Do you like adolescent entertainment? Do you have the mentality of a teenager?
Do you find Cézanne a bit overrated? If the answer is yes, yes and yes, then
I don’t know what to do with you. You are a childish philistine literalist.
Get down to Bonhams (one of the world’s oldest and largest auctioneers of
fine art and antiques) next Tuesday for their first-ever dedicated sale of
“street art” – this is the experience for you.
“Street art” means graffiti, comics-style stuff, spray-paint art, flyposting –
the art of groovy youth. The stars of the street-art sale will include
Banksy, Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Antony Micallef, Adam Neate,
Faile, Paul Insect, Space Invader, Swoon, D*Face and Shepard Fairey.
Basquiat, who died of an overdose in 1988, was funny and witty, and he had a
great sense of bitter irony about black cultural history: he shared this
sensibility with many people. But he was a great mark-maker, an arranger of
forms, he could make surfaces breath and colours sing, and all this made him
extremely rare. As an artist Haring (who died of an Aids-related illness
three years after Basquiat) was nothing like in Basquiat’s league: he had
commercial appeal but was too visually repetitive and sterile to be
significant beyond his own brief moment. Basquiat’s shining light shows up
the visual boredom of the rest of the “street art” crew – they are funny and
punky, sure, but, well, who isn’t?
Gareth Williams, the urban-art specialist at Bonhams, says: “By transposing
their images from street wall to canvas, urban artists are now creating a
permanent legacy without compromising the vitality of their art.” Poor
Williams – how giddy and weightless life must be for him, to be in the
business of using words without having any interest in what they mean.
“Vitality” is what Matisse or Goya has, or Islamic mosaics, or Greek statues,
or abstract paintings by Jackson Pollock – all that old obscure stuff.
Vitality in art is a rare quality, it means life – you see it and you feel
life is worth living. It goes with originality and surprise, a mixture of
the fresh and the eternal. It’s found throughout the history of art. It’s
the opposite of convention and routine. The point about street art is that
it has to conform to street-art convention. It has to be a routine. It has
to express the personality of a stoner, grinning, funny and kidlike.
What can you get at the auction? You can be the owner of Banksy’s Laugh Now,
in stencil paint on canvas, for only £40,000. It shows a chimp with a sign
round its neck that reads: “You can laugh but one day we’ll be in charge.”
What would you really be buying? A status symbol – the work has no value as
art. But owning it would make you modern and clever. Or stupid. It’s a fine
line.
A work by Banksy sold at auction for £288,000 last April. He is collected by
Damien Hirst, who we know is incredibly wealthy – but so what? Hirst’s
paintings of his son being born cost £1 million each and visually they are
junk. They are only valuable because of a market consensus, not because they
connect to anything important. Most of life is made up of trivia, and
there’s nothing wrong with celebrating it. But it’s something else again to
revere it as if it’s the pyramids; there’s something sick about that.
“Street art” is adolescent. With the exception of Basquiat, the artists whose
work is on sale at Bonhams next week are talented people in that area, but
the area itself is of absolutely no interest unless you’ve got an arrested
mentality. Its rise as something to take seriously says something about the
weird state of art now. The core of art today is satire and gags and
attention-getting stunts. As a society we all kind of know this but somehow
we also accept that it’s a social faux pasever to mention it. Banksy being
considered a “conceptual artist” is only a measure of how banal and feeble
the “concepts” of contemporary art are, and an indication of art’s slide
into all-out philistinism. To appear tuned-in we now have to pretend that a
literal crack in the floor at Tate Modern means global unease (the latest
commission by Tate Modern in its annual Unilever series), that a lot of real
people standing on a marble plinth means “humanity” (Anthony Gormley’s
proposal for a new work on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square) and that
Marc Quinn’s new sculptures at White Cube of foetuses are “influenced by
Michelangelo”.
Banksy’s ideas only have the value of a joke. What is an idea in real or high
art? This is a puzzle for Williams, Bonhams press-release writer, but also
apparently a puzzle for the guardians and spokespersons of culture now. When
contemporary-art explainers are asked on to Radio 4’s Front Row or BBC Two’s
Late Review to enthuse about new art shows, the hosts never challenge the
rubbish they spout. Mark Lawson doesn’t know about art, but also he doesn’t
want to seem offensive. And yet he does know about ideas, and he must see
that Anthony Gormley doesn’t really have them in any important sense –
Lawson starts reasonably enough, not wanting to appear gauche in a
conversation about art, but he ends up actually believing the bullshit.
The result is a culture subscribed to by many, many intelligent people, in
which another level of meaning operates where art is concerned than the
level that operates for, say, books by J. M. Coetzee. With the former we
accept an unaesthetic experience and an explanation that is shallow where it
is not incomprehensible. And with the latter we’re in awe of wit, learning,
craft, knowledge and surprise; we’re amazed that the depths of what it feels
like to be a suffering, feeling, joyful, thinking human being right now can
be captured by art. With Banksy (as with Hirst) we’re just amazed that he
could be so rich.
— The Bonhams Urban Art auction will be at 101 New Bond Street, W1, on
Tuesday, February 5, at 7pm Matthew Collings’s new book, This is
Civilisation, is out now (21 Publishing, rrp £25, Times Bookshop £22.50,
free p&p)
Laughing all the way to the Banksy
Online bidding for a wall painted on by Banksy closed earlier this month with
a final price of £208,100, after 69 bids. The owner of the wall, Luti
Fagbenle, estimated that the cost of removal of the piece would be around
£5,000, to be paid by the buyer.
In October 2006, a Banksy painting used for the cover of Blur’s Think Tank
album – of an embracing couple dressed in deep-sea diving gear – sold at
Bonhams for £62,400, ten times the original estimate.
The previous month, the graffiti artist staged a show in Los Angeles, at which
Angelina Jolie is reported to have spent £200,000 on his work. Christina
Aguilera is another celebrity fan – she visited Banksy’s Soho gallery during
a trip to London in April 2006 and paid £25,000 for three works, including
one depicting Queen Victoria in a lesbian clinch with a prostitute.
Bombing Middle England, a painting of pensioners playing bowls with bombs,
fetched a whopping £102,000, more than double its highest estimated price of
£50,000, at Sotheby’s in February last year.
In the same sale, Banksy’s Balloon Girl sold for £37,200, and another work
called Bomb Hugger for £31,200.
Jokes can be important. But the only thing useful about them is to make you laugh or think. Since Banksy's art does neither, it must be of limited use. If Banksy's art challenged or shocked authority that might be useful as well. It does not even achieve this. Therefore I view it as truly redundant.
nick, london,
The only person with a good perspective on all this pitiful scrabbling is Dave from Melbourne (see third comment). \\
Alex, New York City, USA
Bansky's themes have always been very anti-establishment. Now that he has made it in the establishment he has compromised his title of 'artist'. I very much agree with the statement 'Banksy’s ideas have the value of a joke'. A lot of his work is just visual irony.
Tom, St Ives,
'Bloviating' or not, lovely piece. I especially liked the pity for the urban art specialist. Sonja, you sort of have a small point, but you miss the larger one. Most readers of this article are familiar enough with the cultural landscape Collings describes to know whether they agree that contemporary art is providing woefully thin gruel compared with other artforms, both conceptually and aesthetically. Sure, he's blowing off steam here (and I enjoyed that), but contrary to the impression you give by quoting that steam blowing out of context, he provides examples and analysis enough to make his point.
To the various post-modern relativists popping up here: you're behind the curve. Yes, Collings is old; old enough to have lived right through the postmodern era and know it's used up and bankrupt, despite the high prices. The 'well you have your opinion and I have mine' approach to appreciation art is not very fertile ground for critical writing (whatever the editors of Frieze think).
John M, London, UK
Myself, I've always put incredible value in jokes.
Dave, Melbourne, Australia
The whole ethos of post-modernism is nothing but an attempt to intellectualise and legitimize 'bread and circuses' for the masses. Give them the second-rate and mediocre and tell everyone it's valuable just because it exists. And then wonder why there is poverty of aspiration and no social mobility. Brilliant!
Liz Matthews, Bristol,
Great article. There are lots of highly talented contemporary artists around it's just that Banksy isn't one them.
CHARLIE, LONDON, UK
I love it!!. So called Contemporary street artist(Banksy) turned
multi millionaire. Please do not divide us in this cultural debate street art vs.gallery art . Its more like beauty is in the eye of the beholder and money in your pocket to buy it, if that
is what you desire. The artist creates out of necessity and
passion be it Banksy or Da Vinci.
e galgano, philadelphia, usa
In order to make his case here, Collings presents us with a fallacy of limited options: Banksy either has to be Rembrandt or he's rubbish. On the other hand we have exceptional cartoonists and illustrators who create inspiring work every day and who don't claim to be anything "higher" than their occupation. Banksy creates simple, striking work, which often provides concise and scathing criticism of authoritarian government, surveillance society, and war. I imagine, to some extent, it may be your conservative sensibilities Banksy has offended, more than your sense of aesthetics. So be it.
Robert S., New York, NY
Wow, judgemental much? Have you heard about postmodernism? What constitutes "great art" anymore, are there universally-held standards? That having been said, I think street art should stay in the street where it belongs, and all the decorative painters can hang in galleries.
MW, Cambridge, MA
Congratulations, Mr. Collings... I was doubtful at first, but with this article, I believe you truly have been reborn, and have finally become the art critic it has long been alleged you were. Gone is the unreadable, tragically hip tripe you used to peddle, in favour of what now is a wonderful level of keen scrutiny.
Thank you.
Ryan McCourt, Edmonton, Canada
I agree that bringing street art into the gallery setting is compromising its vitality and integrity. Miwon Kwon, in Site Specific Art and Location Identity traces the developments of post-minimalist site specific work since the likes of Micheal Heizer. Her conclusion is that much of the conceptual developments lead to an increase in the very commodity systems early site specific work was rejecting. Banksy is a clever and a talented stencilist, but that is the depth of his work, and am appalled (and I hope he is as well) that his 'vandalism' is now adding value to the sites he wishes to transgress. Ultimately Bansky is a populist propaganda painter. His work is fully accessible without any intellectual foundation, and conceptually he working in fully explored territory. Not to get down on him too much, I enjoy the work, but the depth of it is an allusion.
Dave Olsen, Boston, MA
How you are allowed to keep your job is a mystery to me when you analyze art thusly:
“Vitality in art is a rare quality, it means life – you see it and you feel life is worth living. It goes with originality and surprise, a mixture of the fresh and the eternal..."
You're assigning enigmatic qualities and descriptors in order to justify depriving an entire group of artists of a vocal position within the art world. Don't insult your readers. Provide what is requisite for every art historian/critic to offer: visual analysis. Did you not learn at a young age to "show" rather than "tell"? Describe how the visual qualities and performative aspects of street art is "adolescent" or "puerile". Juxtapose that with something comparable at least in terms of palette or line or subject. Matisse, whom you mention, is a good start.
Whether or not I agree with you is irrelevant. The point here is that you are not evalutating art. You're bloviating.
Sonja, New York, USA
New art is important and it should confuse the establishment and you won’t find it in the galleries selling for hundreds of thousands of $$$$ – sorry banksy is for t-shirts which is fine, but it’s not new and it’s not original and i fine him kinda naïve like haring – and really does anyone really haring, I mean really.
dfb, toronto, canada
There has always been little artistic merit to Banksy: one-look art for the eBay aesthetes. If chavs collected art it would be towards Banksy that they'd gravitate but it is the middle classes that it largely appeals to. In the same way that New Labour once courted the banal whims of 'Mondeo Man', Banksy has managed to court the banal whims of know-nothing gentrifiers. I'm interested in the popular reception of the work by these powerful partisan groups (Mondeo Man seems to like Banksy too though he can't afford him). The appeal is, I think, that to engage with Banksy at his level is to feel a little frisson of resistance without actually having to stop 'playing the game'. Though you're mortgaged up to the hilt and swamped by credit card debt, you can still feel that you're up there on the barricades, showing a finger to the Man. It's an empty experience though, because there is nothing new in Banksy - he's both derivative and banal. http://www.kurtenscharfer.net
Kurtenscharfer, Little England,
I almost stopped reading after that first paragraph but then caught that Basquiat was the exception. He certainly is the exception.
If these collections were being sold 50 years from now I'd be equally confused. Suffice to say that the simplicity of street art language while it may not have the legs to stand strong in 50+ years (maybe even 10) it is easily understood today. But it's a short term investment.
Josh, Chicago,
You're old! I answered yes to all three questions. Have some tea while you figure out what to do with me. The best new art should confound you, because the fact is you're far too comfortable. Banksy makes you uncomfortable. It makes you uncomfortable to see others, whom you don't know what to do with, praising him.
Ray, Charlottesville, USA/ VA
What 's surprising is that the authors of the two posts above, were able to maintain concentration long enough to read, let alone understand Collings's piece.
My question would be the elevation of all this crappy graffiti, to the level of 'joke', with the expectation, that they might be funny or clever.
Matthew Collings is pretty accurate, in just about everything else.
FC
francis Convery, aberdeen, scotland
Doesn't every new movement meet the revulsion of the critics? You love Basquiat now, but until his death he was parodied as being puerile and lacking depth. As were most ground-breaking artists - even Van Gogh.only sold one painting in his lifetime. This ability to miss every important trend and judge purely on what has gone before is one of the amazing things about art critics. Thankfully, Banksy's massive popularity (his book Wall and Piece has sold over 300,000 copies) is nothing to do with what pompous cultural luddites like Matthew Collings. And if you want to see 'real' art on the streets, take a look at Jose Parla - whose 21st century take on abstract expressionism is every bit as powerful as Pollock and de Kooning (both of whom were lambasted by the critics in their day). Banksy, Adam Neate, Parla and Faile will survive because they are moving art forward in a way that real people genuinely respect and enjoy.
Ed Baines, London,
Matthew Collings this is the worst piece of journalism I have seen in quite some time. Banksy provides stunning stencils in minutes, on street corners etc that the vast majority of us find very clever,witty and artistic. Unlike your reporting
Patrick, Oldham, lancs
The transaction from street to gallery is compromising street art vitality. The art market could be crazy as always has been. I could have an arrested mentality, and I am not a teenager. But man, you are boring and sooo last century. Accept the idea that things change and evolve.
Margherita , Roma, Italy