Julian Spalding is former director of Glasgow Museums and the author of Con Art, a short book that attacks the type of contemporary conceptual art that is valued in the millions today. Using Edvard Munch’s The Scream as an example, he describes the universal and timeless effect of what he considers to be a real work of art:
Julian Spalding (English accent): In 1883 the Indonesian volcano erupted, [the] Krakatoa. It spewed masses of debris into the atmosphere and created amazing sunsets all round the world. Edvard Munch was twenty, saw this sunset and he was absolutely amazed. But he couldn’t express what he felt because he was just beginning to paint. And it took him ten years to develop the visual language that enabled him to do that. And ten years later, in 1893, he painted The Scream. One of the great images of modern times. And it exists in reality in the National Gallery of Norway in Oslo. When you look at it, it absolutely speaks to you. It’s about anguish. It’s not an idea - it’s about something very specific.
STUFF THAT HAPPENS
Gavin Turk is a prominent British artist and a member of the Young British Artists group of the 1990s. Turk believes that art is about ideas, and that it simply reflects contemporary culture:
Gavin Turk (London accent): Art has to have ideas. Surely art is a process, it’s like science. Art isn’t a thing, an object. Surely art is just cultural stuff that happens. If people arrive on a desert island, and some people have been there, making some stuff, they would say: ‘Ah this is the art of the island, this is the cultural output of the island.’ They [the visitors] would take it into another cultural space and give it importance as a material through which they would understand their [the native people’s] lives.
REMBRANDT CAN DO IT
Spalding says that art cannot be just “stuff.” He places emphasis on the skill that a select few artists have to develop a visual language. He gives some canonical examples:
Julian Spalding: Somebody can’t just say ‘I’m an artist!’ It requires a huge amount of effort and a huge amount of concentration and a huge amount of skill. Some people can do it. Shakespeare can do it in writing poems. Mozart can do it. Rembrandt can do it. I remember showing some very young children the Mona Lisa and this little girl said, ‘She looks as though it’s her wedding day and her best friend has just died.’ And I thought, [that’s a] fantastic response to the sadness and the happiness in that painting. The things that are lasting in art still speak to us.
THE BULLETPROOF SMILE
Turk questions whether art can have a timeless effect. He suggests that history itself transforms the work, and that our interpretation of older works, and what constitutes art history, is always changing:
Gavin Turk: The history of art, which we think [of] almost like a fixed thing, this canon of art is actually changing. There’s a lot of reinvestigation into artists’ work, and artists’ work coming to the surface. When I showed my son, and he was aged six, the Mona Lisa, he said, “Is someone going to shoot a gun at it?” So his response wasn’t actually relating to the painting and to the figure, his response was relating to the bit of glass in front of it. I think the ‘frame’ is part of it. That, you know, the fact that the Mona Lisa has been stolen is the thing that makes it famous.
YOUNG BRITISH CAPITALISTS
For Spalding, much of the conceptual art valued by art galleries and critics today will be worthless in the future. He specifically accuses members of the Young British Artists group of being marketeers rather than artists. This includes Tracey Emin, whose unmade bed sold for 2.5 million pounds, and Damien Hirst, whose shark preserved in formaldehyde sold for a reported eight to twelve million pounds! “What separates Michelangelo from [Damien] Hirst,” says Spalding, “is that Michelangelo was an artist and Hirst isn’t.”
Julian Spalding: Why I’m so against conceptual art is that it denies you the right, it denies you the ability to make any judgement, the whole thing becomes a sea of junk.