Destroying art is all the rage this week
What a week for art! What a week for the wisdom of crowds!
It’s just seven days since Channel 4 announced the premise of their latest intriguing/oh-so-interesting/irritating TV show. This time there are no obese people losing weight through the magic of trampoline or naked S&M potholers forced to live in an Orkney nunnery for a year. The idea this time is to buy works of art by “problematic” artists and then ask a studio audience if the pieces should be destroyed by the intriguing/oh-so-interesting/irritating Jimmy Carr. Who, after all, wouldn’t like the idea of consigning the work of Adolf Hitler to the wheelie bin of history? What about Rolf Harris? Eric Gill? And who is going to stand up and defend the art of the very worst people?
And therein lies the challenge. The premise sounds as thought-provoking as it is harrowing. Destroying art? Whatever next? Book Burning with Holly and Philip? (Note to self: pitch this to ITV.)
It’s a question sure to have provoked more than a few debates over vegan dishes and cocktails in Soho restaurants this past week. Some will have been downright appalled. Others more taciturn. Quote of the Month probably belongs to Dr Sam Rose, a senior lecturer in art history at St Andrews, who told The Guardian: “I think it’s all on a case by case basis […] It’s fine to burn some cultural works by wrongdoers – say, DVDs by Jimmy Carr when he avoids tax and jokes about the Holocaust. But this is because those people and works aren’t significant – see also Rolf Harris.”
He has a point. But isn’t this how art has always worked? Don’t we already remember and forget art, much of it considerably better than a scribbled Rolferoo or, indeed, an Adolferoo. Antiques Roadshow has been more successful than most art movements (shoutout to “Les Arts incohérents”) simply because it recovers art that was in the process of being forgotten. Art constantly exists on the edge of destruction. Does it make a difference if that happens due to Aunt Hilda’s randy tom rather than Jimmy Carr?
And then there’s George Monbiot, surely asking the least interesting question of the week as he riddled us this in response to the two environmental protestors who threw soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers: “Do we really care more about Van Gogh’s sunflowers than real ones?” Well, George, of course, we don’t. But if we’re asking about why we value artistic expression, then we’re posing a far more interesting question that might contribute something to your larger point.
Great art is a distillation of a lived life. It’s why it takes on a value that will never be replicated by some clever AI pretending to have loved and lost before cutting off its own mechanical ear. Why, after all, might Monbiot believe the world worth saving? Does he want to retain it on behalf of the puffins, as some miraculous quirk of the universe where Life happened to flourish for a few billion years? Or does humankind give it added value? Ask it quietly but… might it be worth saving because it happens to be our home?
Surely, it’s the human variable that unlocks this riddle. Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, their continued existence, as well as the human story they represent, should make us care even more deeply about real sunflowers and by extension, the rest of the natural world. It’s not quite as simple a choice as art or the environment. We are the environment. The environment is us.
Nor is Jimmy Carr’s new show really about art as much as it’s about affirming the subjective values worth affirming as human beings. This is hardly a new concept or even a modern problem. Art is inextricably bound to the lived-in world. The two protestors who threw soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers didn’t throw soup at “Van Gogh’s Sunflowers” per se. They threw soup at the National Gallery’s presentation of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, protected by armoured glass, in a context where thousands of people a week take selfies before a painting they visit in pilgrimage without truly seeing the object of their adoration. The protestors threw soup because we value the Sunflowers so much (albeit in a postcard, Kiss Me Quick, kind of way) and their temporary defacing of the painting would consequently make the news.
This is where there is a wisdom of the crowd or, at least, the matter of an ongoing (almost unnoticed) arbitration between the public and art. It is also an expression of the unconquerable power of the market. Culture is itself a marketplace of ideas, tastes, fashions, and even identities. Every culture war will fizzle out – as culture wars in the past fizzled out – because there’s no usurping the human quantity, which will either adapt or reject the changes that periodically challenge the status quo. One can try to anticipate that market, but it rarely goes as expected. Just ask those Tufton Streeters how they feel about the market’s response to the Truss/Kwarteng budget. You might not get as many defences of the free market as you’d have got a couple of weeks earlier.
“Right, studio audience! Over to you! We bought this original Kwasi Kwarteng mini-budget, circa 2022, and now you get to decide. Should we preserve it for future generations or run over it with this tractor driven by the lovely Anneka Rice? Vote now. History is waiting and I can see Anneka already revving that throttle!”
Art, just like economic policy, is an attempt to assert order upon the chaotic universe and one cannot do that from a neutral position. There is not a great deal of difference between shaping a budget and shaping a canvas or giving shape to a novel. Kwarteng’s gaudy pastiche of dayglo tax cuts and primitively formed public spending was rejected by its intended audience but there is nothing to say that Channel 4’s plan will produce the results they expect or many fear. Perhaps the audience will choose to keep the art as a useful reminder of Hitler’s scarce talent (my preferred choice) but if they don’t then we’re playing out a narrative as old as art itself. We can scream and panic about moral decline, about the banality of our culture, or even the fickle nature of a market that rejected something that was meant to please them. But we should not delude ourselves that we’re not already in the business of destroying art. And if you question that, then go look at art out there in the real world (much of it power-washed off public walls by council employees) and compare it to the incoherent scribbles (cough, David Shrigley) that sell in galleries for thousands.
No artist, in whatever medium they work, can escape the ongoing fight for survival as we all swirl around the lip of entropy’s bottomless well. Channel 4 are just making us face that struggle head on and it need not be an unedifying process if, in the process, it makes us face the very nature of creativity, and the art we retain as well as the art we let go. This, after all, is the explicit bargain we all make when, in the words of Hunter S. Thompson, we “buy the ticket [and] take the ride”.
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