A four-month long, much-hyped London exhibit of 25 recent works, painted by English “artist” Damien Hirst’s very own hands, closed on Jan. 24.
The words “very own hands” are not, as they normally would be, redundant in this context. Damien Hirst is the world’s most materially successful artist; his 2008 show Beautiful Inside my Head Forever sold at auction by Sotheby’s for $198-million. Yet his creepy creations are factory-line products assembled by 120 studio minions, some assigned to pickling sheep, sharks and cows (one Hirst montage of rotting, copulating cows was banned by health authorities in New York), others tending the laundromat from which his famous “spin” paintings emerge. This London exhibit, No Love Lost, Blue Painting, revealed that painting solo, Hirst is, technically speaking, an amateur.
Which only emphasized the hubristic irony of the exhibition’s placement amongst the Rembrandts, Titians and Rubens’ of Hertford House’s Wallace Collection. Swine before pearls, so to speak.
It is true that some old masters, like Rubens, also ran art “factories,” with apprentices laying the groundwork, and Rubens applying the strokes of genius. Unlike Hirst, though, Rubens could have painted his works from scratch himself.
Critical reaction to the exhibition was uniformly, devastatingly contemptuous. But the reviewers’ fusillade of derision: “embarrassing,” “shockingly bad” and — my personal favourite — “Francis Bacon meets Adrian Mole,” glanced off Hirst’s bulletproof sangfroid. As he mused to a reporter soliciting reaction to the general condemnation: “I don’t believe in genius … Anyone can be like Rembrandt … That’s the great thing about art. Anyone can do it if you just believe.”
Hirst’s naked-emperor moment is propelling ripples of mortification through the art world. As an online Guardian columnist conceded: “It is not just Hirst who is implicated in this exposure. It is an entire idea of art that triumphed in the 1990s and still dominates our culture.”
An airing of the art world’s unhealthy deference to “an entire idea of art” — i.e. that concept is all, technique nothing — is long overdue. Conceptual art, whose roots go back to the 1960s, privileges ironic statement and self-reflexive cleverness over talent and discipline. Pioneering conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner built his celebrity stencilling superfluous words on walls in capital letters: One representative work, a plaque over a rug on which bleach has been poured, reads, an amount of bleach poured upon a rug and allowed to bleach. Novacaine for the mind and aesthetic sense in one: quite a feat.
Conceptual faddishness soon colonized art schools, where pranks and performance theatre replaced serious skills-building. The Royal University of Fine Arts in Stockholm no longer teaches traditional drawing and painting techniques. But last January, as a (tax-funded) academic project, an art student in Stockholm was encouraged by her teacher to fake a suicidal tableau on a bridge, then dramatically fight, kick and bite her police rescuers and psychiatric examiners, all in aid of “questioning the accepted definitions of sanity.”
Instead of technically proficient craftspeople with respect for art’s traditions, these art schools are graduating preening fifth columnists. Decades ago, most art schools became, and remain, militantly politicized along politically correct lines. At the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, staff who defended two professors awarded figurative art and sculpture appointments were characterized by their colleagues as Nazi sympathizers.
Canadian schools are no better. A long-time male art teacher who stubbornly champions courses offering technical skills and figurative art at the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD) told me, “My students can’t draw and paint.” He added, “If you have talent with your hands and eyes, you’re out of luck at OCAD.”
Projects such as skinning cats and phoning in bomb threats to public buildings are now sometimes perpetrated in the name of “art” — perverse extrapolations of OCAD president Sara Diamond’s (historically awkward) exhortation for students to become “storm troopers of the imagination.”
There’s hope. A January New Criterion magazine article introduces readers to a new counter-movement: “retrogardism,” which is described as “a multidisciplinary attempt to retrieve techniques and genres that fell into disuse during the modernist period.”
Retrogardism isn’t retrogradism. If pseudo-artists are all avant-gardism can produce, retrogardism may, for those who would be themselves, or wish to educate, real artists, the only way forward.