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From: RS
Category: Exhibitions
Date: 22 October 2003
What is art, and how is contemporary painting? I thought as I walked around. Seeing, with specific questions in mind, is a way of heightening our responses and structuring our looking. All this art on show, that which is traded, but still representative of contemporary painting, if not art, due to the exigencies of the marketplace.
So how is painting. Often witty. Stylish. Unemotive. Figurative/abstract have become entirely irrelevant categories, nothing has any power to signify. Effortless elegance. Painting is not triumphant but not scared or sacred. Where it is good is when it squirms out of just being clever and becomes difficult to know, absorbingly something else which exists only in art/painting. A false metaphysics, a mood, a swirling stomach. Then it collapses flat as a pancake, boring as dirt. Interesting as dirt.
What is art. It is this stuff we see at the art fair. There are clowns in real life, but the real ones earn a living by wearing curly wigs. There is no room for the pompous judgment of history. This art fair fare is art, take it or leave it, for it is fascinating if only we can escape out little selves for a time.
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