. The artistic Canon is built upon the foundation of centuries of judgement and writing by artists, connoisseurs, writers, critics, curators, and historians. Up until about 1990, art was judged by aesthetic standards of talent, craft, skill, vision, originality, and power of influence - irrespective of gender, race, creed, nationality, or period. But since around 1990, all that has been thrown out the window and now we are supposed to entirely forget aesthetic standards of talent, craft, skill, vision, originality, and power of influence - and judge art merely based on victimhood status. But so much of this victim art, is quite frankly shit, by any old-fashioned standard you might wish to apply! The reason of the Canon - has been overturned in favour of the aggrieved chaos, and hysteria of the baying mob. 

For over four decades now, the Western canon and the white, male, genius, have been so debased and dishonoured by left-wing Liberals more concerned with identity politics, that it is almost shameful to be a male painter today. Having destroyed all standards, the art world has become more about identity politics, celebrity and art market manipulation and hype. I no longer have any faith that mere excellence is enough to succeed. So, had I known in 1980, what I know now, I doubt I would have ever bothered with art. In fact, I doubt any ten-year-old boy would find any consolation in the elitist, conceptual, orthodoxy of today. Not that the art world of today cares if another white, middle-class, able-bodied, and heterosexual boy ever becomes an artist, and if they do, they will make sure to make their life unbearable. At the age of ten, I thought being an artist was the most noble, challenging, and authentic things one could possibly be. But today, I frankly laugh when I hear of yet another ‘artist’.

Since the late 1950s, the term 'art' has become utterly meaningless, if everything can be art then surely nothing is art. And, if anything can be art, what in God's name is the word we should use to describe the work of Giotto, van Eyck, Michelangelo, Dürer, Titian, Rembrandt, Goya, Delacroix, or Picasso? Of course, most contemporary artists would not claim to be influenced by these dead white males, but it suggests special pleading to ask viewers forget the masterpieces of art history and judge a contemporary artist on nothing but the ‘newness’ of their approach or the grievances of identity politics. Since Pop Art in the 1960s, the number of genuine artists, who have spent a lifetime of creative struggle to arrive at an original and truly personal style have been decimated. In their place have come hordes of cynics, producing novelty art, which they promote with the dark arts of marketing and public relations to achieve media attention.  

I try now to look at all art from a critical and sceptical position uncluttered by the supposed ‘truth’ of Liberal art world wisdom. In fact, there are few artists I cannot find a point of criticism with, and my criticism of my own work is endless and nihilistic. I no longer believe most of the things I hear or read about art, most of it is just propaganda or sales talk. But it is precisely because I once so fanatically believed in the semi-divine nature of art, that my bitterness and sarcasm towards contemporary art runs so deep. When I chose painting as my career, I foolishly thought that all I had to do was produce paintings of quality, and a helpful and supportive gallery owner would market and sell them for me - leaving me to the solitude of my studio. It took me a long time to realize that art today is as much about networking, self-publicity, and collaborative efforts with other artists and businesspeople – none of which I feel capable of doing.

But I am more than willing to accept that my views have been tainted by bitterness and a martyr-complex! I admit that I was arrogant in my youth. I admit that I thought I was a genius!  But if you have known the number of deluded amateurs, students, and professional artists I have (with not a tenth of my talent I might add) you will know, that my kind of grandiosity is very common in both male and female artists, what is uncommon is my naïve honesty. In fact, the list of sweet tempered, humble, generous, great, or not so great artists would be a very short one, only Raphael, Peter Paul Rubens, and Jean-Baptist-Camille Corot springs to mind just now. Most artists are selfish, self-absorbed, deluded creatures of mock modesty, and secret steely egomania. I admit that I am not the most technically accomplished of painters or draughtsmen - but by God I have a lot more talent and I have a lot more dedication, honesty, integrity, and things to say in my art, than many who have prospered while I have struggled.

Ideas, per say, have never meant much to me as a painter. As Picasso said: “After all, a work of art is not achieved by thought but with your hands.” (Picasso quoted by Ronald Penrose, Picasso: His Life and Work, London: Gollancz, 1958, P. 407.) Personally, I have never had many worthwhile ideas before painting, and it is only in the process of painting that I find anything of worth. Painting for me, has always been more a physical, instinctive, and subconscious activity than intellectual one. If I knew why I was painting something at the time, I doubt I would paint it. For me the challenge and joy of painting, is the process of discovery that one enters when painting. That is why for me, conceptual art, which starts and ends with the creation of an idea and its direct implementation or fabrication - has nothing to do with real creativity. Besides as Anthony Haden-Guest has pointed out, the: “…thing about Idea-based art is that different people frequently have much the same idea.” (Anthony Haden-Guest, True Colours: The Real Life of the Art World, New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1996, P.311.)

In my art, I try to bear witness to my existence and try to bring moral order and understanding to my observations. I may be a mediocre painter, but I would rather be a sixth-rate painter than a first-rate conceptual artist. Art made by the hands of the artist, has for me a soul – which ready-mades, installations, and manufactured art made by studio assistants and technicians does not. For me, the important thing about great painting, sculpture or drawing is its embodiment of sophisticated philosophical ideas in sensual mediums with a personal touch. This call to the senses of great art, is what separates it from most conceptual art, which is utterly devoid of sensual or personal appeal.

Art for me is a form of communication between myself, and the world. The more profoundly my art reveals the humanity of myself, and the world around me, the greater my art in my opinion. For me, drawing and painting are pure arts because they are so personal. In a world glutted with machine made objects designed and ethically neutered by committee and addressed to the lowest common denominator and most faddish tastes, my paintings declare the vision of one man alone in the world trying to speak the truth. 

              

It is not that I do not know the kind of art that is admired. I do. I simply cannot bring myself to make it. I remember when I was about fifteen looking through my father’s Encyclopaedia Britannica to look at its entries on contemporary art and coming across a black and white photograph of St. Mark’s Square in Venice which the German artist HA Schult had filled with newspapers in 1976. At the time, I was struggling every day to develop my drawing and painting skills, and learn about the full history of art. My heroes were Ingres, Degas, and Toulouse Lautrec. So, seeing conceptual crap like HA Schult’s work made me feel nauseous. This was what passed for art for many in the art world that I wanted to enter! The more I looked at the art of the 1970s, and read the text accompanying it, which made all kinds of pseudo-intellectual claims, the more horrified I became. “Is this what is considered art today?” I despaired. I could not find anything about it that filled me with awe, passion, or interest. Over the next few years, I remember seeing more and more conceptual art and feeling bitterly depressed that while I tried every day to develop my skills, these completely talentless irrational charlatans were perverting the meaning of art, and people in the art world fell for it! I was disgusted at fifteen and I still am at fifty-one! I would rather be a non-artist - than be what is called an artist today. 

            

In 1708, the French Theorist Roger de Piles, in Balance des Paintres, compiled a list of the fifty-seven greatest painters rating them on composition, drawing, colour and expression. Raphael and Rubens were equal highest in de Piles list. Yet Rembrandt came only tenth! Personally, I would not agree with de Piles ranking at all, and I think that he should have also considered the brushwork and originality of the painters. Though I do share his inclination toward rating artists! I would argue that it is possible to write a comparable list for painters from Giotto circa 1305 to Manet circa 1863. However, with the birth of Modernism, and the gradual abandoning of the conventional technical skills that European painters had developed over five hundred years, in favour of innovative ideas that did not depend upon technical skill or labour, no such comparisons can be made of artists from Monet onwards. In fact, I think that it almost impossible to compare the talents of painters from Giotto to Courbet with those who have come since Modernism. One can judge the overall aesthetic vision of modern and contemporary painters, but you cannot judge in any meaningful way their respective technical merits, let alone make that the sole basis for one’s judgements. Since Manet onward, it is a painter’s ideas that have mattered, not their skill or talent. And since Manet onwards, the technical abilities, skill, and formal ambition of painters has eroded to almost nothing and of course the primacy of painting has also been superseded by new mediums and media. Moreover, not only have most artists lost all sensitivity and passion for painting - most of their audience have lost all ability to appreciate it.

Going around a mixed museum like the Metropolitan Museum in New York, this was brought fully home to me. I realised that there was a significant difference between how you could study a classical painting and a modern one. Between 1490-1860 from the mature years of da Vinci to the last works of Courbet, mimetic painterly skill had been a hallmark of virtually all the great paintings. The Old Masters secured their position with virtuoso performances in drawing, painting, and sculpture. Western oil painting had developed successively more and more technically complex, time consuming and difficult to master skills. Yet from Impressionism and the dawn of Modernism, painting became increasingly more about the originality of the approach, not the time spent on, or skill involved, in the artwork. Art dealers like Paul Durand-Ruel also helped to change the way the public assessed artists by mounting the first solo exhibitions of artist in the 1880’s. So that the public began to judge artists not on individual masterpieces seen in the Salon, but on a significant body of work presented in a monograph exhibition, where the artists character and originality came to be more prized than mere one-off technical wizardry or myopic labour. In the twentieth century, some like Balthus, Lucian Freud, or Antonio López García tried to revive the old standards. Yet they were swimming against the tide. Not only are traditional skills elitist, since they take both an initial gift followed by a long apprenticeship, but the appreciation of these skills by an audience takes longer to develop than a mere fascination with the latest gimmick or wacky outrage. In a museum like the Met, that presented a grand historical group show, this debasement of skill, labour, and shared technical values, became very apparent to me. For while you could try to practice your drawing or painting in front of a painting by Titian, it was pointless with a Mondrian or Rothko or even a Picasso Cubist painting, which would take little skill to copy. In fact, modern and contemporary painting seemed like a series of artful dead ends that were pointless to follow - since their chief virtue was the originality of the idea behind the canvas. I found this quite a sad indictment of painting - which had lost its communal language and descended into solipsistic slang. 

                

I find it ironic that people think artists are so sensitive and civilized, yet often they are the most selfish, cunning, liars, and manipulators. Many artists are so confident in their talent, that they fail to realise just how incompetent they are. Or how great an imposter they are. Often the most confident artists are the least competent - because they do not even know what they do not know. In my experience, most contemporary artists are conceited and beyond self-criticism. They are intellectually limited, technically inept and their knowledge of art history and connoisseurship is about as deep as a puddle (you think I am bad, look around you.)  

               

I have always had a love hate relationship with Art Colleges. Because I was mostly self-taught, I picked up many bad habits as a draughtsman and painter that have taken me a lifetime to correct. So, I would have loved to go to Art College at the age of twelve like many had in the nineteenth century and learn my craft from the beginning. But by the time I applied at sixteen I was already infatuated with Modernist artistic rebels, who had either not gone to Art College or left early. But it did not matter because they would not accept me anyway. Then when I did get into Art College on exceptional talent aged eighteen, I only did it to prove a point to everyone who doubted me - and make my mother proud. So, when I was kicked out a year later, I was quite happy. But then getting into college became something of an obsession with me and I tried repeatedly and was constantly reject. It was only when my second girlfriend got into to NCAD, and I heard about what it was really like that I realised that it would never have suited me. Still, I have always felt that I never received the training I needed, it when I needed it, even thought I wanted to take the academic skills of the nineteenth century to paint the most anti-social, misanthropic, and obscene art in history! 

Between 1500-1870, art was a form of competition between painters in a credible way in has never been since. For centuries working-class boys trained in artist studios and workshops, slowly developing their skills, later in the academic system, this continued with official awards and contests. This process was fairly judged according to the standards of the time and more importantly those standards were widely understood and agreed upon. But once middle-class students began attending unofficial ateliers in the mid-nineteenth century and the power of the Salon was eroded by competing exhibitions of Independent Artists and the rise of private commercial galleries – ancient artistic standards were subverted, and the competitive process crumbled. Suddenly standards became corrupted and endlessly debated, and ideas and originality became more important than agreed upon craft, skill, talent, or work ethic. After the birth of Modernism, mere talent, and the possession of skill, came to imply academic and social conformity, whereas genius even if it was lacking in conventional craft, was seen to discover imaginative new artistic possibilities on its own. Modern art thus moved sharply away from talent and onto revolutionary breakthroughs. There had of course been stylistic changes in painting from 1500-1870 but they were far more gradual, and arguably there were greater, faster, more chaotic, and more numerous stylistic upheavals in the seventy-five years between 1870-1945 than in all the preceding three hundred and seventy years.

Before the mid-twentieth century, young art students spent their youth slowly developing manual dexterity so that when they had something to say - they could do so convincingly. Modernists like Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Georges Seurat, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Egon Schiele, Marcel Duchamp, Vassily Kandinsky, Kasimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, Franz Kupka, Otto Dix, Max Beckman, Salvador Dalí, Jean Dubuffet, Willem de Kooning, and Lucian Freud illustrate that many of the first-rate innovators of Modernism first acquired a solid (sometimes exceptional) grounding in naturalistic skills before moving beyond their limitations. This was far more difficult task than merely starting from scratch. And their training, respect for skill and craft, made their later innovations valid achievements, and not just lucky flukes. But Neo-Academic art from the 1960s onward preformed a complete inversion of the academic art that had dominated Western art since the mid-seventeenth century. Right-wing politics turned into left-wing politics, traditional elitist craft and skill was replaced by democratic incompetence, freedom of expression and art therapy, and the noble subjects of the powerful were replaced by the dumb crap of everyday life, the expression of personal psychological and psychosexual problems, and aggrieved left-wing and Feminist political sloganeering. As Robert Hughes observed: “… it is unlikely that the students and teachers of 1900 would have recognised the woozy therapeutics and the rhetoric of personal expression that prevails in most art schools 100 years later (especially in America) as being education at all...” (Robert Hughes, The Stuff Modernism Overthrew, Time, 2000.) Today students are encouraged to develop ideas long before they have the skills to make such work satisfying to the heart and eye as much as the mind. As Robert Hughes pointed out: "For nearly a quarter of a century, late modernist art teaching (especially in America) has increasingly succumbed to the fiction that the values of the so-called academy - meaning, in essence, the transmission of disciplined skills based on drawings from the live model and the natural motif - were hostile to 'creativity.' This fiction enabled Americans to ignore the inconvenient fact that virtually all artists who created and extended the modernist enterprise between 1890 and 1950, Beckmann no less than Picasso, Miró and De Kooning as well as Degas or Matisse, were formed by the atelier system and could no more have done without the particular skills it inculcated than an aircraft can fly without an airstrip... Where as thanks to America's tedious obsession with therapeutic, it's art schools in the 1960`s and 1970`s tended to become crèches, whose aim was less to transmit the difficult skills of painting and sculpture than to produce 'fulfilled' personalities. At this no one could fail.” (Robert Hughes, The Decline of the City of Mahogany, Nothing if Not Critical: Selected Essays on Art and Artists. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990, P.11.) Instead of places where one learns a craft, these days Art Colleges are about learning how to become a conman. 

          

Since the mid-1960s, art schools have changed from studio practices, where students are taught technical skills, learn from the Old and Modern Masters and how to tap into their subconscious – into art universities where art is turned into a calculated process open to explanation and debate and where textural study is as important as practical work. As Harold Rosenberg observed: “Can there be any doubt that training in the university has contributed to the cool, impersonal wave in the art of the sixties?” (Harold Rosenberg, The De-definition of Art: Action Art to Pop to Earthworks, Educating Artists, New York: Collier Books, 1973, P. 40.) Today the art student must produce works even more cryptic and obscure, than their conceptual art world heroes. 

           

Because art, like life has become fragmented and the art object commodified, the art student has been encouraged to pursue any gimmick that can potentially hold the attention of the consumers of art - however limited its actual scope will eventually be. So much of the art of our day is little more than student exercises in material and form – five-finger piano exercises - claiming to be the equivalent of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3. A fact often obscured by the big budget productions and gross over-elaboration of rich super stars of art, who can afford to take a plastic toy from a Poundshop and turn it into a ten-ton steel sculpture. However, great art is more than an exercise in conceptual problem solving or creative production processes, it is the sensual embodiment of thought, observation and feeling. Da Vinci was perhaps the most intelligent artist who has ever lived - but even he warned of art theory and art schools, which led artists into mannerisms and artistic cul-de-sacs. 

In every profession, there are cowboy traders, who do a half-assed job, and charge the earth for their incompetent efforts. The same is true of the profession of art. As Herbert Read noted in the 1950’s: “The notion of an absolute standard, to which all artists should conform, has been lost, or deliberately sacrificed; and with this goes the competitive sense of craftsmanship…” (Herbert Read, A Concise History of Modern Painting, London: Thames & Hudson, 1974, P.282.) I will go further, since all agreeable standards of art had been well and truly lost by the late 1950s, art became the arena for the charlatan, poser, attention seeker and circus barker, who were guaranteed more press coverage and attention than any artist foolish enough to try to earn the right to be an iconoclast. There is a dishonest aspect to many artists –who choose to take the easy highway filled with countless other artists keeping them company - not the long, difficult, lonely, and uncharted road. They opt for the technically easy options anyone can master and avoid the technically difficult ones. Why try to paint like Édouard Manet, Balthus, Lucian Freud, Gerhard Richter or Antonio López García, when a few doodles in the manner of Jackson Pollock, Cy Twombly, Joseph Beuys, Julian Schnabel, Tracey Emin, or Jonathan Meese can bring you money, fame and success (sadly I too tried this many times in my feckless youth). And if even doodling is beyond you, why not just throw some objects together like Marcel Duchamp, Jeff Koons or Damien Hirst! So, in Art Colleges, students often take the path of least resistance. This means, not only making technically facile art, it also means, following the prejudices of their tutors, and fellow students. 

Today, the international bureaucracy of modern art is staffed by smug and snobbish Liberals and champagne socialists who use obscure art as décor for their élite social club, and promote an all-encompassing policy of conceptual art, showing the same insider artists from New York, to London, Paris, Berlin, Venice, San Paolo, Sidney and Beijing. The globalization of art has not led to diversity – instead the exact opposite. The styles that are rewarded and enshrined are those that most closely fit in with the tastes of the global left-wing art elite. 'Newness' has proved in many cases to be the best defence of incompetence and stupidity. Since art that claims no history - can have no critics. Likewise, the past is regarded as a threat to progressive politics, so any artist seen trying to uphold ancient standards, is regarded as a right-wing reactionary. As Anthony Haden-Guest wrote: “Conceptual art has more and more become an academic art for people who don’t know how to make even academic art, and race, gender and AIDS continue to elicit their quota of high-minded, self-righteous work.” (Anthony Haden-Guest, True Colours: The Real Life of the Art World, New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1996, P.311.) 

In an art world without any standards of quality, political virtue signalling has become more important than talent. Art has always been corrupt, and dependent as much upon who you know, as what you know. But in today’s art world where pretentious and politically bigoted left-wing curators’ rule and there are no agreed standards, art is no longer a meritocracy and more like a corrupt political court, where those that parrot the clichés of left-wing Liberals and aggrieved identity, are highlighted at the expense of those (regardless of their talents) who do not fit the political agenda of the art élite. Frankly, if art was a sport, it would have been disbanded for corruption and nepotism decades ago. 

Exploiting an art form that had destroyed all its own standards, everyone from the postman to the rock musician and actor could dabble in playing the artist. Art, which had been a monastery, populated by people with a vocation who were unable to do anything else, had become swarmed with squatters and moochers all trying to make a buck and have a wild party.

In today’s art world there are thousands of artists with all the right credentials, (seven years of training in Art College, MFA's, scholarships, awards, and an exhibition history as long as your arm), yet the art they make is derivative, politically correct, and dead to any real invention or feeling. These smug purveyors of pretentious banalities have a passport to the art palaces of the world, because nothing succeeds like different ways of saying nothing. How can such supposedly important art, be so mind-numbingly boring? As Anthony Haden Gust observed, much of this new politically correct art is as dumb as the old Soviet Realism of Russia, “… most message art has had a thundering obviousness that puts me in mind of a visit to Moscow’s Tretiakov Gallery in the Brezhnev epoch. “See!” an Intourist guide instructed. “The drunken priest is treading on the Easter egg!” Got it.” (Anthony Haden-Guest, True Colours: The Real Life of the Art World. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press 1996, P. 309.)

In What is Art? Leo Tolstoy writing in 1898, morbidly observed that of the millions of art works produced in the world every year, only a few were genuinely real art (according to his own idiosyncratic notion of real art, as that with real human feelings - which taught mankind goodness). Tolstoy then described just how vast this deluge of ‘art’ in his era was: “I read somewhere that there are 30,000 artist-painters in Paris alone. There must be the same number in England, the same in Germany, the same in Russia, Italy and some smaller countries combined. So that there should be altogether about 120,000 artist-painters in Europe, and as many musicians, and as many artistic writers. If these 300,000 people produce at least three works each year (and many produce ten or more), then every year yields a million works of art.” (Leo Tolstoy, What is Art?, 1898, London: Penguin Classics, 1995, P. 113.) Tolstoy went on to say that of the million works a year produced by artists, only three or four of them according to Tolstoy were true and lasting works of real feeling and goodness. But if at the fag-end of the nineteenth century Tolstoy had thought his generation was experiencing a flood of art, today we are drowning under a tsunami of artists and art works at least a thousand times larger. When I was growing up in the 1980s, it seemed to me that the only artists I saw on TV, or heard about on the radio, were elderly world-famous painters who had just died after a lifetime of struggle and triumph. So today, I am baffled by the number of young artists I have never heard of, being breathlessly interviewed on TV and the radio, as if they were geniuses. Today not only is everyone famous for fifteen minutes, but it also seems that a teeming stream of talentless nobodies are hailed as ‘geniuses’ if only for fifteen minutes. Moreover, not only has the number of dilatants has become suffocating, but the number of truly great artists has also probably dropped since the 1900s, because our culture is so decadent, corrupt, and deluded.  

So, today we face the problem of the ‘paradox of choice’. Never before in human history, has so much art been made and meant so little. For example, there are over 1,544 visual artists in Ireland around 29,000 in the United Kingdom over 100,000 in the EU and 288,000 in the United States. Worldwide the number of visual artists is estimated at over 4,400,000 with around 600,000 of them fulltime professionals and 122,000 art students, all hoping to become successful artists. The biggest art community website DeviantArt has over 35 million members! In New York city there are over 1,500 art galleries with over 295 art galleries in New York’s Chelsea district alone! But while there may be millions of artists world-wide, the art market has frankly no use for most of them. The system can only support a few thousand of them and only around ten of any generation can become art stars commanding millions for their art and perhaps only one or two of them will have a place in art history a hundred years hence. Even if you have talent, you have almost a greater chance of winning the lottery than becoming a world-famous artist. Thy only people who are guaranteed to make money in the art world today, are the highly paid bureaucrats who administer the art world monster. Meanwhile, the artworld loves to hype the rare and random success of struggling artists who achieved late fame, but they say little about the legions of artists who carry on for decades and still never achieve any success, and who become pathetic and embarrassing failures to family and friends.

So, remove totally the idea of talent, quality, or lasting value (barely a handful of the artists famous today will be remember in twenty years never mind a hundred years), and look at the art world as it really is, countless artists of no value, chasing grants, bursaries, residencies, and exhibitions, who think more about their CVs than their art, and who are driven by narcissistic monomania, attention seeking desire for fame, base greed, and a lust for cool partners of either gender. So, much of the art world is also an egotistical game played by macho men more concerned with wining than creating great art. Sadly with Feminism, there are now just as many women who play art to win. So, the so-called biographies of contemporary artists, are often little more than a list of exhibitions, awards, and triumphs, that say more about their desire to achieve success than pursue an existential or aesthetic dream. Moreover, in the art world today, most friendship is based upon power not a mutual love for each other. It is all about how you can use the other persona and conversely how they can use you. Although the art world is supposed to be about truth, beauty, art, and love for humanity, many of its members are deluded, entitled, obnoxious, arrogant, snobbish, backbiting, ruthless, and nasty creeps. 

The only thing that reduces the sheer volume of artists in the art world, is the attrition of failure, economy penury, and people simply growing up and growing out of adolescent dreams of artistic glory. There are lately so many artists noisily proclaiming their importance, or media sources proclaiming their political relevance on their behalf, that personally I end up hating them all and choosing none of them. So, in art, if you are not fanatically adored by a sizable audience, you do not survive more than a few seasons. In fact, most of the truly great artists in art history, are also the most beloved through the centuries. So, art is essentially a very snobbish popularity contest.

              

And despite the vast number of artists in the world today, the percentage of truly great artists is as small as ever and the number of artists merely mentioned in art magazines like Artforum is as tiny as ever. So, for any artist to stand out, a campaign by dealers, public relations agents, curators, collectors, and critics must hype an artist, if they have any hope of standing out from the sea of often very similarly talented artists. But getting noticed, is just the first step in an artist’s attempt to be taken seriously. Their life after that, must be a constant series of exhibitions of consistent signature style and quality, networking with rich and famous people, and avoidance of professional scandal. Because far from the bohemian myths of artistic rebellion, today’s successful artists are some of the richest people in the world, with a public image to protect. Which is why given my mental illness, I no longer care if I am part of such a world, because I find telling lies, and being two-faced, almost impossible, and I became an artist to be anti-social and free.

              

From my youth, I groaned in agony every time some ancient crooner came on TV to sing their one-hit wonder again. Their later lives seemed to me to be completely pointless. Creatively they had died decades ago, but like zombies they continued to fill the airwaves with their ghosts. Why in God’s name did they want to repeat the same songs? Was the attention really that important to them? Did they have no self-respect? But as a young man going around museums, I thought that the consistent style of important painters was different. I had been taught in art history, that the uniform repetition of the same visual gimmicks, by these artistic ‘geniuses’, was a sign of their profound authenticity, commitment, and undiluted vision. However, now at the age of fifty-one, I see all that as pure bullshit. Fifty or sixty years is a long time not to have second thoughts, doubts, or reassessment! Just like the pathetic crooner on TV, the repetitious producer of a signature style is like a braindead zombie, desperate for money and attention. These artists with their signature style have only one trick that they formulated in the last year in Art College and have done to death for decades. Yet, few contemporary artistic signature styles deserve or require decades of elaboration. But ego, pride, and greed, commit these artists to repeat themselves until the day they die. I am no great fan of Duchamp, but I was always impressed by his refusal to play these repetitious games, and his cynicism towards art careers.

             

In the late 1960s, Andy Warhol declared that “everyone will be famous for 15 minutes” and in the early 1970s Joseph Beuys said, “every human being is an artist”. It took until the noughties for these prophesies to become true. Yet, as Gilbert and Sullivan had said long ago, "If everyone's somebody /Then no one's anybody." Since the 1970s, in art as in life, we now face the paradox of choice, there are so many artists and so many styles, but they mean less than ever, and even those we think we believe in - we still have doubts about. The noughties saw a tsunami of mediocrities all cunningly participating in an art without any professional standards, taste or boundaries - making countless, gimmicky art objects with the lifespan of a house fly. As Haden-Guest observed: “It is as if somewhere a computer has been stuttering out every possible combination and recombination of the moves of Duchamp, Joseph Beuys, and Andy Warhol as game plans for young artists.” (Anthony Haden-Guest, True Colours: The Real Life of the Art World, New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1996, P.311.) After the death of Modernism and real rebellious innovation we have had the orthodoxy of anti-orthodoxy of the Post-Modern era. 

Going around the city blocks of art galleries in New York’s Chelsea district in late January 2011 was one of the most dispiriting experiences of my life. Since a teenager, I had read about these famous galleries I had grown up reading about in art magazines, and I thought of them as secular churches. But seeing the reality of such a vast industry built upon artworks, left me feeling like a religious zealot living in poverty and misery, who finally sees the triumphant materialism of the Vatican. The art exhibited in these acres of art galleries was so decorous, safe, commercial, and politically correct, that frankly, these galleries might as well have been selling expensive high-end cars, designer clothes, perfume, or home decor. Since just about half a dozen galleries in America represented most of the artists represented in American museums, the thousands of other galleries in America and their tens of thousands of artists were wasting their time - if what they wanted was the immortality of the museums. So, most of these artists and dealers were just mercenaries trying to make as much money as fast as they could. I also realized that out of this vast sea of art galleries, almost anything might be declared important, fashionable, or a sign of the zeitgeist. But was any of it? I also realized that I had truly been deluded to think my art would ever find a place amongst this world of décor, commerce, virtue signalling, and social climbing. 

The old cliché criticism of Modern Art is “my five-year-old could make that”, but I have never seen any Modern Art a six-year-old could really copy, never mind invent. However, one of the dirty secrets of today’s contemporary art world, which is devoid of either originality or skill, is that every year, thousands of ‘world-class’ contemporary artworks are created by graduates and are just as soon forgotten along with their makers. Why? Because there is a significant difference between making a great work of art, and fighting tooth and nail, for its place in the pantheon of art. Just as there is a significant difference between having immense talent, and being able to snake charm the art world, into recognizing that talent. 

The world is literally awash in art works, many of them of excellent quality, but very little of it is saleable, by even the most experienced dealers. So, the art world is set up to specifically promote those on the inside and keep outsiders out. You have to be part of the scene and people have to approach you. It is like being an ambitious woman, if you prostitute yourself on the street, nobody of class will take you seriously. But if you become part of a cultured elite and play the courtesan, you will still be a harlot, but get better conditions for your work, and people will even stop noticing your wantonness. 

            

Works of real intensity and meaning can only happen occasionally in the life of even the greatest artist, but commerce demands a constant flow of products. The less an artwork says the better. People prefer artworks that are not very specific because they can project their own experience upon them. So, most successful artists are false prophets, fake gurus, con shaman, and manufactured geniuses. Their miracles are magic tricks, their spectacle of ecstasy a charade, and their intensity just brazen production. Their carnival does not stop the world in its tracks like real epiphanies, it only lubricates the machines of spectacle, distraction, and commerce. 

Fame is such a fickle mistress, in art just as much as in more famously cynical industries like pop music, fashion, and cinema. Trying to find a rational explanation for the overnight success of young artists or rediscovery of forgotten ones is like trying to find meaning in the music charts or lottery. In today’s media dominated world, artists who use public relations agents or cunningly make work designed to get coverage can achieve fifteen seconds of fame. Yet they distort the whole notion of art from the expression of a timeless insight, into the fleeting manufacture of a political thought-fart or faddish joke. What distinguishes many a great artist from a hack today, is how they are treated and how they are treated depends not on talent but fame, money and power.

It is true that eventually the cream rises to the top, however, one cannot avoid the realization that some are given far better opportunities to realize their talents than others. For every great artist there have been hundreds of equal talent, who life did not give the same chances. For example, you could be born an intellectual artist in an age of emotion or vice versa and doomed to marginalization no matter what you do. Moreover, talent for art, must be married to a head for business, and a talent for winning friends, and influencing people.

People love winners in life, and they shun failures, likewise, people love art that celebrates success even if it is facile, vacuous, and self-regarding. So, they prefer to see a famous artist long past his or her sell by date filling in large canvases as a celebration of self-indulgence, rather than see a failure doubt every minuet brushstroke, even if the results are more difficult, thoughtful, and profound. Mostly, people prefer the circus to the monastic cell, the flashy showman to the brooding introvert, the delusional attention seeker to the self-critical intellectual. So today, it is the show-off, rather than the truly talented, that often gets success, at least in the short term.

There are two great poisonous ideas of Modernism. The first is that great art must be original, taking on new forms, new mediums, and new ideas. This means that we have what Harold Rosenberg called “The Tradition of the New”, a virtual factory formulation of newer and still newer gimmicks and variations. This scientific evaluation of Modernist art, namely, prizing artists who did something first is a bizarre way to judge art. It completely ignores the humanity of art and its impact on the audience. For example, Modigliani did not innovate anything much, but his art is loved far more than Braque or Malevich who are considered far more innovative and important painters. The problem I have with innovative artistic movements is the law of diminishing returns. Once you get the idea of a movement or style, understand its social impact, and the response of its critics, you are often left with something no more important that a season’s colour or fabric in the fashion world, or the impact of a one hit wonder in the music charts. No wonder so many art critics become disillusioned and give up active art criticism. The constant changes of fashion and taste that make no real sense, leaves even many art world insiders bewildered, and many artists who start off as radicals end up becoming reactionary conservatives. As a teenager, I had grown up believing the hype of Modern Art which claimed that something extraordinary was happening in art that was not happening in the crass and dumb worlds of popular music or television variety shows. But as a middle-aged man, I now realize that most of the time, art does not add up to much more than a snobbish trend in the impotent and irrelevant art world.

Following on from this cult of the new is the assumption that craft is conservative, reactionary, and stupid. What codswallop! Most great art is a marriage of tradition and innovation, just look at Géricault, Rodin, Picasso, Beckman, or Lucian Freud to see what this great love affair between modernity and antiquity can yield. Likewise, just look at all the supposedly ‘cutting-edge’ art, that in reality, is nothing more than a rehash of recent fashionable academic and stylistic tricks, it not only lacks craft it also actually lacks originality as well!

The second poisonous idea of Modernism is that great art must be cryptic, puzzling, opaque and obscure, comprehensible to only the most highly educated. The notion is that great art is so complex that only those initiated into its mysteries and have the requisite intelligence, can appreciate its depths. This is complete and utter bullshit, promoted by people who have absolutely no concept of art before Duchamp and Warhol and think they are more intelligent than Da Vinci, Rembrandt, or Picasso! A broad understanding of art history proves the exact opposite, great art is accessible to everyone, no matter how complex its interior meanings are. The truly great artists in history from the cave painters to the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, the masters of the Renaissance and the Impressionist painters produced works of compelling visual beauty, power, and accessibility, even when the themes of their work dealt with difficult religious, spiritual, or humanistic concerns. Yes, there are hidden symbols and meanings in great works of the past, as well as references that were understood clearly at the time but have now become obscure, but that is always subservient to an initial lush visual impact that draws the viewer in and makes them want to learn more of its mysteries. So, the idea that ‘difficult’ art is also great art, is just not true most of the time. To quote Haden-Guest again: “Not all character flaws wreck an artist’s work, and plenty of good artists are sentimental, snobbish, or cruel, but condescending clever-cleverness is a killer.” (Anthony Haden-Guest, True Colours: The Real Life of the Art World, New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1996, P.377.) The greatest real artists from da Vinci to Picasso have achieved both the respect and love of the public and the fascination of intellectuals.

The period 1900-2019 in art has been one of a confusion of novelties and experimentation that frequently resulted in only new kinds of gimmicks and formulaic approaches to making art, no more significant than the old orthodoxies they sought to overthrow. Seeing a room full of Cubist inspired paintings in the Thyssen-Bornemisza museum in Madrid, in 2004, illustrated this perfectly for me. While the innovations of Cubism by its father’s Picasso and Braque are undeniably intellectually impressive, as art, I have always been rather bored with their end results (with collages aside). Now, the influence of Cubism on twentieth century art cannot be denied. Its paintings lead to abstraction, and futurism. Its collages lead to Dada and thus Pop art and even conceptualism. And its assemblages lead to many of the key developments in modernist sculpture. But seeing a room full of virtually identical cubist inspired art by so many minor artists, proved to me the madness of art world fashion, which leads so many to imitate the stylistic innovations and gimmicks of others, that they think important. These works in total, seemed to illustrate to me a kind of mass hysteria that prompted artists to cubify everything, because they thought at the time, that modernism meant seeing the world in terms of little boxes.

 

Many Modern Art movements from Futurism on, are inseparable from attention seeking stunts and calculated provocation that has guaranteed their place in art history but left their work shallow and crass. Dada too was more interesting as a protest movement than as an aesthetic expression and now that its anti-art has become accepted as High Art in the contemporary cannon it has become completely self-contradictory and hypocritical. Moreover, according to the Formalist art critic Hilton Kramer, the assessment of art was irrevocably debased with Susan Sontag’s publication of Notes on Camp in 1968, which degraded connoisseurship and intellectual discernment, in favour of populist fun and a pleasure taken in art so bad it was thought to be good. 

            

I had known Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades in reproduction in books since I was a young teenager - and in books they had quite an iconic and insolent character. But when I saw his coat rack nailed to the floor, snow-shovel, and iron bottle dryer for the first time in the Pompidou Centre in Paris in 1990, I was shocked by their total banality and lack of aesthetic interest. I instantly thought that they did not deserve to be called art - even if they had a place in art history that could not be taken back. As a painter and draughtsman Duchamp’s work meant nothing to me. In December 1995, with my friend Edward, I watched Duchamp; A Game of Chess a documentary by Jean-Marie Drot with music by Edgar Varese. Watching Duchamp act enigmatic - while his every pronouncement was emphasized by Varese's clattering dissonant music – Edward and I were soon in fits of laughter! For the whole fifty-six minutes of the documentary, we heckled and ridiculed the great innovator of Dada for his and his follower’s pompous self-regard. Had I watched the documentary by myself, I would probably have found it a tedious chore. But as always, Edward's wit deflated Duchamp’s camp regard for his own intellect, with a necessary injection of scepticism and common sense.

And by the age of twenty-eight, after studying Duchamp’s flimsy oeuvre for many years, I realised that Duchamp was a mediocre draughtsman and painter, and very limited artist, who turned his creative impotence into anti-art, and whose flimsy oeuvre later influenced students and artists with even less to say, and lacking Duchamp's undoubted originality as the father of the entire conceptual game. From the 1960s, as Art College admittance standards declined, the art student population greatly expanded, traditional drawing and painting lessons were abandoned, arts training became more and more theoretical, social welfare and arts grants in the West mushroomed to prevent Europe and America sliding into Communism, and the entire Western Culture became selfish, narcissistic, and delusional – Marcel Duchamp became the patron saint to a vast sea of talentless charlatans. Duchamp’s supposed genius, and the nihilism of his anti-art became their alibi. As I have mention before, I am a bit of a student of the early work of artists, and I have been awed by the early work of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Georges Seurat, Picasso, Dali and to a lesser extent Schiele and there are many artists like Modigliani that produced promising early work. But Duchamp’s early works are nothing but clumsy, vapid, and uncertain pastiches in comparison. By the looks of it, Duchamp was never going to be a master painter or draughtsman and his artistic ally Francis Picabia had far greater natural ability. I think Duchamp was essentially a cunning and unprincipled looter, he knew he did not have the talent or work ethic to be a great artist in any conventional sense, so he decided to just break all aesthetic laws and standards to create anti-art. For decades Duchamp ponced around the rich salons of Europe and America pontificating about his anti-art to the super rich! A seducer of rich heiresses and the snobby and pretentious art world élite, Duchamp was no more a rebel than Edward G. Robinson was a gangster! Duchamp deserves a place in art history, if only to understand the origin of so much boring, indifferent, pretentious, and po-faced rubbish of the last ninety years. As Wayne Andersen observed: “Marcel Duchamp’s gift to artists was similar to the Marquis de Sade’s gift to sadist – relief from moral restraints, accountability, guilt, and shame.” (Wayne Andersen, Marcel Duchamp: The Failed Messiah. USA: Èditions Fabriart, 2011.) I have always felt that Duchamp’s work is one of the greatest bores in the history of art. Hardly any of his work is interesting to look at in the flesh. It is all message, without any aesthetic pleasure or complexity of feeling. There is deadness to far too much of Duchamp’s work. Duchamp not only severed the connection between talent, craft, and art, he also turned art into a serious of unfunny jokes, too po-faced to be laughed at, too unfinished and obscure to be rationally understood. As we all know, comedy dates faster than most art forms, so even if Duchamp’s jokes were funny in the nineteen-tens they are not today. Art after Duchamp became as Tom Wolf joked: “Not “seeing is believing,” you ninny, but “believing is seeing,” for Modern art has become completely literary: the paintings and other works exist only to illustrate the text.” (Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975, P. 5.) Because without words to inflate the meaning of such work - it would just be meaningless junk and a waste of time and money.

The iconoclasm of Duchamp’s Ready-Mades cannot be repeated, only turned into a new form of academic cliché.  These copies can be inventive like when Manzoni substituted Duchamp's vial of 50cc of Paris Air 1919, with balloons of his own breath and cans of his own shit (though this is now in some doubt, some say they were filled with plaster.) But the meaning remained essentially the same, the gullibility and crassness of the art market which will speculate on anything it thinks will make money. What artists like Manzoni did that was different, was use public relations people to create news stories about their art stunts, and still to this day, artistic ‘outrage’ is framed by manipulation of the media, without it their works would just be so many trees falling without notice in a forest. In contrast, paintings by Rembrandt, Cézanne, Picasso, Pollock, Bacon or Kiefer can be extended, and reinterpreted in subtle ways by generation after generation. 

If art was merely about ideas, Rembrandt would have simply dashed off cartoon likenesses of people and religious scenes. But he knew that art is so much more than ideas, it is about a process of self-discovery, an empathetic involvement with one’s subjects, and a sensual engagement with one’s materials. There is thus no single idea and nothing superficial about Rembrandt, his choice of subjects and allegorical and symbolic references, were merely the starting point for a visual exploration of the human soul that was as visual profound as the works of Shakespeare. 

Andy Warhol was talented as a draughtsman and had great talent as an ideas man. But his art was cynical, voyeuristic, and vampiric. I could not forgive him for turning art into an impersonal form of manufacturing and giving license to so many talentless opportunistic followers to also run their own factories of ‘art’. Warhol’s silk-screen ‘paintings’ reduced the art of painting to its most rudimental aspects. Silkscreened images appropriated (stolen) from mass media sources, their cropping and colour, often decided by his staff - who were often high on drugs - had almost nothing to do with Warhol. Incredible meanings were ascribed to these paintings, yet the meanings resided with the photographers and newspapers and magazines that Warhol stole from. It was claimed that Warhol told the story of America in the late twentieth century, when in fact it was the photographers that he had appropriated from, who had told this story. Because Warhol was one of the first artists to appropriate mass media images in the early 1960s, he did not (at first) suffer from the copyright lawsuits, criticism for appropriating imagery, or demands that he give a justification for his interest in such imagery that artists today constantly receive. The kind amoral intellectual ‘inquiries’ that artists like Warhol made throughout the final decades of the twentieth century without much debate would simply not be tolerated today. Do not get me wrong, I think intellectually Warhol was one of the greatest artists in the twentieth century, because of the originality of his ideas, the uniqueness of his cool impersonal persona, and his uncanny understanding of his times, but as a ‘painter’ I simply don’t think his work has any meaning in its fracture (make up). His technique was almost totally mechanical, and it is laughable to read any personal emotion or meaning in his paint. However, since Warhol, painting has often been diminished in art circles (especially in America) as merely a mechanical process to convey ideas.

Other than Duchamp, no other artist has done more to debase the notion of art than Joseph Beuys, by expanding it to include everything, and attach to felt, fat, and detritus - mythical and pseudo-religious bullshit. The fact that the myths Beuys created about himself were often lies, distortions, or crimes of omission did not seem to bother those in the art world. The famous story of Beuys as a German JU87 Stuka rear-gunner in Russian at the age of twenty-three, being shot down and then saved from death by Tartars, who wrapped him in felt and fat, has been proved false. He a shot down, but he was saved by German commandos. Moreover, what the story did not included was any mention of the many Russian soldiers and civilians Beuys bombed and killed, in a war on the Eastern Front that was about extermination not chivalric combat. The Russians were terrified of the JU87 Stuka and the terrifying scream of the dive-bomber’s siren as it bombed, and they frequently executed captured Stuka airmen.

Beuys had minor formal gifts as a draughtsman and sculptor but his drawings and sculptures seemed far more substantial because of the even more dreadful work of his deluded and talentless contemporaries in the 1970s.  More importantly, I hate all cult leaders, and after his death, Beuys work became nothing more than the shoddy props of a magician. I loathed Beuys for making the mythology of artists more important than their actual artworks. This German ‘Doctor Dolittle’ who thought he could talk to the animals, is the father of much of contemporary art. In front of art audiences, Beuys lectured on art history, spirituality, politics, ecology, philosophy, aesthetics, and God know what else, yet he had no formal qualifications in any of these subjects, and he did not submit a thesis on any of this to anyone accredited to judge it. This was the typical bullshitting of a con-artist or cult-leader. The only time I truly believed in the artistic and political importance of Joseph Beuys, was when one night in our hotel room in Amsterdam in February 1995, my friend Edward and I snorted cocaine, and thought we were going to establish a new radical artistic political party based on the ideas of the likes of Nietzsche and Beuys! That’s the kind of stupid rubbish you come up with high on cocaine! But Beuys was powered by pure delusion - and he had no insight into his condition. His notion that ‘everyone is an artist’ was a meaningless hippie statement. Even if everyone is an artist, there are some artists who are far better than the rest. The world is crammed full of people who do call themselves artists and nag the world for attention, but frankly only a few have the craft, vision, and personalities to hold one’s attention. Beuys’s statement that “everyone is an artist” was also a gross and impertinent insult to real artists, whether they be a white man like Lucian Freud, a woman like Louise Bourgeois, or a black man like Basquiat! As Julian Barnes observed: “Art isn’t, can’t be, a temple from which the incompetent, the charlatan, the chancer and the publicity-chaser should be excluded; art is more like a refugee camp where most are queuing for water with a plastic jerry-can in their hand. What we can say, though, as we face another interminable video-loop of a tiny stretch of the artist’s own unremarkable life, or collaged wall of banal photographs, is: ‘Yes of course its art, of course you’re an artist, and your intentions are serious, I’m sure. It’s just that this is very low level stuff: try giving it more thought, originality, craft, imagination – interest, in a word.’” (Julian Barnes, Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art, London: Jonathan Cape, 2015, P. 234.) At the end of the day, the world is glutted with millions of art objects, most of them hoarded in artist’s houses and studios, or in the storerooms of museums, never to be seen. Ironically, the man who said, “everyone is an artist” became one of the only superstars and multimillionaires in the 1970s art world. 

In The Painted Word, Tom Wolf recounts an anecdote he claimed was popular amongst Conceptualists in the 1970s. It supposed that a poor and unknown artist was sitting in an automate in Union Square and was inspired to create “the greatest work of art in the history of the world” and recorded this using his finger to apply some water on a napkin. But within minutes the water had evaporated - leaving no record of his masterpiece. And so, he died of a broken heart, and the waiter thought he was just a dead wino. “Now, the question is: Would that have been the greatest work of art in the history of the world or not? The conceptualists would answer: Of course, it was. It’s not permanence and materials, all that Winsor & Newton paint and other crap, that are at the heart of art, but two things only: Genius and the process of creation! Later they decided that Genius might as well take a walk, too.” (Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975, P. 93.) The point being that by the 1970s the whole notion of proven talent and genius had been replaced by the far more democratic notion of creators engaged in mere process and declaring themselves artists. These so-called artists in New York in the 1970s, spent more time trying to justify themselves as artists - than actually making anything that really impressed people.

These megalomaniacal and solipsistic self-declared artists from the 1970s onward pretended that they were above any criticism or interrogation. But as Julian Spalding observed this was absurd: “When David Frost asked Tracy Emin on his TV show why her bed was a work of art, she replied, ‘Because I say it is’. He did not then asker her, as he could have done, ‘But who says you’re an artist?’ Artists do not, by any means, hold all the cards; they are free to try to be artists, but others are also free to decide for themselves whether they have achieved their goal.” (Julian Spalding, The Eclipse of Art: Tackling the Crisis in Art Today, London: Prestel, 2003, P. 76.) Frankly an artist can call themselves the reincarnation of Michelangelo - but we can refuse to believe them!

For millennia the creation of a masterpiece was the triumph of creative genius and profound human feeling. But since Dada after World War One and with ever increasing regularity since the 1950s the creation of ‘masterpieces’ has been the lucky fluke of one monkey over millions of other monkeys- trashing around studios. The assemblages and sculptures made from found or manufacture objects of artists from Duchamp to Koons, Hirst and The Chapman Brothers are just megalomaniacal and pretentious child’s play. I remember as a child using my imagination to create battleships, fortresses, and spaceships out of objects I found around my home like; boxes, bottles, and hoover parts. But I was not insane, I knew they weren’t really battleships, fortresses, and spaceships! Yet, that kind of sanity is wholly lacking in the contemporary art world, that increasingly resembles some weird religious cult where the artificial presentations of intellectually lazy contemporary artists are worshiped like holy relics and all kinds of social, political, sexual, and philosophical messages are read into their accumulation of objects. Most of these objects are failures of metaphor and imagination.

The art of conceptualists like Duchamp, Kline, Nauman, Koons or Hirst reveal nothing of the intentions, thoughts and feelings of their maker, in fact, they often seek only to confuse the viewer and create pseudo-mystery. There is no human communication. Only blunt objectness. Their artworks are metaphors without resonance or resolution. No contract of humane and honest dialogue is made between the viewer and artist. Instead, these artists act like cult leaders revealing little, but hinting that there is a world of knowledge that they are withholding for the enunciated (fat chance.) Unlike paintings, which can be minutely manipulated by the artist, ready-mades cannot be changed, manipulated, modified, or fully created. They are borrowed objects displaced to an art gallery, not fully born artistic objects of a human creator. Of course, occasionally ready-mades can create a higher degree of consciousness in the viewer, framing reality in a way that creates new understandings, but the viewer can never be sure if they are responding in the way the artist of the object planned. The real purpose of these works is to promote of the myth and cult of the artist as Harold Rosenberg pointed out: “The uncollectable art object serves as an advertisement for the showman-artist, whose processes are indeed more interesting than his product and who markets his signature appended to commonplace relics. To be truly destructive of the aesthetic, art povera would have to forsake art action for political action. As art, its products bear the burden of being seen by non-believers, who must be persuaded to respond to them. But to make a fetish potent outside its cult is precisely the function of the aesthetic.” (Harold Rosenberg, The De-definition of Art: Action Art to Pop to Earthworks, Educating Artists, New York: Collier Books, 1973, P. 38.)

             

So, art lost meaning for me after 1955, when traditional skills in drawing and painting were abandoned, and hand-made objects that spoke of one’s soul became taboo. Traditional artistic measures of skill, vision or expression no longer applied in an art world filled with found objects, video pieces, installations, photographs, and text. Instead, art had to be novel, gimmicky, cutting-edge, shocking and media worthy, but most of this stuff was worth only a moment’s consideration. The art movements from 1955 to 2022 like; African Art, East Asian Art, Junk Sculpture, Colour-Field Painting, Neo-Dada, Situationism, Pop Art, Hard-Edge Painting, Snapshot Aesthetic, Fluxus, Shaped Canvas, Minimalism, Art Photography, Art Povera, Conceptual Art, Earth Art, Happening, Process Art, Funk Art, Feminist Art, Performance Art, Public Art, “Bad” Painting, Sound Art, High-Tech Art, Instillation art, Media Art, Political Art, Crafts-As-Art, Latin American Art, Op Art, Video Art, Body Art, Land Art, Photo-Realism, Hyperrealism, Appropriation, East Village Art, Neo-Geo, Australian Indigenous Art, Digital Art, Urban Art, Young British Art, Indian Art, Chinese Art, Identity Art, Zombie Formalism, and Woke Art mean virtually nothing to me. As Robert Hughes declared in 1972: ““Advanced” art – whether conceptual art, process art, video, body art or any of their proliferating hybrids – avoids the object like the plague. The public has retreated, in turn, from it. This is a wordldwide phenomenon, and what now exists is not simply a recession of interest (and talent) but a general weariness – a reluctance to believe in the avant-garde as principal. To be ahead of the game now seems pointless, for the game – under its present rules – is not worth playing.” (Robert Hughes, The Decline and Fall of the Avant-Garde, Time, 1972.) He was dead right, as an artist myself, I gave up wanting to be part of the avant-garde game long ago. The only exceptions in the debacle of contemporary art since 1955 for me, have been some of the artists of Neo-Expressionism in the early 1980s, stubborn Realists like Lucien Freud and some of The School of London like Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach.

              

Today there are ‘major artists’ who cannot draw, paint, sculpt, and are virtually illiterate. Yet they have more success in the art world than their peers who are cursed with the ancient skills of Western Art. For example, looking back at my early and brief infatuation with Tracey Emin and her work, I am dreadfully embarrassed. Caught up in her narcissism and the hype surrounding her, I adored her the same way I loved looking at sexually crude and hysterical, loutish women on Trash TV talk shows and reality television at the end of the 1990’s. Because I found them a fascinating exposure of the vulgar nature of some women, which had been hidden by the idealism of Fine Art and the propaganda of Feminism. However, looking back at Emin’s oeuvre, I am astonished by how appallingly bad most of it is on an aesthetic and technical level. Nothing Emin made was creatively innovative, she merely pilfered ideas from Expressionism, Minimalism, Conceptualism, Feminist Art, and Slacker Art and turned it into a pathetic expression of her narcissistic vanity and sexual degeneracy. And her talent, craft, skill, and intellect were virtually nil. So, seeing the outrageous hype and critical acclaim she received from many in the art world sickened me. If these people really thought Emin was a genius, then their cultural authority was totally bankrupt! Then in mid-December 2011, it was announced that the incompetent Conceptual Expressionist Tracey Emin had been made a Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy of Arts! And to compound the insult, art critic Jonathan Jones in The Guardian praised her abilities and tenure! Later, in April 2015 she was given an exhibition Tracey Emin/Egon Schiele: Where I want to Go where her dire epileptic scribbles were hung alongside the work of one of the greatest draughtsmen of the twentieth century! 

               

Nothing original of any importance has been created since 1965-7 with the emergence of Actionists, Minimalism, Happenings and Land Art. If you were generous, you could also call the emergence of Hyperrealism in 1974 as somewhat original - although it also harked back to a very academic and Victorian desire to wow the public with dumb and meticulous realism. But then in 1975 the innovation of Western art ground to a halt. After a hundred years of countless innovative artistic movements, we had gone from the flickering, sketchy brushstrokes of the Impressionists and their celebration of bourgeois life in Paris – to the obscenity and self-mutilations of the Actionist and their assault on the bourgeoisie in Vienna in the 1960s. 

Because nothing in the past forty years has been original in the ground-breaking way that the work of Picasso, Malevich, Kandinsky, Duchamp, Pollock, or Warhol had been. Art has become merely a Neo-Mannerist repacking of ideas created by Modernist artists from 1870-1974. Thus, in an age when nothing being produced is truly masterful, heartfelt, original, or iconoclastic and when art itself has no real importance, who you are, has become more important than what you make. Art has become a by-product of the social carnival, and the colourful life stories of artists, have become more important than what they make. Instead of original artists we have art stars, national artists, protest artists, political artists and identity artists representing; female, gay, lesbian, black, handicapped or mentally ill communities. The art of these various manifestations of identity, have varied naturally from genius to utter crap, but regardless of quality, it has all been unoriginal compared to Modernist achievements. 

              

The avant-garde art world of the 1960s saw the abandonment of the art object of quality and the whole idea of the masterpiece with its hope that it would speak to posterity. Artists trying to circumvent the art market took up fragile, impermanent materials that would decay in decades, creating a nightmare for those stupid enough to pay good money for unexchangeable art objects. Thus, conservationists often found themselves repairing works coming straight from the artist’s studio. These avant-garde artists also shifted the emphasis from masters and their long-lasting masterpieces in oil on canvas or in bronze - to a mass of unskilled, semi-literate people producing works with the detritus of contemporary life. All claiming, that like their heroes Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys, their lives and what they did with them were more important than conventional works of craft, skill, and beauty. This was easy for them since so often their ‘education’ and exhibitions were funded by their government. However, looking back retrospectively, their efforts that once seemed so radical - now appear dated, jaded and cliché, and the faded condition of their works, a stark condemnation of their lack of professional ethics, craft, and short-term historical ambitions.  As Peter Fuller observed: “On the one hand, we have seen since the last war a profusion of mixed media objects and activities in such things as conceptualism, performance, environmental art, etc. All this has failed to produce a single work of stature, let alone a masterpiece. It can now be said with confidence that the claims made for such innovations were, at best, vastly exaggerated.” (Peter Fuller, Seeing Berger: A Revaluation of Ways of Seeing, London: Writers and Readers, 1980, P.26.) The great promises of the late avant-garde turned out, mostly to be a decadent hippie period drama, populated by talentless eccentrics determined to be weird and wacky, and of only parochial interest to art world insiders in the handful of post-codes of Modern Art. Those who defended such work, claimed that this idea-based art was an expression of its time, but in fact, it was largely a handicapped form of expression that wallowed in easy, conceptual mediocrity. 

Such conceptual and minimal art is soulless and heartless, leaving me often feeling dead inside when I view it. As Robert Hughes observed about Carl André’s pile of bricks: “A Rodin in a parking lot is still a misplaced Rodin: Equivalent VIII in the same lot is just a pile of bricks”.  (Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New: Art and The Century of Change, 1980, London: Thames and Hudson, P. 369.) This dependency on the museum to rarefy the object is a major indictment of conceptual art. As a confirmed atheist, I look at most conceptual art like Michael Craig-Martin’s An Oak Tree from 1973 (a glass of water on a glass shelf, with a semiotic style text beside it, explaining why it was an oak tree) with the same kind of distrust, I felt when told as a boy by the Catholic Church to believe that a wafer and some red wine, was the body and blood of Christ. Today the contemporary art gallery is a form of church, which exhibits the relics of the modern saint, the artist. If like the boy in The Emperor’s New Clothes you see the relics as nothing but what they are; a urinal, a pile of bricks, a shark in formaldehyde, or an unmade bed, you are considered an insensitive and ignorant fool. Surely you can see they are; a questioning of the nature of art, a questioning of aesthetic beauty, an intimation of mortality and a record of existential anguish! This we are told, is art that makes you think! Well if this is thinking – then thinking really has little use! It is all far too obvious, far too easy to understand, and far too boring to pay much attention to. The fact of the matter is that artists can claim anything they want to be art, but it is the audience that will decide if it is worth more than a quick look, never mind an art that can enrich the complexity of their lives and how they imagine themselves. 

The mere presence in an art gallery today, (so long as it has been called art by someone who has called themselves an artist and this statement accepted by two or more curators) is enough it seems to convert by magic, ordinary objects into art. And as Tom Wolfe pointed out: “The public plays no part in the process whatsoever. The public is not invited (it gets a printed announcement later).” (Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975, P. 23.) Moreover, how such and such an object becomes conferred with the status of a ‘cutting-edge’ masterpiece in today’s world, would be utterly unrecognizable to an art lover a hundred and fifty years ago.  Since the process has nothing to do with old judgments of skill, craft, common sense, or humane genius. Instead, a significant artwork is now judged important by the degree of media shock and column inches it can generate, who buys it, who exhibits it and who the artist can call his drinking buddies. These are the laws not off Fine Art, but of celebrity and media culture in general. As Brian Sewell put it “…art is now art because someone in perceived authority says it is, or someone puts it in a gallery, or someone known as a collector collects it: art is now to be defined in the same simple terms as a celebrity, just as someone who is known for being known is a celebrity, so something that is known for being art is art.” (‘A Perfect Display Case’, Evening Standard 11.04.03.) 

Moreover, philosophically this situation is absurd as John Carey observed: “The idea that by calling something a work of art you are bestowing on it some divine sanction is now as intellectually respectable as belief in pixies… They assume the existence of a separate category of things called works of art (to which they believe Emin’s productions belong), which are intrinsically more valuable than things which are not works of art, and which accordingly deserve universal respect and admiration. These assumptions, we can now see, belong to the late 18th century, and are no longer valid in our culture… If this seems to plunge us into the abyss of relativism, then I can only say that the abyss of relativism is where we have always been in reality – if it is an abyss.” (John Carey, What Good Are the Arts?, London: Faber & Faber, 2005, P. 30.)

The trouble with art today, as writers like; Harold Rosenberg, Robert Hughes, Hilton Kramer, Peter Fuller, Brian Sewell and Julian Spalding have pointed out, is that there are no agreed standards by which it can be judged. “No one can say with assurance what a work of art is – or, more important, what is not a work of art. Where an art object is still present, as in painting, it is what I have called an anxious object: it does not know whether it is a masterpiece or junk. It may, as in the case of a collage by Schwitters, be literally both.” (Harold Rosenberg, The De-definition of Art: Action Art to Pop to Earthworks, Educating Artists, New York: Collier Books, 1973, P. 12.)

As Hilton Kramer noted in 1973: “Duchamp’s legendary assault on the work of art as traditionally conceived effectively demonstrates that there is no such thing as an object or a gesture that, within the magical museum context, cannot be experienced as art, and this demonstration has the effect of consigning both the idea of tradition and the museum itself to a limbo of arbitrary choices and gratuitous assertions. Which is what our culture has now become.” (Hilton Kramer, Age of the Avant-Garde: An Art Chronicle of 1956-72, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973, P. 18.) Or, as John Carey suggested: “The ignoramus’s attitude to art used to be parodied as ‘I don’t know much about art but I know what I like.’ But this, it seems, is all any of us can say.” (John Carey, What Good Are the Arts?, London: Faber & Faber, 2005, P. 31.)

So, is it any wonder that Donald Kuspit famously declared in 1979, that: “Now it is inevitable that one acknowledge, however reluctantly – for both critic and artist – that ‘the critic is artist’, in the fullest sense that the eroding idea of ‘artist’ retains. All the weight of meaning in the formula of their relationship is now on the critic rather than the artist.” In other words, since art had become so conceptual, minimal, and obscure - its meaning was signified not by the artist, but by the critic who interpreted it. Kuspit declaration that “the critic is artist” – might have been seen as obnoxious and arrogant - and it surely was. But it also reflected just how detached from common sense contemporary art had become. Thus, if contemporary art was to establish any meaning at all, it was through specialists in contemporary art like art critics, for whom artists merely provided illustrations for their philosophical speculations.

But in my view, art works that require a literary or philosophical explanation stand condemned. Since the 1950s art theory, the spawn of academia has killed art stone dead. Often making critics like Clement Greenberg, Lucy Lippard, Arthur C Danto, Rosalind Krauss and Donald Kuspit, more important than the artists they write about. As early as the 1950s pessimistic philosophers like E.M. Cioran observed how art had become so perversely self-conscious: “It is the individual who creates art, no longer art which creates the individual, just as it is no longer the work that counts, but the commentary that precedes or follows it. And the best thing an artist produces now are his ideas on what he might have done. He has become his own critic, as the average man has become his own psychologist. No age has been so self-conscious. Seen from this point of view, the Renaissance looks barbarous, the Middle Ages prehistoric, and it is only the last century which does not seem a little childish.” (E. M. Cioran, The Temptation to Exist, London: Quartet Books, 1987, P. 139.) Sadly, I too have become infected by this mannerist, self-consciousness in my own writings and art - even though I try my best to rise above it - and feel only my best work transcends it. 

Idea based art, like adverts - are intrinsically limited - once the viewer has grasped what is being conveyed - there is little need to return to the work. Based on aggro, sensation, shock, political-agitation, or sexual display such work usually fails to give the viewer second thoughts. Whereas great art, whatever the medium, always contains an element of complex multi-layered meaning and material complexity that rewards renewed contemplation. The greatest art works are self-evidently the result of a journey by the artist into the deepest complexities of material, iconography and meaning and are the result of unrepeatable inspiration. And many of the greatest artists in art history have also been extremely eccentric characters. As such, masterpieces are rare even in the oeuvres of great artists. So often idea-based artists, try to manufacture complexity - but typically such efforts are a predictable academic dance of the seven veils.

 So, art today is more often than not, visually boring, obtuse, and pretensions, erecting an immediate barrier between the viewer and the art object. So, much art today is driven by the desire to baffle, frustrate, bore, or deny the viewer. Questions are asked but never answered, sex is made repulsive or bewildering, conventional politics and religion is mocked, and the viewer is made to look stupid. Those in academia often claim philosophy or art history is a complex subject, it is like quantum mechanics - you would not expect it to be understandable to the common man. My response to that is that, art is part of human civilization and is about being human, so it should be understandable to most humans of general intelligence. Moreover, the origin of philosophy was not in writing, but discourse, and modern philosophy’s entrenchment in the text has led to its complete and utter disconnection with the ordinary man. Yet while contemporary artists love to come up with ideas for artworks, they strangely hate their ideas being challenged by critics. So, while they love to flood the world with their vision, they are offended that other people might not appreciate their efforts. Of course the dirty secret is the art elite do not want the common man in their galleries - which are bastions of privilege and crony capitalism, and as Tom Wolf pointed out: “The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in Modern Art, the notion that the public scorns, ignores, fails to comprehend, allows to wither, crushes the spirit of, or commits any other crime against Art or any individual artist is merely a romantic fiction, a bittersweet Trilby sentiment. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.” (Tom Wolf, The Painted Word, London: Black Swan, 1989, P. 26.)

Not only does it not take much talent, skill, imagination, or intellect to create ‘important’ contemporary art, many of those that make it like Frank Stella, Joseph Kosuth, Brice Nauman, Jeff Koons or Damian Hirst are given major museum exhibitions in their early thirties. Not only are they not even forced to suffer a decade of marginalization or misunderstanding - but their work is also lapped up as soon as they leave Art College, and they are anointed as masters’ worthy of retrospectives by their mid to late thirties. Since the 1960s, the so-called battle of the avant-garde rebels, against an uncomprehending art world is nothing but a sham. These kings of the talentless are only misunderstood by the many members of the public, who rightly despise their efforts and wonder at the sanity of the art world. 

Abstract art has also caused me problems as an art lover firstly because I do not respect the technical ability of abstract artists, and secondly as an atheist I do not share their religious aspirations or delusions. I also came to abstract art when it had largely lost is significance, purity of thought and originality. But by then, abstract painting had become such an essential form of corporate and home decoration, that countless mediocre painters had prosperous careers, far beyond their actual merits, producing vacuous backdrops to the lives of the rich and famous. Devoid of socio-political or sexual content, lacking even human or animal references, such abstract art was the perfect anodyne backdrop in public museums and corporate offices. Such abstract art could only cause offence to the rare few nut bags afraid of red, yellow, and blue, or more likely the few people enraged by what passed as art and the prestige and capital it accrued. It was something John Berger had already noted in the late 70s: “Recently, corporate capitalism, having grounds to believe itself triumphant, has begun to adopt abstract art. And the adoption is proving easy. Diagrams of aesthetic power lend themselves to becoming emblems of economic power. In the process almost all lived experience has been eliminated from the image. Thus, the extreme of abstract art demonstrates, as an epilogue, the original problematic of professional art: an art in reality concerned with a selective, very reduced area of experience, which nevertheless claims to be universal.” (John Berger, The Primitive and the Professional, About Looking, Vintage International, New York, 1991, originally published 1980, P. 73-74). So, I admired artists like Sigmar Polke and Julian Schnabel who reinterpreted abstraction and often mixed it with figurative references.

Growing up in Ireland and seeing utterly banal, timid, and myopic abstract painters like Felim Egan, Sean Scully, Mark Francis and Diana Copperwhite have careers in Ireland and abroad, that I could only dream of was galling to me. To me their work was nothing better than corporate art, impersonal, safe, modest, and conservative, a threat to no one and nothing. So, I am proud that I never settled for these glib achievements and dared to be different. 

I remember in Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum in 1992, I stared for some fifteen minutes at Barnett Newman’s vast oil painting Cathedra from 1951. Looking at this huge foggy moonlight blue canvas with a single strip of white just off its centre, I tried to experience its religious depths. I looked at it from a variety of distances imagining it as some profound primal field of God, but despite being stoned on hashish I still did not believe its religiosity, and I gave up on Newman and his vastly pretentious claims for his very barren painting. In fact, Newman was the most talentless and formally crippled of the Abstract Expressionists and that really is not saying much. But then there was only a modicum of craft involved in Barnet Newman’s paintings or those later followers of his masking tape school of painting. Of course, he had to think of how to lay them out, but there was no imagination or skill involved, literally anyone could have made his canvases. Later, I learned that apart from Andy Warhol (who made no claims to purity) Newman was also one of the most socially pushy painters in New York. And Newman could attend all these openings and dinner parties, because the actual making of his paintings took such little time and effort. Even with painters like Rothko whose profundity I did believe in, I wondered how one could continue to claim spiritual depth when you had made over 800 huge canvases! Surely some of them had to be less profound and meaningful than others? Moreover, since so many of them were so similar, one wondered if Rothko had merely found a signature style that appeared to signify depth. Yes Rothko was a depressive and obsessively focused painter, but just because he was tragic and compulsive and later killed himself does not mean he was really a great painter. 

As a teenager, I was in awe of the Existential heroics of the Abstract-Expressionists and believed Greenberg when he claimed that they were a continuation of great Modernist painting. Yet, now I feel duped and think that the Abstract-Expressionist were more like the continuation of the conceptualism of Duchamp and their very limited paintings were merely illustrations for heroic Existential mythology. When I was also a teenager, I believed that I was undergoing an Existential crisis and the idea that my anguish had some great philosophical meaning gave me some comfort! But it took me years to realise that I was really going through a psychological and psychiatric crisis. I now think Existentialism was a heroic atheistic mythology which refused to acknowledge its psychological problems. I have no doubt that many of the Abstract-Expressionists struggled for decades before achieving success, but that does not make their art any better, unless you believe the hype. If I continue to greatly admire Pollock and de Kooning it is for the psychological battle within their work, and how they managed to transform inexpressible psychological trauma into living paint, rather than the formal Modernist qualities or myths of Abstract-Expressionism around their work.

Staring at great works by Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, Mark Rothko, Barnet Newman, Clifford Still, Robert Ryman, or Sean Scully for ten minutes I can never be sure if I am feeling what the artist intended. And given the kind of Theosophical mumbo jumbo that artists like Kandinsky and Mondrian believed do I really want to drink that Kool-Aid. In addition, when I have had feelings of awe in front of abstract works, I have never been sure if it was a real glimpse into secret order of the universe, the existential void of being, an intimation of God, or just a cheap theatrical visual trick and the workings of my own mind. Much of the time I wondered whether I was simply deluding myself or self-hypnotizing myself. I could not tell if my feelings in front of theses artists’ works were real or merely the imposition of my knowledge of their careers and life on the meagre stuff of their actual paintings? Now, I have painted many abstracts myself in the past, but again I often feel that the abstract is a cheat. It requires a tenth of the skill of figurative painting and often seems to be more reliant on little more than the lucky accident and the stylish invention. Of course, it requires some panache to come up with an original form of abstraction - one which is clearly its own. However, technically they are simply never of the same level of difficulty as a realist painting. So, is it any coincidence, that many of the key later abstract artists like Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Morris Louis, Frank Stella, Cy Twombly, Brice Marden, Richard Diebenkorn, Howard Hodgkin, Julian Schnabel, and Sean Scully were seventh, eighth or even tenth rate figurative artists? What did they really have to sacrifice to make their art? After all, it is easier for a man with no talent in drawing or painting to renounce those skills in favour of abstraction! Neither Picasso, Matisse, Beckman nor Bacon made abstract art - they had too much to lose! Picasso thought that abstraction lacked drama, and Francis Bacon thought it was just decoration. The advantage abstract art and that of post-skill conceptual art has over skilled-based painting or sculpture is its accessibility to the viewer who imagines that they could almost make something of comparable quality. 

Despite their tragic lack of conventional skills, abstract painters have often overcompensated with a megalomaniacal belief in the importance of their art, and religious delusions, whether it was the Theosophist delusions of Kandinsky and Mondrian, or the “I am nature” of Pollock, or the endless series of abstract painters like Malevich to Ad Reinhardt who declared their work to be the final paintings. Even in the heights of psychotic mania I never thought I was making the last paintings! 

In the mid-1950s art dramatically changed from the supposed expression of deep emotions by tortured and authentic souls like Pollock, to the cynical re-production of second-hand, commercial imagery drawn from popular culture. Yet perversely the persona that Jackson Pollock had created for himself was no more authentic than that which Andy Warhol had created for himself. And in fact, Warhol might be said to have been more authentic in his commercialism than Pollock was in his supposed rebelliousness. In fact, there are few well-known and successful artists since the twentieth century, who have not created a persona as artful and fully worked out as their art. And these personas allow them to create the kind of art that their personas would be expected to make and allow them to be marketable. 

I have always had an irrational love of Minimalist canvases and growing up in Ireland I saw many versions of Minimalism and Process painting in Dublin galleries. I liked their reduction of oil painting to its most basic elements. In 1993, I suddenly painted a series of black minimalist canvases inspired by Ciara Lennon (who himself was inspired by Pierre Soulages) and coloured minimal canvases inspired by minor German radical minimalists like Kuno Gonschior, Ingo Meller and Peter Tollas. However, they were nothing but pastiches without any great intellectual understanding or vision, and I discovered I simply did not believe in minimalism as an art form because it said so little about life. By painting Minimalist works, I discovered their emptiness. So in 1999-2000, I made figurative drawings in oil paint on paper which I collaged on top of my old minimalist paintings. However, most of these works were also nothing pastiches, this time of Julian Schnabel!  

               

Looking at most minimalist or conceptual works where there is little evidence of craft, skill, or time spent making the object, I am angered and insulted especially when I read the hyperbolic texts that promote such work. As Hilton Kramer wrote: “The more minimal the art, the more maximum the explanation.” (Hilton Kramer, Age of the Avant-Garde: An Art Chronicle of 1956-72, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973, P. 412.) I do not care how much time was spent conceiving and developing the ideas, the same time has been spent conceiving paintings and one still has to make them, which is when the finest ideas can come crashing down to earth. You can positively think yourself into believing that you are going to produce a painting comparable with Rembrandt, but in its making, the chasm between your intellectual ambition and practical disability becomes frighteningly apparent. Unsurprisingly, the attempts of conceptualists at traditional painting are often laughably bad or ghost painted pictures so dependent upon the skill, craft and labour of paid assistants and technicians as to be fraudulent vanity projects.

                

In Ways of Seeing, John Berger attacked the oil painting as a commodity in the art market (a popular sentiment in the highly politicized art world of the 1970s.) However, this is not the fault of painting, it’s the nature of the art market. History has shown that the market can and will make anything a commodity like family photographs, old clothes or letters of the artist, even if it is for a fraction of the price achieved by contemporary paintings. Anything, that can be bought and sold, will be bought and sold. That is the nature of the capitalist system. Moreover, if you are going to invest money in something, why not buy a portable oil painting, that could have had months of labour spent on its making and will last hundreds of years intact. Instead of; a quickly thrown together set of yellowing photographs, a rusty can of artist’s shit, a lump of decaying fat on a chair, a rotting shark, or a mouldy old bed - which may require little money to fund making or effort and skill to make but will require a curatorial bureaucracy and conservation department to maintain. 

              

So, to this day, collectors still have not wanted to spend much on art photography, conceptual art, new media, or contemporary sculpture and most of the prices for such work is a fraction of that for the best contemporary paintings (even if many of them are also conservation nightmares, as I shall explore further on.) Paintings are still by far the most sought after and expensive artworks in the world, with only extravagantly manufactured sculptures by the likes of Koons and Hirst matching or surpassing prices for paintings by their peers.

               

In the 1970s it was fashionable for the anti-painting brigade to say that oil painting would eventually blacken and crumble to dust, but forty-five years on the old masters still look amazing in the museums while much of the work of contemporary painters and the conceptualists often look like a tired, ragged mess. I remember in 1992, seeing in Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, Charlene by Robert Rauschenberg a vast assemblage and collage on canvas that had become discoloured, yellowed, and frayed. Charlene was only thirty-eight years old but was already, more of a wreak than countless frescos, oil paintings and even watercolours hundreds of years old that I had seen in museums. I loved the work, but I knew I was no longer looking at the work, the way it looked when it had left Rauschenberg’s studio and it stood out in my mind as a lesson on the danger artists faced when using unconventional or poor-quality materials. Obviously, every artwork will darken and crumble with time, but I have always thought it was the artist’s duty, to at least give the artwork a fighting chance against time. 

            

The Old Masters who first started as apprentices to a local master, learning all the secrets of making stretchers, priming canvas, and mixing paint, that had been accumulated over centuries, would mix their own paint only using tried and tested pigments and binders, seal their canvases with rabbit glue and then apply a layer of lead white primer and would often leave their paintings to dry in-between layers for months even years. It was the Impressionists who abandoned this ancient craft in favour of manufactured paints and canvases and by the time of Cubism artists like Picasso and Braque were incorporating fugitive materials from the real world into their works like chair canning, newsprint, wallpaper, and sand. They also started using commercial household paints instead of artist quality oil paints and thus inspired may later artists to experiment with commercial paints. The trouble was that the lustre of these found materials was impossible to maintain, and commercial paints designed to paint walls and doors, did not work as well on canvas as artists oil paints.  

           

Contemporary artists keen to make a novel impact have abandoned all the lessons of the craft of painting. Today’s young artists make it up as they go along and want to make their work look as different as possible, even if the results will not last a lifetime. Seeking to make an impact in the art world they use any gimmick to get attention, regardless of its long-term permanency. Moreover, today’s artists are in such a hurry to get famous, they spend as little time as an hour making a painting – that is supposed to be taken seriously.

          

So many of the great Masters’ of Modern and Contemporary art have been humiliated to see their work fall apart in public and private collections, much to the delight of the general public, who feel vindicated in their belief that contemporary art is a con. By the 1980’s many of the painting of the Abstract-Expressionists and those that followed them were already in crisis restoration mere decades after they had been made and despite being housed for most of their lives in museums with some of the most advanced humidity, light protection and conservation standards. The household paint Jackson Pollock used has lost its lustre and many of the colour values have been lost, the unprimed canvases that Jackson Pollock, Morris Louis and Francis Bacon painted on have discoloured, attracted surface grime and are slowly rotting from the acids in the paint because no primer was used (though Bacon’s fared better because they were actually primed on the back.)

           

Robert Hughes recounted how a Frank Stella painting from 1968 that he owned which had been painted on unprimed canvas had over the years become grimy with dirt and dust which it attracted like a magnet. Hughes wanted to sell the painting, but given its condition it was unsaleable. So, Hughes had it restored by a conservator who made a living restoring the work of the Abstract-Expressionists - many of whose wrecked canvases, he often had to completely repaint. The last time Hughes saw the Stella canvas “… it looked as new and bright as a fluorescent pin.” (Robert Hughes, Graft -Things You Didn’t Know, The Spectacle of Skill: Selected Writings of Robert Hughes, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015, P. 547.)

           

Meanwhile, De Kooning’s early black and white paintings painted with household paints have yellowed, darkened and lost most of their tonal values, in de Kooning’s later paintings, his mayonnaise like mixture of safflower oil, other minerals and water will never dry and is percolating up, the dangerously thin washes used by Rothko in his paintings are darkening and the lustre of his colours lost, the encaustic on many of Jasper John’s early paintings is peeling off, virtually everything in Rauschenberg’s early combines is deteriorating, the plates in Schnabel’s plate paintings are falling off, the velvet in Schnabel’s velvet paintings are rotting from the paint applied to them and are worn and prone to sucking up any dust and hair in the atmosphere and there are little bales of hay accumulating at the bottom of Kiefer’s paintings in which he mixed it with a disastrous mix of oil and acrylic paint. 

           

As Anthony Haydn-Guest observed the situation for art made with new media or experimental paintings that incorporated elements of assemblage was even worse than that for many traditional paintings. “Paintings, drawings, sculpture, buildings all fade, corrode, crumble, but much of the oeuvre of the Post-Modernists is proving particularly ephemeral. Giotto’s frescos, Sung porcelain, and Degas pastels will out-tough huge quantities of the work of our experimental times, not just such intentionally transient stuff as Installations but the work of the Auction Stars. John Chamberlin’s earlier work can be preyed on by rust; Anselm Kiefer’s straw is shedding, rubber pieces dry and split; and china shards began dropping off the surfaces of Julian Schnabel as soon as they left the studio. Basquiat gave a work to the writer Glenn O’Brien. “The paint is falling off,” he says. A Dan Flavin owned by Donald Judd incorporated a light fixture that had the optical equivalent of a stutter. These parts are no longer made. “It’s like watching the piece die,” Roberta Smith says. I asked a dealer about the long-term prospects for the felt pieces of Joseph Beuys. The gallerist said, “They will be dust!” as if exultantly.” (Anthony Haden-Guest, True Colours: The Real Life of the Art World, New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1996, P.321.)

But it is not just about permanency, if an artwork is considered important and makes it into the great museums, it will hang alongside well-made masterpieces, and the tattier and more decomposed it is, the less impressive it will be. 

I suppose I could laugh, since I have always tried to use the best papers, canvas, linen and paints I could afford at the time. But despite that, I have a side-line in restoring my own paintings. Because no matter how good your materials are, humans and pets living with paintings, take their toll. And the mere storage, and the taking out of storage to photograph work, can result in damage. 

            

Art lovers who regularly visit museums might wonder why so many museums (provincial ones) try to ram unpopular conceptual installation, video art and sculptures down their throats and assume some grand conspiracy should also realise that it is not just a matter of ideology or a lack of trained and interesting painters, it is also a matter of finance! Great contemporary paintings are snapped up by multi-millionaire collectors, who often keep the best of them forever, and even build their own museums to house their collection. So, it is expensive for Modern or Contemporary Art museums to stage exhibitions of great contemporary paintings (because of costs of rent, security, insurance, preservation and transportation) and their tiny budgets are often inadequate to collect great contemporary paintings. So, the more provincial and cash-strapped the Modern or Contemporary Art Museum, the less great contemporary paintings you will see, and the more conceptual crap you will be surrounded by and told is important!

              

Despite all its flaws, if painting was invented today, it would be one of the greatest artistic innovations ever! It is only because it is such an ancient medium associated with Western, white, male painters that it is taken for granted or condemned as reactionary. Eric Fischl writing about the attitude towards painting in CalArts back in the 1970s observed that: “The conceptualists argued that painting was part of a long Western tradition, the art form most closely associated with white European males and therefore elitist, anti-Feminist, anti-black, and anti-Hispanic. To them, paintings were easily commodified, giving rise to the corrupt and corrupting gallery-museum-action-house system.” (Eric Fischl and Michael Stone, Bad Boy: My Life on and Off the Canvas, New York: Crown, 2012, P.55.) Yet, art history has a way of turning heroes into villains. The same conceptualists who bitched about the art market system, went on to have very lucrative careers, turning conceptual artworks into commodities. And having attempted to castrate white male painters, many female artists went on, to sport their own strap-on-dildo paintings. 

Painting is permanent (relative to everything else save for sculpture), its message remains clear, unlike decaying photographs, video tape and the found objects of contemporary art. For an outsider artist like myself, painting is the ultimate medium of freedom. The art world have marginalised and shunned me but they cannot stop me painting! My work is not dependent on arts grants to create, exhibit and store it, and even my meagre resources can run to the cost of a canvas and some paint. When I paint a picture, its essential character will remain intact for hundreds of years (if anyone cares to keep them). The same cannot be said for video pieces, which are already decaying or technology redundant, or installations, which are chopped, and changed every-time they are installed in new venues. Moreover, painting is an independent art form. When I paint a picture, I do not have to first think; how I will get the arts council to fund its making, what gallery will install it, what dim-witted curator I will have to arse lick to 'mediate' it, how will it pass an ethics committee, or how I will store the finished work. I simply paint it and put it aside for eventual exhibition - free of the mucky compromises of the art world. Installation artists on the other hand are intricately bound to the curatorial system. All of this is ironic given that the initial impetus behind conceptual art was the undermining of the art market and curatorial system - today nothing could be further from the truth.

Moreover, the greatness of paintings, sculptures and drawings is that they imitate reality, but they are not real. This creates a greater depth to them as art works, allowing mediative distance, and at least doubling their meaning. Installations and ready-mades on the other hand are just dumb reality, edited and arranged, but dumb reality all the same. The greatest art works are far more than ideas made physical, they are ideas transcended and superseded by a complexity of feeling and material engagement, that cannot be anticipated or rationalized. 

             

 So, as I have grown older, I have come to enjoy and respect a sixth-rate traditional painting or sculpture over a second-rate conceptual piece. I have also come to realize that most contemporary art works are not even worth a first glance never mind a second, bad art doesn’t improve the more you look, it just gets worse. In fact, in my experience many conceptual, video, installation, and sculptural artists have painting envy, and secretly wish they had conventional talent. Personally, I am only envious of other painters. Looking at the work of the likes of Damien Hirst or Jeff Koons I feel nothing but contempt at their lack of skills and talent, and anger at their success built on the talent of others. However, looking at the likes of Matthias Weischer, Michaĕl Borremans, Herman Bas, Adrian Ghenie and Jonas Burgert I feel debilitating inferiority because I know they are the real deal. But that is the problem with real talent in an age of democratic incompetence - it is obnoxiously elitist to be talented and breaks the heart of mediocrities. 

For me drawing and paintings are the supreme mediums because they embody the feelings and sensitivity of the artist better than any other mediums. You can literally pour your feelings into drawing and painting in a way that even sculpture, never mind photography, conceptual art, or assemblage can never hope to match. Drawing and painting are the most direct and sensual mediums, which hold one’s emotions in the seismograph register of line or the amber of paint. So as Donald Kuspit observed: “… painting at its best can become an expression of personhood and individuality – perhaps their last refuge – to the extent it becomes an original psychic act. (Thinkers who believe that the collective is more important than any individual that constitutes it, and who argue that subjectivity is nothing but a social construction and as such lacks a dynamic of its own, cannot help but reject painting. Does their ideology rationalize the fact that the collective necessarily suppresses individuality and spontaneity in the modern instrumental-administrative world, which attempts to include everyone in a total comprehensive system? Painting has to historically discredited and devalued if only because it is produced by individuals, and as such implies what Peter Gay calls “privacy”, however much it involves collective culture and craft.)” (Donald Kuspit, The Rebirth of Painting in the late Twentieth Century, Introduction: Why Painting, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, P. 2.)

Although I have dabbled with photography, video work, installations and performance - I have always felt a con man when making them. In my view, they are essentially dishonest mediums that require virtually nothing in terms of skill, craft, originality or emotional commitment on the part of the artist. Since the 1960s, the mere novelty of new mediums like video, performance, photography and installation has concealed the fact that in terms of content nothing much new has been invented, instead old ideas have merely been repackaged in a different medium. For example Bill Viola heralded as one of the greatest video artists has spent much of his career simply turning Old Master paintings into video vignettes.  

               

In 2002, I staged Five Day Wonder, a performance in which I lived and worked in the Oisín Gallery for five days. At the time, I wanted to humanize myself in an art world that viewed me as a perverted freak, so I moved all my books, video and much of my art into the gallery to give people a more rounded view of me. However, despite my dabbling with both installation and performance, I was really only trying to get my paintings and drawings appreciated. 

The trouble I have with happenings and performance art is their tenancy towards, rumour, hearsay, and thus inflated mythology. Few people see such events, and none of those that do, can return to it, to see it in a fresh light. All one has is its video or photographic record and the gossip that surrounds it. Paintings are totally different; they permit a continuous historical discourse. Unlike photographs, video, installations, or ready-mades, my paintings are totally handmade objects, the product of one human mind at one moment in time. What you see is exactly what I intended you to see, unaffected by decay, curatorial fiddling, or misrepresentation.

Performances are often only notable for the exhibitionistic shamelessness of the performer. So many performance art pieces are self-indulgently masochistic, I have joked with friends that if I were to do a performance piece, just to be different, it would be me drinking a mocha, eating a cream cake, and watching Reality TV. Although in my youth, I videotaped myself, as I cut myself with razor blades, painted myself mutilating myself and tried to kill myself, my anguish and insanity was real, and outside of any public theatre. If they were cries for help, they were cries for help I showed nobody at the time. After painting such work, I hid them away and did not show them to anyone until years later and my condition had improved. I also destroyed the video tapes because for me they were just source material for paintings. So, I find such performance art slumming in the language of madness galling. 

The Liberal treatment of the mentally ill and the care in the community of psychiatric patients has combined with the anything goes art world so that as Barry Gewen observed we have had decades of self-mutilation and the torture and slaughter of animals in the name of art: “IN 1974, Chris Burden had himself crucified on the roof of a Volkswagen. He was creating a work of art. A decade later, Hermann Nitsch staged a three-day performance in which participants disemboweled bulls and sheep and stomped around in vats, mixing the blood and entrails with grapes. Another work of art. Rafael Ortiz cut off a chicken's head and beat the carcass against a guitar. Ana Mendieta, who had a retrospective at the Whitney last year, also decapitated a chicken and let its blood spurt over her naked body. As one commentator has observed: "animals are not safe in the art world." Neither are the artists. They have sliced themselves with razor blades, inserted needles in their scalps, rolled naked over glass splinters, had themselves suspended by meathooks and undergone surgical "performance operations" during which spectators could carry on conversations with the artist-patient. In 1989, Bob Flanagan nailed his penis to a wooden board.” (Barry Gewen, State of the Art, The New York Times, 11th December 2005.)

In painting my suicidal despair, I was trying to purge myself of those impulses and cure myself. I also liked the distance that painting provided from reality. Yet crude or theatrical reality is all that most performances seem to be able to provide. As a solitary, introverted recluse, I find the shameless exhibitionism of performance artists self-indulgent, dishonest, manipulative and attention seeking. Besides, I no longer find my own body worthy of interest even to me. So, to see good looking young men and women parade their sexy bodies, but in a self-loathing and wounded narcissistic way, bores me aesthetically even if sexually it might raise my eyebrow. Of all the performance art I have seen in books, only the Austrian Actionists were interesting to me, since their performances were original and seemed to come from a genuinely dark place. Though once I learned more about them, the less empathy I had for them. Behind such extreme theatrics as those of the Actionists - lay a hunger for therapy, meaning and transcendence, that performance art could never fulfill, it remained a circus like any other. 

          

Compared to painting, photography is just the casting of light by machine or electronics, moreover it is a medium of super abundance, so ubiquitous as to be worthless no matter how arty the image. As Peter Fuller wrote: “Photography is merely process, a true medium. The image slides into the camera as the spirit is supposed to slip into a medium during a spiritualist seance. [sic] But painting is not like that at all. It requires a prior imaginative conception, which is not given, but made real, through the exercise of human activity, i.e. transforming work upon materials, conventional and physical. A painting is constituted not processed. A painting is thus the material embodiment of an artist’s expressive activity in a way which a photograph is not.” (Peter Fuller, Seeing Berger: A Revaluation of Ways of Seeing, London: Writers and Readers, 1980, P. 12-3)

Any two-year-old can point a camera and get a good photograph (if they take enough of them) but it takes at least ten years of work for a painter to reach his maturity and paint a masterpiece. Vernacular photography proves time and time again, that it is the camera that is the genius, not the man or woman that pushes the button. As the great American Photo-Realist Chuck close observed, there is no such thing as an accidental masterpiece in painting or drawing, every stroke of the paintbrush or stick of charcoal is a product of the artist’s; judgment, skill, vision and will. However, there are thousands of accidental masterpieces in photography. Personally, I have taken thousands of photographs of my family, friends, house, studio, and myself. However, I have never considered any of these photographs’ art, they are merely documentation of my artistic life. 

Moreover, photography is far more dependent upon a good subject to capture. If the subject is eye catching enough, even the most talentless photographer can make images of a compelling nature. While in the commercial photographic world this might mean, scenic views, sexy nudes, or battle scenes, in the art world this generally means mundane details of empty rooms, poor third world beggars on rubbish tips, or ‘ironic’ pastiches of pop culture phenomena like shopping malls. A typical example of this, reminiscent of John Waters satirical movie ‘Snapper’ came in the late nineties in the form of Richard Billingham. For a few years, Billingham was the toast of the English art world, because of his gritty snap shots of his alcoholic father and working-class family in their grotty council flat. Such images were delightful to a politically correct art world that knew nothing of this poverty-stricken world, and he was touted as a major artist. However, he had only one subject - the lucky snaps of his family. When Billingham moved on, to images of housing estates and landscapes - all the fire went out of his work - and the art world moved on.

However, compared to video art, photography is practically the genre of the old masters. Most video art of the 1970s now look like the most stupid, pretentious, and pointless home movies imaginable, where the artist and maybe their friends would do random humdrum things like walk up and down in a line, talk about themselves, or hang out. Moreover, what was state of the art video technology at the time, now looks as dated as silent movies from the 1900s. As I have mentioned, from the age of twenty, I made video tapes of myself naked posing in various positions, from which I painted pictures. However, once I had finished the paintings, I destroyed the video tapes, since I never considered them anything more than source material. 

Even today at its best, video art is just a poor man's cinema, which constantly avoids real comparison or competition with films true geniuses like Eisenstein, Hitchcock, or Kubrick. Video art is to cinema as finger painting is to real painting, anyone with any real talent avoids it like the plague and gets into the big game of advertising, television and the cinema, just like Steve McQueen was to do. Art photographers and video artists avoid real comparison with fashion photographers and documentary journalists because their work would pale by comparison. Video art in my experience is either; so slow, plodding, obscure and pointless that I am bored to tears and lulled into sleep. Or it is so gimmicky and desperate to shock, surprise and titillate, that it is like an awful cable television channel. However, despite its amateurism, stupidity and banality, video art as Brian Sewell noted is greedy, demanding whole rooms in galleries to be darkened and emptied save for a monitor or screen flickering its boring projection. Rooms that could have held ten or twelve paintings or four or five sculptures are emptied for this pretentious rubbish! But worse than its stealing of space, is video arts stealing of my precious time! Life is frankly too short to waste on most video art. 

Ultimately, the art object must be able to stand on its own, apart from biography, and theory. Its intrinsic, skill, visual power and originality must be enough to make it stand out and hold one’s attention. Only later, if the viewer wishes, should sketches, writings, and archival material be sought out for greater understanding of the artist and his/her working methods. After all, if only one painting by Bosch, Vermeer, Rembrandt or Balthus survived we would still recognize their genius. But today all the junk of an artist's life is displayed in museums to bolster their reputations. In fact, today too much art is just archive material raised up to the level of art, and in this debased genre there are few as self-involved as Tracey Emin. But her artifacts are not art – they are the rubbish of human existence. After all, truly great modern artists like Picasso, Warhol, and Bacon, all knew the difference between art and archive material. They all hoarded vast amounts of junk from their lives, but they never sought to show any of it as art.

Most of the temporary exhibitions in the world are as ephemeral and meaningless as grains of sand in the wind. The collection of junk assembled by young wizards of conceptualism is cheap to produce and exhibit, saving equally young curators the headaches of loans, shipping, insurance, and security. Yet they do have one significant element that is never openly acknowledged by those involved, the successful courtship of the curator and enjoyment of the bounty of arts grant funded parties. Virtually all this ‘art’ ends up in a skip and remains recorded only in photographs and the drunken memories of those that participate. What was achieved was a temporary presence in a disused warehouse, a party for friends, and a review in an arts magazine by a friend.

Apart from charting fads and fashion, trying to make any sense or form any meaningful narrative about art since 1980 is almost impossible. It has been an age when virtually every conceivable style and rehash of style coexists in galleries sharing the same streets. Art up until the 1960’s used to be about making bold new statements, today, it is often just posing cryptic questions against conventional society. The politics is of the extreme left and its enemy is traditional values including traditional notions of quality and common sense. No wonder it has also been an era that has resulted in the death of art criticism as a serious subject. How can one possibly decide which is better, a woman eating a sausage suggestively on video,, a man squirting paint from his anus onto canvas, or a woman farting easter eggs from her vagina! Perhaps that is why art criticism has become more a kind of gossip column, relating stories of this or that oddball. Everything is permitted and none of it means anything much to anyone, even those who create the art we contemplate. So today, one has the strange situation where everybody feels the right to be an artist, but nobody feels the right to be a critic. Anything can be art, but virtually no one has the credibility to stand in judgment. If you know little about art history, you will be dismissed as a fool, yet if you know too much you will be called a crank. 

            

Since the 1960s and the conversion of Art Colleges into universities more concerned with theory than craft, art has become hollowed out. So today, so many of the ‘artists’ I see in the art world are replicant artists - that claim they are human beings creating ‘art’, but to me they seem like robots trying to mimic art through academic theory, technical shortcuts, and tricks. Their work is devoid of traditional craft, skill, sensuality or humanity and express nothing but groupthink, cant, and Liberal propaganda.

Great art that moves one’s soul or defines an era does not have to have any justification for its existence - it sheer quality, skill and vision is its own justification. Yet so much contemporary art has a “why would you bother make this” quality. It could be anything from a man carved onto a human hair or a model city made of toothpicks or a reproduction of the Sistine Chapel one’s bedroom, or a daily photographic record of one’s breakfast maintained for ten years, or in the old Salon days some vast, tiresome, lugubrious oil painting illustrating some doggy ancient mythology. Such work, usually involving years of manual labour, to create some pointless crowd pleaser, begs fundamental psychological, philosophical, and sociological questions about its reason to exist but it inspires few real artistic responses. These are artists who try to wow their audience not with a vast quantity of work, but with the obsessive creation of one megalomaniacal project. Like so much bad art it presumes that miniature or grandiose size combined with endless man hours - equals profound greatness. It does not.

Since the late 1990’s, we have had the era of the new virtuosos of Neo-Salon painting by the likes of Gerhard Richter, Jenny Savile, Neo Rauch, John Currin, Glen Brown, and Cecile Brown. In an era when everything has been done before, and no one has had an original idea since 1975, one of the only ways an artist can standout, is to produce paintings that marry some of the ideas of the twentieth century with the working methods and craft of the late Salon academics of the 1880s. Such work has elitist skills and massive visual impact, even if they are devoid of original ideas or real feelings, and are cynical to the core. In fact, it is quite comical, the way painting in the West destroyed all its ancient, skills and techniques and drowned galleries with incompetent crap, only for painters trained in the former East German city of Leipzig, to come along in the 1990s with old-fashioned skills married to sophisticated Post-Modern ideas and made the idiot hippie painters in America and Europe look pathetic and stupid. In fact, most of the other painters in the world, look pathetic and stupid compared to German painters from 1960-2022! 

Worse than today’s virtuosos - who at least make their own art - are factory owner artists like Jeff Koons, Damian Hirst, and Ai Weiwei whose manufactured art maintains a constant level of calculated, impersonal, professional mediocrity, devoid of expression or catharsis. In the early days of Modernism, the way real artists differentiated themselves from academics and amateurs was through their rapid adoption of new ideas, radical friendships, bohemian existence, and triumph amongst the cognoscenti. Today professional artists differentiate themselves from amateur artists through their wealth, the vastness of their factories, their use of technicians to produce their work, and the sheer number, and scale of their artworks. Because in the art world today, you do not get commercially what you deserved. You get what you take. In the mid-sixties, knowing that many artists struggled to afford the paint and canvas to do one major work, mega art stars like Picasso and Warhol indulged in producing endless series with very minor versions on multiple canvases. Such self-indulgence was the privilege of the rich and successful artist alone. And because they were important artists all kind of deep philosophical meanings were read into their endless facile variations.

I have multiple problems with factory set ups. Firstly, it turns poor artists into slaves to a richer authoritarian artist who use their power, to make them do the mundane work he or she either cannot be bothered to do or are unable to do. Secondly these group-made spectacles, lack any individuality, integrity or real feeling. So, by dint of their power in the art world, artists with no manual ability are able to make others with real talent, help them create their art. Finally, while it is often mentioned that the likes of Koons and Hirst are merely doing what Rubens and others since the Renaissance have done, they forget to mention that the likes of Titian and Rubens could draw and paint supremely!  Even Warhol who started off the cult of the factory, was a talented commercial draughtsman! Whereas Koons and Hirst were completely talentless and incompetent by any conventional standards.

Factory made art, oppresses the viewer with the fruit of money, power and the mercenary efforts of nameless artisans and factory works. Not only is such art, a great fuck you, to those artists not successful enough to also become exploitative businessmen, it is also a great fuck you, to connoisseurs, art lovers and artists who want art to express the inexpressible and dignify the individual human hand, heart, and eye.

These big art star factory owners have used their massive budgets to make clever but laborious re-workings of established conceptual models, their showing off on a large scale, used to hide a lack of real invention. Because another dirty secret of success in the art world is that if the dealers and collectors like your half dozen little works (if it catches the trend of the day) they will finance the making of hundreds of bigger and bigger works, until the sheer scale and number of your oeuvre cows your public into believing you are a genius. Thus, one of the greatest concealments of mediocrity and lack of creative élan in much of contemporary art since the 1955 has been over production and one can see this in the oeuvres of everyone from Picasso, to Bernard Buffet to Warhol. In this demand for high production Damien Hirst’s ‘Spot-Paintings’ stand out. He used the sale of these canvases (painted entirely by assistants – Hirst himself has only ever painted about five of them) to fund his costlier sculptural projects. However, they were little more than a crib from the colour chart paintings of Gerhard Richter from the 1970s and the mass-production methods of Warhol’s silk-screens, Sol LeWitt’s assistant produced wall drawings, and Joseph Beuys’ multiples. Looking at art of the late nineties and noughties, Eric Fischl observed: “You began to see more and more art being made that was clever, obsessively well crafted, often genuine spectacle, and completely devoid of emotional content… as artists moved away from making content that invited you to reflect on your life to making objects in which you can see your reflection.” (Eric Fischl and Michael Stone, Bad Boy: My Life On and Off the Canvas, New York: Crown Publishing, 2012, P. 281-282.)

             

So many artists from Neo-Geo onwards, have concealed the unpleasant nature of human existence and their own characters by using factory set ups that produce as impersonal a form of art as possible. One just must look at the early psychotic and violent looking drawings of Jeff Koons to see that his character was far more malevolent than his later shiny, happy and kitsch works revealed. And that was the way it had become everywhere, people putting on a charming front to survive in today’s ruthless capitalist and surveillance society.

Artists like Picasso in his late years and Warhol throughout his career, have dazzled the public with manic but largely empty over production. Once an artist like Picasso, Warhol or Schnabel become rich and famous the attraction and interest in their work becomes as much about their fame as what they make. In fact, they can make any old rubbish - and it will be given voluminous attention. They go from a situation where everything fails, to one where everything succeeds, and even if it fails it becomes a news story in the soap opera of ‘genius’. Because the artistic failure of a celebrity artist who was once great - is always more important than the success of a nobody. In his later life Picasso stated that: “One must be the painter, never the connoisseur of painting… The connoisseur gives only bad advice to the painter. For that reason I have given up trying to judge myself.” (Picasso quoted by Françoise Gilot & Carlton Lake, Life with Picasso, New York: McGraw Hill, 1964, P. 118.) Armed with such self-indulgence Picasso went on to spend the last decades of his life scrawling mostly crap doodles on expensive linen canvases and inspired other successful artists to also abandon any self-critique. And since the art world had long since abandoned connoisseurship in favour of the fame-game, such artists happily played with paint to great commercial success. Because the unspoken rule of successful painters became - the less they did to a canvas – the more they got paid for it.

Just take Julian Schnabel who happily admitted he could start and finish a huge abstract canvas in less than an hour! That was fine for him, he could happily afford thousands of dollars’ worth of paint and canvas - and do little more than a doodle on them! But most art students and artists would have had to make the most of their limited resources, and make such an expenditure last them weeks if not months. However, the tragic irony was that art connoisseurs would then praise the spontaneity and fecklessness of the Schnabel and dam the efforts of the struggling artist as repressed and academic!

So, artists like Rosenquist, Baselitz, Richter, Kiefer, and Schnabel, have painted great and not so great, gargantuan canvases so large that the viewer is duped into believing them more important than they are. While other sculptors like Judd, Gormley, Kapoor, Hirst, and Koons have crushed descent with the sheer vastness of their inflated products in bronze, steel, and glass. It is a very male thing all these vast canvases and monstrous sculptures, as laughably egotistical as the man going through a mid-life crisis driving a Ferrari. Though in the last thirty years, even female artists like Louise Bourgeois, Jenny Holzer, Tracey Emin, or Yayoi Kusama  promoted by a female curatorial establishment desperate to create a female Picasso, have been as vain and egotistical in their production values. However, in nearly all these cases, what one is really witnessing is the cynical and egotistical effect of a rampant art market and needy institutional system, which requires huge art to fill its vast walls, even if it is vacant and pretentious art. Whatever one might say of Duchamp, one could never accuse him of such egotism - his oeuvre was charmingly small, unrepetitive and humble in comparison. 

These and other big art world stars, exhibit in countless contemporary museums, are represented by chic galleries and sometimes their work receives hundreds of thousands of dollars at auction. They are well thought of in official art circles and obey all the currently correct aesthetic principals of art. But their work is so calculated, academic, and unoriginal, how will it be received in a hundred years? Especially since today, it gains such lack-lustre applause. I suppose most of these art stars do not care, they address their art to the high priests of the art establishment rather than to the public at large, whose opinions are largely irrelevant in contemporary art. For these artists’ fame is a gilded cage whose price is their artistic integrity and freedom of speech. The successful artist simply does not have the capacity to question or critique the very system that is bankrolling their success. Thus, the celebrity artist lives a schizophrenic life espousing left-wing and humanitarian philosophy amongst the dregs of the art world, and whoring up to the super rich in their business hours. Meanwhile, the celebrity artist (whether male or female) claims to be a Feminist – yet they cannot control their primitive urges for reactionary sexual power dynamics.

With the end of avant-garde innovation and transgressive shock, art has become the comforting arena of inspirational stories and humanitarian appeals. As artistic standards have evaporated, and artistic value has become problematic even meaningless, ethical values have replaced them in Woke Art. Which has reduced art to merely its moral value for the first time since the Victorian era.  Moreover, if an artist or an artwork is morally suspect - then they must be censored and cancelled. The idea that art is so powerful, and has such an effect on people, that it must present a positive political, social, and moral message used to be an obsession of the right. But today it has been taken up by the Woke left-wing who seek to no platform or cancel any art they disagree with and claim to be triggered by. Today, there is no separation, between artists and society because everyone is online. Artists are no longer able to dictate to audiences what they are supposed to like, and there is less and less tolerance for freedom of expression or freedom of speech. In the past, artists created in fear of church or state censorship. But today, artists live in fear of online petitions, cancel culture, and mob attacks, which constitute a form of attack on the freedom of artistic creation never seen before. Having grown up in Ireland in the 1980s, when the vicious cancel culture of the catholic church censored so much of our lives, but also hid the sordid truth of life in Ireland at the time – I found the left-wing inspired cancel culture of the noughties and twenty-tens deeply sinister. 

 

Cancel culture feeds off mass hysteria, schadenfreuder, self-righteous anger, and the sadistic pleasure of humiliating and shaming others. Such Woke self-righteousness does not even have the forgiveness or hope of Christianity. Such groups mock the idea of the law, but the law exists precisely because of the danger of vigilante mobs like them. Meanwhile, the left-wing liberal media uncritically applauded such witch-hunts and lynch mobs, because many were minority or Feminist ‘victims’ and their targets were mostly white heterosexual males.

Since the 1970s, art world people have constantly talked about art challenging ideas, but it is an almost entirely left-wing, Feminist, anti-colonialist challenging of conservative ideas. Where is the art challenging left-wing shibboleths? Not only is such art non-existent, but its display would also cause calls for censure, no platforming, vandalism and even riots. But time and time again, I have heard left leaning Liberals lie through their teeth, when they suggest that their art is impartial and does not indulge in propaganda and sloganeering. Yet you would have to be brain dead not to see the political agenda and bigotry their consciousness is steeped in. In the Liberal art world of the twenty-tens they still tell artists they can make any artworks they want, but they only buy, sell, hype, exhibit and praise what conforms to their socio-political agenda! Most of this work is mediocre as art, but it has a mostly socio-political agenda anyway.  

             

Since art replaced religion in Western society in the 1980s and more people began attending museums than church, moral protest, humanitarian outreach, minority glorification and the redressing of all kinds of social injustices has become the role of art it seems. Since the noughties, art has been appropriated by government agencies in the West for Liberal propaganda and well wishing. Do you come from an underprivileged background? Have you experienced racism, sexism, or discrimination? We will give you an exhibition and that will fix everything! It is no longer enough to make a quality work of art - you must overcome some physical or mental disability or social prejudice in the process. Personally, I quickly had ‘inspiration’ fatigue from all these so-called heart-warming stories of triumph over adversity. 

I do not cry much, but I have been almost in tears looking at van Eyck, Rembrandt, Goya, and van Gogh just to name a few, because the beauty and humanity of their art overwhelmed me. I did not need to be re-educated, lectured, or hectored, to respond to the art of these dead artists. So, I am insulted by the political dogs who try to bully me into admiring fourth rate work for politically correct reasons. People who say that I want to kick the rungs out from under minorities, do not realise that I was constantly rejected, and denied any opportunity to advance my career, and nobody gave a dam about me. So, I don’t see why I should applaud the positive discrimination of those who have a fraction of my talent and ability. Moreover, all my life I have noted my inability to play the victim, cry on demand, or say the right things, and I have noted how many supposed victims play parts worthy of an Oscar. Besides those who would criticize me are far too naïve and idealistic to see how cynically the art world machine uses such stories for their own authority and credibility.

               

To me, art in Britain ended with Banksy and the rise of Street Art, and worldwide art ended for me with Woke Art, which combined smug Liberal clichés and virtue signalling, with media stunts, aimed at gaining social media likes and TV coverage. Banksy’s style was a rip-off French stencil artists like Blek Le Rat from the 1980s, married to lefty virtue signalling, and publicity stunts. But what really appalled me was how gullible the British public were, and how uncritically they applauded his stupid rubbish. Thankfully, most serious art critics knew Banksy was a talentless joke.

               

From Courbet and Realism in the 1860s to Tracey Emin and the yBas’ in the late 1990s, contemporary art movements had been greeted with howls of anger and incomprehension from the pubic, bitter critical dissection from critics and fellow artists, and serious academic reassessment. Yet when Woke art emerged in the noughties it was striking for its universal acclaim, its simpering public approval, and almost total critical vacuum. In the 1980s Robert Hughes had railed against the hyperbole and propaganda surrounding Neo-Expressionism, but that was amateur stuff compared to the cynical politically correct hype surrounding female and minority artists, and virtue signalling Woke art in the twenty-tens! No one doubted it was art, because the public had become so universally accustomed to all the formal gimmicks of conceptualism, installation, and appropriation, and no one questioned its aggrieved politics because they were made to feel so guilty, ashamed, and pitiful by the Woke brigade, and besides they were too cowardly to question it. So, was Woke art the greatest art movement to ever arrive upon the earth? Of course not! It was the most cynical form of artistic blackmail, gaslighting, and manipulation ever perpetrated in art! Presented with an angry tsunami of protest art from marginalized and disadvantaged people of all kinds – everyone had to shut up, and pander to it - like the efforts of a dying five-year-old child. Yet, any art without critics, is mere propaganda, and its audience complacent collaborators or brainwashed cult members. 

             

Woke art arrived at a catastrophic and chaotic, end of the world period in the West, and only added fuel to the fire. Woke art, was Stalinist in its simplistic tales of good and evil, and total lack of ambiguity or nuance. It relied on mob rhetoric and hysterical moralism. Woke Identity Politics was also inherently anti-individualistic and ever assertion of tribal identity is inherently set at war against every other tribal identity. The age of political correctness, cancel culture, mass governmental and corporate internet surveillance, and social media witch hunts, has resulted in the cowardly projection of Woke Art. Because for artists who know that to really confess any of their own failings, or transgress artistic and social boundaries could not only mean the end of the careers, but also social ostracization, it is far easier to self-righteously project their guilt and shame upon other people, and virtue signal their own moral rectitude in sloganeering art against capitalism, racism, sexism, homophobia etc.

             

Moreover, Woke politics has set the entire art world against each other, as white women, black women, white men, black men, LGBTQI people, disabled, and native people and immigrants are set against each other in a vicious and Machiavellian game of victimhood, played out for grants, bursaries, residencies, and awards. Moreover, talent, and originality, never mind genius, is irrelevant in this cat fight between mediocrities. In fact, this swarm of entitled, back-biting nobodies, has meant that artists of real genius and real artistic doubt, will find it even harder than ever to find an appreciative arena, because their talent will be taken as an insult to the talentless egotistical mob. 

            

There is no point in showcasing a load of diverse token marginalized artists if they lack character and talent and cannot draw or paint for toffee. None of this Woke Art has anything to do with art really. This ‘inspirational’, human interest ‘art’ has become the most talked about work (at least in the mass media) since the noughties. In its way, such art is as asinine as Victorian morality paintings with their self-righteous ethical tales and finger wagging at human depravity and the behaviour of the ‘uncivilised’, and just as useless. Yet today’s morality tales are the kind that Liberal, and loony-lefties, like to drone on about and are refashioned, in the now generic styles of graffiti, conceptual documentation, photo-reportage or assemblage. The intolerance of dissent of the Liberal left wing in the art world, has now become as dictatorial as the patriotic, bourgeois and sexually hypocritical Victorians but they share with them the same deluded belief that art can change the world for the better.

            

Moreover, have you ever noticed that none of these Identity Artists have any self-criticality and reveal no character flaws or social crimes? They pose as entirely blameless victims of a cruel world and manufacture grand historical grievances even though they themselves are only in their early twenties. Not only are they politically right on, but they are also attractive, hip, and talk like influencers and politicians. Because they are not only selling their political virtue but also their personal attractiveness, and their art is often merely a stage prop in their efforts to increase their social capital. Their whole life and career are staged as a series of public relations projects. 

So, art today has nothing to do with who is the greatest artist, it is all about who is the most politically correct. Contemporary art today, is awash with good natured work that is ideologically correct, and tries to change humanity with socially conscious work, by ‘artists’ who think art is a form of social work. Such manipulative art strokes the humanitarian ego of its creator and gullible audience who love to think of themselves as saintly, but changes nothing in existence, and if it did, we would have to add another branch to government The Department of Well Wishing, though I suppose that is what the Arts Council has always been. Such work is virtually impervious to conventional art criticism never mind social criticism which is why it was been so successful. How can you critique art that claims to be fighting for social justice? Are you a Nazi, misogynist, sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobe, elitist snob? Who wants to be the Devil’s Advocate in such a rush to sainthood and healing of the ills of the world! 

For decades, I was baffled by people who made happy slapdash art and were so smugly satisfied with their efforts. It was only with the age of social media, that I was able to see these people’s lives in the round, and I realised that they had such rich, privileged, pampered, and vacuous lives, that they were incapable of painting truly profound paintings. The happy self-satisfaction of their art mirrored their lives, and they felt nothing deeply, understood nothing, and had no revelations. So, they could never make the kind of sublimely beautiful art of great artists who had known real sacrifice and suffering and whose beauty came through hard-won wisdom, and experience. 

Growing up I remember looking in awe at the vast studios of the great Modern masters with their huge amounts of art materials and huge canvases. But I thought of their material success as hard-won and deserved. Yet, in the age of social media I am bombarded by images of smug, talentless non-entities making unoriginal and irrelevant paintings, in huge studios with vast amounts of art materials, and I feel the world has gone mad. Were they born into wealthy families? Did they marry well? Or are they just charming mediocrities, that are cunningly skilful at selling their trivial art to rich friends? Whatever bizarre reason for their material success, I loathe them and their painterly slop. Today far more than talent, one needs to go to the right Art School, wear the right clothes, have the right haircut, make the right connections, date the right men or women, go to the right nightclubs, and dump old partners as soon as you can and move on to a higher celebrity status mate, espouse the right politically-correct views, get into the most important galleries, befriend the most influential curators, get the best PR agent and appear in the right newspapers, magazines and TV shows. This is all about social climbing, attention seeking, celebrity chasing, money grabbing, and gaining important friends and influencing powerful people - but it has nothing to do with actual art! So, when COVID-19 dramatically brought a shuddering stop to the constant hype of art and artists on TV I was frankly relieved. I was sick to death of being told almost every day that such and such a nobody was a great artist, a once in a generation master, or genius! When from what I could see they were utter mediocrities and their art tedious pap.

As youth, I had been attracted to artists’ solitary existences and detachment from society. I believed there was something almost sacred about the artist alone in his studio. Yes, I wanted to financially succeed as an artist and gain recognition, but I also wanted to remain apart from society. Artists today, are some of the richest people on earth as well as being socialites, media celebrities, trend setters and corporate collaborators. And artworks are the ultimate in luxury goods which many people think only exist to bring escapist delight to the viewer or impart some cringe-making moral cliché. Moreover, museums which used to be sanctuaries for the sober contemplation of art, have been turned into glorified theme parks, surrogate churches, media stages, snobbish social clubs, Feminist and multicultural forums, crèches, dating arenas, yoga centres, nudist colonies, dance and music venues, and God knows what else! I had turned to art, to escape the world and defy its standards and beliefs. But now if you are a successful Liberal élite artist, you are doomed to live your life, ensnared in a greedy, hypocritical, phoney, and conformist fantasy world. So, whereas the art world was once a place you could find genuine rebels, today it is the very last place to find one. And whereas the art world was once the only place you could go to be free, now it is an even worse panopticon of a prison, than a corporation job. Personally, I don’t understand how famous artists today live with all the schizoid lies, hypocrisy, and contradictions of their artistic personas. 

Finally, I want to ask you the reader, what should the price of art be? In terms of materials, if you very generously say €70 for a small good quality canvas and paint, €100 for studio costs, €100 for labour (at about €20 an hour - which many may find too generous) and €140 to frame it nicely, you get €410. Double that price to consider the 50% that a gallery takes on sales and you get €820. Everything after that is an expression of; the esteem in which the artist is held by collectors, critics and institutions; the scarcity or abundance of their work; and the pure and unadulterated greed of the free market. Given the disparity between the price many art works achieve at auction and their actual material and labour cost, it is no surprise that the common man is left aghast. Personally, I feel such high prices do no justice to art as a form of pleasure, reflection, or learning, and if the commercial value of all the art in the world was reduced to zero, it would still not affect my love and appreciation for great art one jot.

Of course, some might say, “well you would say that! You are a failed artist!” However, I have sold €61,266 worth of art and the highest price paid for one of my paintings was €10,792, but it has not proved anything to me about my art - one way or the other. In fact, I continue to find it astonishing that anyone pays anything for my work, and I still find it obnoxious how most people are more concerned with the money I make, than the vision I am trying to impart. 

So, at a time when apparently everyone is an artist, and apparently everything they produce is art, the only ‘objective’ measure of greatness is the money paid for the art works and the net income of the artists! This market valuation is merely the result of an ongoing process of assessment and adjudication by art world insiders, but it can easily be manipulated by hype, publicity, fad and fashion. Yet, it is the only ‘objective’ aesthetic measurement left in an art world - where nobody knows anymore what art is or is not.

The insane prices paid not only for Old and Modern Masters but snotty nosed contemporary artists barely out of Art College - turns the art object into a perverse prize of greed and vanity, and obscures its real aesthetic meaning. There has been no greater perversion than the conversion of van Gogh's tragic solitary art, which was made with the highest spiritual and aesthetic feelings, into the crass trophies of billionaires, corporations, and institutions. Of course, conversely, I would point out that there is no harm done to an artist like Warhol when his work is traded, since his whole degraded artistic life was lived in pursuit of money, fame, and power. You cannot debase an art that is inherently debased! Now in real world terms, it was Warhol, not van Gogh that was right. In the real world, everything has a price, and it is up to the individual in Western free markets to get as high a price as they can for their labour, and it would be utopian piety to suggest otherwise. In my experience, I find that 98% of artists follow the line of Warhol, not van Gogh, though they are rarely honest enough to admit it. Especially since acting high and mighty, is often one of the best ways to get people to pay even more for your work. Personally, I have no objections to artists making money from their art, how can I criticize the likes of Titian, Rubens, Rembrandt, Picasso, Willem de Kooning, Julian Schnabel, Jean-Michel Basquiat? But I do think it can be a corrosive influence on an artist’s integrity. Yes, I would like to make a decent living at my art. But if anything, I am doing everything in my power to put collectors off! Yet, art is one of the few ‘professions’ where you are sometimes worth more dead than alive.