The intellectual or cerebral approach to human matters handles ideas well and is capable of great depth and insight into our human condition, it’s ‘achilles heal’ is the conversion of these ideas into practice. The ideals of the mind do not transfer perfectly to the world, allowances must be made for the natural conditions we all encounter in the world, the more you live in your mind the less skilled you become at negotiating your way through the natural obstacles that hinder every earthly journey we make. The internal world of the conceptual ideals and ideas must first play themselves out within the frailties of our own humanity. These must then be cast adrift within the reality and vagaries of the external world in which we live where ideas cannot live for long outside the mind unless they are eventually converted into human culture. Our lives and our deeds involve mastering the ‘art of compromise’ , which means learning how to negotiate with a world shaped by powerful natural forces which are beyond our control. The great value of art is that it has become one of our most powerful and eloquent human tools for presenting ideas and capturing our deepest insights into the human condition because it has become adept at spanning the gap between the world of concepts and the world of earthly realities.
This process of takeover began during the 19th century in Europe with a growing dissatisfaction among artists and intellectuals with the rigid ‘Academy’ system for training artists and exhibiting finished work. The invention of the camera freed artists from the ‘yoke’ of realism and allowed new possibilities for the visual arts to be explored, especially the personal insights, dreams and thoughts of the individual artist. Early 20th. Century movements such as Futurism, Fauvism, Surrealism, Dadaism and the push away from realism and into abstraction, were as much about philosophical stances as the visuals this posturing produced. Much of the writing by Andre’ Breton, the leader of the Surrealist movement, called for ‘societal’ change in the way we judge and deal with human reality. Their ‘dreamscape’ images were meant to encourage others to see the greater human reality which they believed was lurking just beneath the surface of our everyday lives, locked away within our dreams and fancies. They were calling on people to reject the world of the industrial, the ordinary and the mundane, and to stop being overwhelmed by the trivial details that filled most people’s lives. Optimism among young people was high; reaction against the institutionalised madness of ‘The Great War’ by artists and intellectuals was clear and justified. But pressing questions were now circling the art world like never before; for example, if the creativity of the new century was like a ‘caged’ animal in a zoo, was this move to bring the cultural structures crashing down, which trapped the emerging push for individual creative expression within the arts, capable of building a better art world? Do individuals excel when released from the yoke of ‘Academia’ and central cultural influence, into their own expressive worlds, or do they wither and fade when the new shoot is disconnected from the vine that supports it and feeds it? And does art prosper absolutely when given absolute freedom to create and explore? The uninitiated or casual observer may ask why these questions are problematic, surely this questioning of the fundamental relationship of the individual to society is part of a larger cultural push within western thinking to free up individual expression and unlock the true potential of our humanity. For many the notion of the ‘artist/genius’ and their elite’ avant-garde performance is a test case for all individuals within our rapidly changing world. Thus we are lead to ask ourselves does constructed human culture inhibit or promote individual performance? That is, does tearing down the cages at the zoo create a ‘garden of Eden’ or does it just unleash chaos as all the wild animals fight for supremacy within a new world order where few boundaries exist.
The success of the ‘rational’ within our culture and the industrial revolution that it inspired and controlled, has allowed many more to prosper materially within our society than at any other time in human history. This now means that it holds the high ground on cultural debates and discussions of societal change because it can ‘finance’ the deals necessary to convert human ideas into human culture. But much of this push by the rational was aimed at controlling the natural world and bending it to our human will. If nothing else our humanity is strong on control of it’s immediate environment so that it guarantees safety and material security. But there is an inbuilt problem here which is not easily overcome, the natural world not only exists outside us but also within our own heads. It would appear that it has been ‘hard wired’ into our humanity through a hundred thousand generations of human growth and development and the process of evolution that connects us to the natural world. This instinctive world is represented in our thinking through the spiritual, the sensual, the instinctive and the creative. These elements are our bridge between the world of human concepts and thoughts and the world that is all around us. Running and climbing survival skills become creative dance and movement. Basic visual communication skills become the painted surface and elaborate sculptural and architectonic forms. Understanding of rhythm and pattern, visual balance and harmony within the natural world becomes repeated decorative tribal patterns of immense complexity and beauty. Our eternal search for the visually beautiful and the pursuit of the sublime; for something that is sourced from our world but hovers just above it, (suspended somewhere between our earthly existence and our longing for the perfection of heavenly delights and the eternal), goes on. Perhaps the great human art works are the ‘milestones’ that mark our human journey? Perhaps they are the fluttering banners and flags that we gather around as we march forth across the landscape of time and space?
A ‘new’ art world has grown during the twentieth century, different from any that had come before. It has become a globalised/corporatised art world that lives within the strict confines of the public gallery, exclusive private galleries and the corporate boardrooms of the world. Freed from the discipline and constraints of the ‘classical’ Greek and Roman art models, and with human imaginations free to wander the torrid psychological landscapes of contemporary expression, art has become the ‘weapon of choice’ for those wanting to distinguish themselves from all others. What once connected us across time to the great cultures of the past was now used to plumb the depths of the immediate, the transitory and the thrill of the moment. An art world run in this way lives only in the present, (although post-modernism did champion the notion of ‘sampling’ the past and folding this into contemporary works) and easily absorbs the fanciful and shallow notion that life and our shared human culture may as well have begun when you were born, because this new creative world has no need of a past. Thus, the only relevant imagination is an imagination born of the present and the current which gazes longingly off into an imaginary future. Historic references could be included as long as it was derided, mocked or used as the ‘butt’ of a clever cultural joke. Artists had to be a mixture of the supremely gifted ‘innocent’, cultural warrior ready to wake the masses from their slumber and international super star whose every word and project demanded close attention from a world overdosing on the mundane and starved of the insightful and extraordinary.
The disconnection from the world was made complete when many leading artists within this new world now claiming that ‘the hand of the artist’ was overrated and that the art of art did not lie in the clever making of an object, but in the conceiving of that object (in truth art is a mixture of many aspects of our humanity and cannot belong to any one human quality). This process of change may have begun with the art school generated ‘Performance Art’ movement of the 1970’s and 1980’s which aligned the visual arts with the temporary and the transitory: art was of the moment and was important because of it’s relationship to the great mind that had conceived it, not the ordinary hand that made it. New artists began employing others to do their work, to realise their concepts and in doing so they were saying that our connection to the world around us is tenuous at best, and an unnecessary hindrance in their attempts to realise their creative concepts. They occupy the penthouse in this new artistic apartment building while others work in the basement, in the physical world, where things have to be made, not just conceived. Unfortunately this dislocation from the physical and sensual worlds and downgrading of what they can offer, separates artists from vital components of the creative DNA strand which have been central to arts success throughout human history.
This corporate model of globalisation is misplaced and ill considered when applied to the art model. One of the great strengths of every artist and every individual culture is it’s ‘own voice’ or dialect. From this springs both connection into larger matters, but also the intimacy of the familiar and the knowable. Paradoxically these qualities of particularity and individuality are what you need to have by your side if you are going to create something unique and new. The further you are away from your spiritual and creative home the weaker you become artistically, the more strained and anguished the artwork, the less palatable the outcome for all, including the artists. But yet so many young artists in recent years have lined up, abandoned their communities and sold their souls and creativity to the corporate western art world. Like the fairy tales of old, they have packed their bags and their mobile phones and headed off into the world to seek their fortune. But the publicly funded galleries which control and marshal the resources which power this world are like international airports, you can visit them, but never live there; you can work with them, but never belong; you can be well known to them yet still be anonymous. Art and culture has always been the product of localized events and conditions, with the best of these having implications farther-a-field. The globalized art world model has reversed this and now has young art graduates travelling the world looking for ‘fame and fortune’ within the constructed artificial world of the public gallery system and the fashionable private galleries and auction houses where major art purchases are made. But this contrived world is owned and run by people who have never created, and in my experience, have little affection for the creative because it is inherently unpredictable and difficult to manage in business terms. Freed from the responsibility to create culture, art only has to serve the career of each artist, it is a self contained world which feeds freely from public funding, but as cultural leader has abandoned most public connections or responsibilities. The perception has become that the more obtuse and obscure the art project the greater its capacity to lead us into the future. If ordinary people can understand it now, then it has no artistic or cultural leadership role. This art world contends that the great ideas lie at the ‘end of the rainbow’ and the only way to judge them from here, from the present, is through trusting the insights and inspired instincts of the genius/artist.
Young artists have learnt to become comfortable with the fashionable ‘sweep-stakes’ that the international art market has become. In a marketing coupe’, the art dealers have managed to turn the contemporary art market from a buyers market to a sellers market. The classical art market had always been a sellers market because of scarce resources, but never the contemporary art area. The control and contrivance of those now controlling this new market is complete because exclusive buyers are lined up at the gallery doors waiting to buy whatever they are told to buy. It is a marketers dream come true. Young artists are ‘breaking’ their necks to get noticed and become famous, the new wealthy within the globalised corporate world are lining up to purchase cultural sophistication and the newest status symbols. In the middle of this storm cell are the academics training young artists, art beaurocrats, private gallery directors and public gallery curators who purchase and show the latest and greatest on the fashionable art scene. But to be happy about this you must learn to be happy with the international commodification of the art process and object and the stripping away of individuality by a system that claims that it is dedicated to it. The problem with this system is that it is not allowing any gestation period for the elusive ideas and feelings that launch an artwork. Any system that gets you ‘into it’ in a hurry will also get you ‘out of it’ in a hurry as you make way for the next round of hopeful art graduates. The only constant in this whirlwind of activity (and the only people on a good hourly pay rate) are the non-creative people who act as ‘Ring-masters’ and run the show. It is depressingly sad to see one of our great human strengths reduced to the level of ‘side-show’ freak as artists struggle to be noticed in this ‘wacky’ artificial world far away from their families and communities, far away from the source of their art. Manhattan and London art galleries have become just another hairdressing salon, just another pet shop and, if necessary, just another seedy strip joint (echoes of the German Weimar Republic are coming through loud and clear) no more no less and in this manufactured world the biggest losers are those with a genuine and heart-felt interest in a viable and sustainable future for art and creativity.
Art as idea looks for the new, even if it is flawed, corrosive, divisive or clearly inept in wider cultural terms. Standards used and practices accepted in this world would see you incapable of using them to help you to pass the driving licence test in any civilized country. This world feeds off the ‘hothouse’ Manhattan art scene where for an artist’s career to be realised, you must ‘out shock the shocking’. People now have little or no intention of creating an artwork, but they have every intention of running a vibrant and profitable international art career. The similarities between this scene and their west coast cousins in Hollywood are too delicious not to consider. The codification and commodification of the art scene through an international register (Stock Market) of current prices payed for contemporary art works by leading individual artists, has the capacity to send the art world spiralling down into Dante’s Inferno.
Under this pressure local art schools and public art galleries around the world have themselves become ‘internationalised’. The net result is that the art schools of today are ‘clear felling’ local public culture (the same culture that funds many of these public institutions) to feed the world of individual culture and intensely self-serving personal international artistic careers. The art world is now so fixated on the next ‘super star’ of this contrived and manufactured international art world that all else is not just ignored, but actively suppressed. The shining light in all this ‘madness’ has been Australian Indigenous Art which has, up till recently, ignored this development and used art to tell it’s great cultural and spiritual stories and used the international language of finesse and beauty to caress others into appreciating their cultural world and spiritual insights into this country and their relationship with it. This has been a welcome relief from the ‘Shock Jock’ antics of young art school graduates as they attempt to out ‘gross’ or out think each other in lucrative and prestigious public art prizes as they jockey for position at the starting line of their international careers (I wonder if they ever think that a large slab of their lives are going to be spent in airplanes and airports and ‘seedy’ inner-city cheap hotels and back-packers hostels and that the art prize money is going to be used to feed the art career monster – airline tickets and constant international calls from mobile phones which are never cheap) Art students, please make sure you take your digital camera with you because those shots and an impressive C.V. (in fact for many recent artists their greatest artistic achievement is not their art work but their curriculum vitae) are going to be all that remains, before you wander back home and spend the rest of your days bored and lonely teaching in a prestigious art school preparing the next generation of ‘lemmings’. Take a long hard look at the current art world because, like the pop music industry, as soon as it has discovered you it has already begun planning to replace you.
This writing is a plea for the reinstatement of some sanity back into how we treat the arts in general and the life of the artist and the individual within our community in particular. Lets move beyond the superficial attraction of the Hollywood approach to art careers. In recent times, the artist as supreme individualist, has become a contemporary cultural ‘icon’ for a culture fascinated by what separates us and makes us unique individuals within an ocean of humanity, rather than what connects us. The artists’ isolation from the mundane and everyday aspects of life has been seen as a conduit to a higher order of human life, very much like the life of religious contemplatives from ages past. But in our age of the mind, we have distorted that idea by suggesting that perhaps absolute isolation from life will somehow deliver absolute strength and clarity, unfortunately I fear the opposite may be the case. As exploration of the human condition during the twentieth century through psychology and psychiatry has shown, cut loose from it’s moorings, the human mind has a tendency to wander aimlessly and ineffectively because it is a prisoner of the bodies sensual and corporal needs, especially it’s need for community, companionship and co-dependence. No individual, it would appear, can be an island for any sustained period of time; we are culturally, gender, family and experience specific, paradoxically needing all these things to plot the course of our own individuality and uniqueness. Despite propaganda within the arts, we exist within and, most importantly, cannot exist without human society; but yet despite our recently won individual freedoms and a contemporary culture predicated on this fact, our own individuality and particularity is still and always will be informed by and reflected back by the generalities of our society, family ties and our culture. The likes of Michelangelo and Leonardo did not create the Italian Renaissance, but rather ‘surfed’ this wave of human excellence and vision better than most others. Their status as superstars and cultural icons is richly deserved, but this could not have been realized in isolation. They were a product of their time and place as much as anything else, which was ‘supercharged’ by their own individual efforts.
Just to finish this saga, transpose this template of careerism into the public art arena and think what you can do with it. Then put it under the control of local council officers who want to play the art game and increase their prestige and attract public funding from outside the council because what the council supplies covers their wages and not much more. Then let these people of humble intellectual means assess art in light of recent developments and you have a “Chile Con Carne’ cultural recipe. Our generation will be remembered not for the informed discerning choices we made (please note the last ten years of public art commissions) but rather we will be remembered for the sad quality of inept choices and fanciful creative notions that were found, dug up, funded and failed. Many of these works and their concepts would not pass even the most rudimentary tests of human achievement. If these people and the art culture we all now endure were running a hospital the morgue would never be big enough to accommodate the failures (let alone the money needed to cover the medical mal-practice payouts). Having watched on and been involved in the arts for 25 years now, current art practice and culture has reached depths of despair even I could not have imagined. Like the miners at Beaconsfield in Tasmania I am left wondering what it is going to take to dig ourselves out of this mess we have created for ourselves.
So as an artist how does one react to this situation and find a quiet place to create within this whirling storm of art world activity? Most of the major Australian sculptors thirty years ago who wanted to pursue an art-career approach, worked as lecturers in prestigious art schools, exhibited mainly abstract metal sculptures within the private gallery system, sold works to major public collections and occasionally had works commissioned. Those who wanted to pursue a craft based approach to sculpture normally worked in natural materials, worked full time at a subsistence level fulfilling commissions for private clients, the corporate sector and the churches. They were fiercely independent and self-reliant and probably had little or no contact with the top private galleries and were not included in prestigious public gallery collections. My first attempts as a young sculptor was to approach this situation head on and exhibit within the art gallery system and chase down public art commissions. This had mixed success, but never had the potential to provide me with any sort of permanent income or viable support structure to underpin my art practice. I taught at the secondary and tertiary level, which provided an income but no art career possibilities. I watched as art teachers around me lined up in a never-ending queue applying each year for art grants to allow them to work full time on their art. It never worked. I tried once when it would really have made a difference to my art practice, but along with all the others my application was ‘binned’ and I vowed to do it on my own (the Australia council would just have to learn to get on without me – besides, standing in queues has never held a great attraction for me). Working as a sculptor (I entered art school/teachers college as a painter and came out as a sculptor, this says a lot about my painting) meant that working without support is far easier said than done. By its very nature art works in three dimensions are notoriously difficult to fund, source materials, find appropriate work spaces and hardest of all, find commissions or sell your work through a gallery. Public art commissions were few and far between, private art sales of sculptures were rare, architects were influenced by the modernist school which was looking for clean lines and simple uncluttered forms in their buildings, sculpture was not on the menu, other than large anonymous ‘designer’ forms in welded steel, large in scale but low in art content and character. A circuit breaker was needed and in response to a dream where I glimpsed an image for an exhibition work of a female figure tied to a cross (at the time I was intrigues with the notion that the Christ figure could represent a point equidistant between male and female qualities), I began to understand that perhaps the contemporary church area offered untapped potential for providing support for the arts. Part of my ancestry is Germanic and during my studies I had discovered the sculptural work of late Gothic and Early Renaissance German Cathedral art works. Tilman Reimenshneider and Veit Stoss were standout artists of their day and the logistics and sustained excellence of the large church commissions they created fascinated my young mind. It was as far away from the cold anonymous works in steel that I saw all around me (although to be fair I loved the almost organic but dynamic rusted steel forms of Sydney sculptor Ron Robertson Swann). At that time this countries leading young sculptor, Anthony Prior (who sadly passed away far too young) was beginning to use timber as part of abstract multi-media works but mainly using the wood to express the sensual and the organic. I wanted to use the wood to create lasting studies in human emotion and drama, I wanted to express the feelings of the reverence that I felt when I worked with materials from the earth, and I wanted to have the works housed and treasured within public spaces so that they could be a part of people’s lives. Cut off from public gallery collections and private art sales, the Church became a potential client and way forward through what looked and felt like, at the time, a desert landscape. If I was commissioned by the church to do serious work, not merely decorations or repeats of existing standard images, then it had the potential to allow me to serve my sculpture apprenticeship, begin to make my way in the world, support my young family and fund my own exhibition art projects. Twenty years on my wife Saadia and I have a family of four children who have all managed to live at home and study full time at university, a beautiful property in the Gembrook Forest 60 kilometres east of Melbourne and five major church projects in four states including renovation of the Townsville Cathedral. Recently I have been able to complete a suite of private art works that have begun to give me access back into the private gallery area. Naturally the missing part of this equation is that as individuals Saadia and I have had to walk over ‘broken glass’ to build this private world. This involved working twice as hard as most others for half the pay and in this state of uncertainty wonder if the next round of bills would finish the dream and sweep everything away that had been built up over the years.
Artists, above all else, want rich (not wealthy) and interesting lives. They seek challenges, both private and public, which take them forward in their search for their artistic potential and cultural home. Against all the odds and against all the advice I received from friends in the art area, this pursuit of work within the church has allowed me to approach my creativity on my terms, rather than having my creativity held to account by the next fashionable wave surging through contemporary culture. Creating ‘devotional’ art is a restricted genre’, but so too is aboriginal tribal art where the stories you tell are of an ancestral past which belongs to all initiated adults of your tribe or clan and not exclusively to you. But this has not dulled the flow of exquisite art works over recent years from aboriginal artists. So too with sacred church art, the stories do not belong to you, but the contemporary art which brings these stories to life for others does. Like Australian indigenous artists, I realise now that l am fascinated my the notion of the sacred and have, by default, undertaken a lifetime search for what this means when you come from a European heritage but look for the sacred within an Australian context. I have no real desire anymore to travel in person to Europe to study the masters. Their influence is already so much a part of my psyche that they speak through my work whether I am conscious of this or not. Like quiet close friends they converse with whoever wants to listen.
CONCLUSION ONE
In conclusion, the more I have thought about the position I now find myself in, the more it is beginning to look like I have taken the ‘radical’ option. The current art world, despite appearances to the contrary, has become the new conservative Academy. I now realise that the types of people who ran the traditional European Art Academies are probably the same that run it now; only they now wear black clothes and have radical contemporary hairstyles, or wear bowties and a suit. Their compulsion to play ‘traffic cop’ and control creativity has probably not changed, their need to be ‘at the helm’ of whatever is happening, has probably not changed. But what has changed is that in the past there was an agreed understanding of what mattered and how it should be achieved. I understand that much of this was a re-formulated classicalism which was happy to stifle current trends for the sake of control and predictability, but at least there were culturally agreed methods and outcomes for artworks, artists and potential clients . This current uncertainty has, I believe, slowed the amount of funds coming into the arts. This uncertainty has breed an atmosphere where we no longer feel able to make judgements on the relative merits of art outcomes. This radical ‘devaluation of the currency’ of art and the creative has meant that what is culturally valuable has been attached, not to the substantial, but to things that are novel, individual, distinct and discrete. This has lead to the curators of exhibitions having a far greater say in what is acceptable and elite’. But this position of authority and influence is problematic when it backs art events that are clearly at odds with even the most ‘liberal’ of assessments of intrinsic merit. One occurred recently in Melbourne when English artist Martin Creed had a work installed in our new Contemporary Art Museum (ACCA). This artwork consisted of having the lights turned off in two adjoining gallery spaces within the building. The artwork was the darkened space that gallery visitors walked into. Unfortunately the overwhelming value of this artwork which the curator of the show had seen and understood was lost on almost all others. This type of episode begs the question, do cleaning or security staff at the gallery inadvertently create an artwork every time they switch the gallery lights on or off. In the past artists had such a distinct and developed set of attributes and skills that they were not reproducible by the untrained or those who lacked substantial artistic ability. This line has been blurred for sometime, with this work it was rubbed out completely. This raises some serious and difficult issues for the publicly funded art world. Can you mount a case for extreme human excellence being proven by concept and intention alone, that is, if anyone else asked for the lights to be turned off in these gallery spaces would it be just that? Did the fact that Martin Creed asked for this to be done make it elite’ and distinctive because of his idea, because of his intentions alone? If the curator is correct and this particular artwork does engage in human excellence, do we then have to accept that we as a group, as the people who ‘funded this deal’ share in the cultural and artistic benefits that are meant to flow from this staged event. Because, although the curator of the show was at pains to explain the merit of this work, it was not accepted by the population (please remember art curators that the public are no longer milk maids and simple goat herders wandering the countryside, but are reasonably astute city dwellers with tertiary degrees in law, economics, sciences or the humanities who can and do have a reasonably informed opinion about these things).
The most problematic issues for me as an artist are that many fine contemporary Melbourne artists will work for a lifetime producing a body of work but will never be allowed to enjoy the privilege of having their work exhibited inside of the gallery spaces Martin Creed had handed to him for free. That because of the notion of art as idea most people in Melbourne were relieved of the duty to visit the gallery to see this work once it was described on radio or reported in the press because there was no physical art object to experience. The mind behind an artificially darkened architectural space has no intention of creating a work of art for public consumption, despite protests to the contrary, the intention is to take the next step in an international art career, which has little to do with people in Melbourne, they are just pawns in the game. Art to be art at all must walk the knife-edge of expressing our full individuality as an artist within works, which capture and hold the best that our culture has to offer. This duality of outcome must be matched by the duality of input to the process. Intentions do matter and it is only in union with the inner life of our community’s culture that we can access the worlds that lead us towards works of art. No one has been stronger in their pursuit of individuality than me, but even I am happy to concede our genetic need to embrace the particularity of our individuality in equal measure with the character of our community. Our humanity lies caught between these two worlds and it is here as artists that we must both explore the human condition and search for our art.
Surely the environmental imperatives we are facing in the twenty first century should be teaching us that the accumulated damage caused by all individuals is impacting adversely on the health of our environment. No organic system operates independently from those around it; no person is a cultural island or can operate as one, we are neurologically hard wired to be adept at being connected into things larger than ourselves, while at the same time being fully able to be aware of our own individuality. The art of it is to elegantly balance off these competing interests to produce outcomes, which exemplify our humanity, not diminish and degrade it as we have done to our natural environment. So much of what has passed for art in the last fifty years has had no intention of celebrating our humanity, but has thrown it’s efforts into mocking and degrading our humanity, taunting and jibing a hapless public who have become confused, disillusioned and removed from the art process. Into this vacuum has marched many things that are not creative, not inspirational but rather aspirational and commercial, or technical and scientific. We are finding out the hard way that the delicate balances which maintain the integrity of environmental systems are changed at our peril, perhaps this may also apply to our cultural and community systems which, paradoxically, form a major part of the life-support structures of our humanity and our unique individuality. We as individuals cannot progress without the cultural structures around us following suit so that we make sure that the progress individuals make is not lost and is built into our collective cultural psyche. We as individuals must be much more thoughtful about our actions because the accumulated impact of what we do really matters; global warming has become a clear imperative showing us how tentative our hold on our physical lives can be. The degradation of our collective cultural environment since the First World War under the weight of sustained attacks from elements of the art world has shown us how tentative our hold on our shared cultural lives can be. We disregard all these messages at our peril.
CONCLUSION TWO
Since servicing the whims and fancies and fulfilling the need of absolute monarchs and feudal leaders from the past to stamp their mark on history, artists from Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael onwards have served the ruling classes of European society. Creative people gravitated to the noble courts where both the funds, the will and the decision making capacity lay for awarding prestigious artistic commissions. The fact that much of what the best and brightest produced was locked up within private spaces and available only to the privileged few, was lost on most artists as they scrambled to pursue their careers and sell their work to the highest (both in monetary and social standing terms) bidder. The arts have learned to survive on a diet of feast and famine. They have enjoyed being guests at the table of societies power brokers and despots. They have grown used to servicing a tiny percentage of the population in pursuit of their artistic careers. The more prestigious the purchaser, the greater the impact on their careers; the more notoriety for the artist, the greater the prestige and demand generated for their works. In and of itself art does not, in any obvious way, make the world go round. By and large it is not like a machine in a factory that generates direct income for it’s owner, art is a net financial liability which costs it’s owner money. Art needs to cling to the notion of the prestigious to help justify it’s purchase; a purchase done with money dedicated to discretionary spending by the wealthy or committed collector. Artists need to work with those members of the elite’ who will make their work appear important and therefore collectable.
This model of elite’ art servicing the society elite’ has persisted long after the hereditary power structures within society which produced that elite’ have collapsed and been replaced by participatory democracy and universal suffrage. But yet the current art world persists with the notion that cultural outcomes are lead by the elite’. This means that if a small select group of elite’ or educated individuals approve of a particular cultural event or outcome then it is likely to be approved. However within our democratic system the taxes of the many pay for the privileges of the few. When only a handful of elite’ citizens were literate and culturally educated and capable of making decisions in the art field, than perhaps a case could be made for the legitimacy of this approach to cultural affairs. But in today’s democracy with compulsory state funded education and attendance at tertiary courses commonplace, perhaps a different model is needed.
In the past the history of a country was really the history of the ruling families which dominated society and acted, by proxy, for all other families. Recorded European history is the history of an intertwined group of royal families that maintained their exclusive rights by inter-marrying within a small group of power brokering family dynasties. Recorded art history acknowledged the lives of those who serviced the needs of royalty, the institutionalised churches and wealthy families. For better or for worse formal recorded history is dominated by the lives of very few individuals. The cultural achievements of a society have been measured by the activities of small groups of individuals at the top of the social ‘pecking order’.
I would like to propose a different model which does not use a social elite’ as the sole test of the cultural validity of art outcomes. Rather I would prefer to see cultural outcomes that are measured by their capacity to engage with a larger number of members of a society. This is not meant as ‘popularism’ where numbers only measure worth, but as a discerning approach to cultural outcomes. What I mean is that traditionally the worth of a society was measured by the actions of a small social elite’, no matter what the actions of the rest of society may have been. I am suggesting that perhaps we should be moving towards a model (like participatory democracy) where society is measured by the actions of the many, not just the few. For too long now the institutionalised art world has hidden behind the façade of elitism, justifying it’s stance by saying that they alone could understand and defend the best cultural standards and outcomes the community could expect and produce. The maintenance of this position of privilege has needed and depended on the chronic indifference and confusion of most of the population when it came to cultural matters.
Are we as a culture to be measured by the actions and achievements of the few, or should we be pursuing a model of participatory culture where we are measured by the actions of the many. If people within our community are lagging behind in these matters do we have the right to ignore them and pretend that they don’t exist, or should we be working harder to make sure that who we are includes as many of our community as possible. There will always be outstanding individuals in any society, this is the nature of our humanity, but does that mean that everyone else becomes mere spectators witnessing the elite’ performances of others. Or is our cultural achievement to be seen as a composite of the special individuals in conjunction with the achievements of the many. For example, if Australia wins all the gold medals for swimming at the Olympic games, but no one other than the athletes actually swims in this country, do we have the right to call ourselves a great swimming nation? If many of our artists are recognized overseas for elite’ performances while most members of our community do not participate in the production of their own culture, do we still have the right to call ourselves a cultured nation with a unique contribution to make? The problem with the elite’ model of performance is that by definition it must become and act like a ‘gated’ community. The maintenance of the status of the gated community depends as much on who they keep out as who they let in. The art world clings to a model where the people who run it prosper by keeping most people out of it. The art-curators become the ‘gate-keepers’ patrolling the perimeter of the fence-line and guarding the gates against unwanted intruders. But what happens if the current fashion within the art world has become insular, isolated and, like segments of our natural environment, toxic. In this creative world turned on its head, perhaps the people the power brokers reject maybe the most creative and culturally relevant for their generation and those that they are admitting the most damaged, disaffected and destructive. Whatever the reasons, the net affect has been to generate a publicly supported tidal surge of inappropriate, obscure, self obsessed and insular art work which has held little regard for the cultural ’health’ of our community or it’s future viability. My distinct impression is that our humanity has been diminished by this and is the worse for it, which contrasts sharply with the legacy of art treasures from previous human generations. Surely our best interests cannot be served by using our current art works and art culture as a ‘toxic’ waste dump for human expression. Surely our best interests are served and our future lies in taking the best that our humanity has to offer and using this to propel our community into a sustainable cultural world. Anything less than this is unthinkable and unviable and therefore unworthy of our humanity. We can no longer sustain the depletion of our rich cultural heritage and the threat this poses to our collective survival and future potential. Aboriginal art has unearthed a living treasure of possibilities, we must now unearth ours.