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| Centipede by Paula Morrison |
Here is a piece of contemporary art. It is a sculpture created by a young Scottish artist named Paula Morrison. She gained a degree in fine art from Edinburgh University and earns her living teaching art in a Further Education college in a small town in the west of Scotland. She also creates artworks, often on an environmental theme, in a small studio in her house by the sea, and has exhibited her work at art fairs and galleries around Scotland and elsewhere.
Morrison calls this piece, ‘Centipede’. Like much of her work, it is made from a ‘found object’, in this case a broken TV aerial. For Morrison, it signifies the way that consumer goods and technology are slowly strangling the environment, and imagines a future when no organic living things survive, and our left-behind objects have evolved into lifeforms to replace them.
I’m not sure that I ‘get’ Morrison’s artwork, and I don’t like it much. I wouldn’t want to buy it to display in my house or garden, and would not have the patience to keep explaining it to puzzled visitors. And this is broadly my view of contemporary art as a whole. I visit modern art museums regularly and love looking at great works from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But when I get to the contemporary art section, I tend to feel lost, bored and irritated that so many apparently facile and meaningless pieces are given such prominence. I have tried to broaden my mind by reading books on contemporary art that give examples of ‘great’ works, and have pored over a list in the magazine ARTnews of their ‘100 best artworks of the twenty-first century’. But I am still largely left cold. I find myself thinking, am I missing something, or is contemporary art a massive con?
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| Another example of a piece of contemporary art that I don't quite get, despite the detailed explanation. Displayed in the Stedelijk museum, Amsterdam |
It is of course nothing new to find the latest artistic styles hard to understand or to like. Taste in art can evolve slowly. In 1874, a group exhibition of paintings by Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas and Paul Cezanne (among others) was met with scorn and derision from critics and the public. The title of a painting by Monet, Impression, Sunrise, was seized upon as a term of abuse, and the group was labelled ‘Impressionists’. In 1976, the Tate Gallery’s purchase of a sculpture by the American Minimalist sculptor Carl Andre, which consisted of two neat rows of firebricks, was lambasted in the popular press as a waste of money. And those of a certain age may recall a television advert for an Australian lager, which featured the Crocodile Dundee actor, and stereotypical ‘Ocker’, Paul Hogan in a modern art gallery. He gazes disapprovingly at a pair of large abstract expressionist pictures, made up of complex swirls and blotches. He wonders aloud who painted them, and a fellow visitor helpfully points out that, “Actually, they are Jackson Pollocks”. Hogan chuckles - “I agree with you there, sport!”
I am guilty myself of in the past failing to ‘get’ minimalism and abstract expressionism, but they are now among my favourite modern art genres. Perhaps I need more time to appreciate the different nuances and impact of contemporary art. Or perhaps not – maybe it really is a load of Jackson Pollocks. This article is my attempt to explore contemporary art and by doing so, possibly ‘see the light’. The article is illustrated by my own photographs of some of the works I have seen.
The Many Faces of Contemporary Art.
Seventy years ago, around the time when I was born, the modern art world was a relatively simple place. There were just two major types of artwork, paintings and sculptures. Well regarded artists (those whose works were displayed in museums, and sold for high prices) were overwhelmingly male, white and from America or Europe. The main debate in the fine art world was around the relative value of representational and abstract art. The philosophy of Modernism, proclaimed by critics such as (the white, male, American) Clement Greenberg held sway, setting out principles for ‘good’ art.
Change began to occur in the 1960s, as new generations of artists began to find the strictures of modernism limiting, and styles such as minimalism stale. Art entered a ‘postmodern’ era, from which it has not yet emerged. This philosophy holds that there are no set rules or principles of ‘good’ art and artworks can be in any style or any media. The most important thing in an artwork is the idea or message that it portrays, rather than its aesthetics – art should be about something. The roots of post-modernism can be traced back to the early twentieth century, and the French artist Marcel Duchamp, who displayed ‘sculptures’ made from everyday objects (Duchamp called them ‘readymades’; today they are known as ‘found’ objects, like Morrison’s TV aerial). Most famously, in 1913 Duchamp took a ceramic urinal, turned it upside down, signed it ‘R. Mutt’ and named it Fountain. Then in the 1920s, the Paris-based ‘Dada’ movement presaged later artistic performances and ‘happenings’ by staging absurdist or anarchic events as a reaction to the horrors of the Great War. The Belgian surrealist artist Rene Magritte pioneered the use of words and texts within paintings; using language to distort the meaning of the visual images. Also between the wars, photographers such as the American Man Ray used new techniques that were the beginnings of ‘art photography’. Even Pablo Picasso experimented with 'found' objects, most famously his 1942 sculpture Bull's Head.
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| Bull's Head by Picasso (1942), made out of the seat and handlebars of a bicycle and displayed at the Picasso museum, Malaga |
By the 1960s, the feeling was growing that painting and sculpture were running out of road as creative media, and the definition of ‘fine art’ began to expand. Artists increasingly turned to photography, and later film and video. The use of found objects and other materials broadened the definition of sculpture. ‘Performance art’ involved artists and their collaborators staging events and ‘happenings’. The use of written or spoken texts in artworks became common. 'Land art' created artworks out of the landscape. More recently, digital art, textile art and even sound art have gained traction. And many contemporary artists aspire to create ‘installations’; taking over a whole space and filling it with related artworks – or sometimes keeping it largely empty. In short, much art has become ‘conceptual art’, where the artist’s ideas and the meaning of an artwork are more important than the medium in which it made, or its aesthetic appeal. You will, I’m sure, recognise Paula Morrison’s Centipede as an example of conceptual art.
This expansion of art media has led, among the uninitiated at least, to confusion as to the boundaries between art and other aspects of culture. Video art can look like cinema, or the offerings of Youtubers or TikTokers. Art photography can look like, well, photography, or journalism. Performance art overlaps with theatre, dance, poetry recitals or the antics of Youtubers such as Mr Beast. Particular difficulties can ensue from the use of found objects - more than one artwork has been thrown away by conscientious gallery cleaners who mistake them for rubbish. Textile art can look like a pile of laundry. And installations using found objects can be like looking into someone’s garage. So what is art? Postmodernists would say that something is an artwork if its creator says it is an artwork. Paula Morrison has submitted Centipede to a gallery, and so it must be considered as a work of art. Julian Stallabrass offers another criterion for art versus non-art, pointing out that the vast majority of contemporary, conceptual artists (like Paula Morrison) have university degrees in art.
The Development of Conceptual Art
As we noted above, the roots of conceptual art can be found in the work of Marcel Duchamp and a few others in the early twentieth century. However it was not until the 1960s and 1970s that conceptual art began to significantly attract the attention of artists, critics, curators and the art-following public.
Here are some examples of conceptual art from that period that are still talked about:
In 1960, the French artist Yves Klein published a photomontage titled ‘Leap into the Void’. It depicted Klein apparently leaping out of a building’s upper window, while life goes on unheedingly below. This image is now feted as one of the first examples of a manipulated photograph displayed as a work of art.
Rather more controversially, in the same year Klein produced a series of paintings titled ‘Anthropometry of the Blue Period’, that were created at events where Klein, clad in evening dress and before a similarly attired audience, directed naked female models to daub themselves and each other in blue paint and smear their bodies onto canvasses stretched on the walls and floors, while a string quartet played a piece comprising a single extended note. It was an example of performance art, but the canvasses were cut up and edited and displayed as individual paintings.
In 1964, the Japanese artist Yoko Ono (yes, that one) staged a performance called ‘Cut Piece’, in which she sat before an audience and invited members of that audience to cut pieces off her clothing. It is now regarded as a seminal work exploring themes of participation, vulnerability, gender, and audience interaction.
In 1969 the British/Italian artistic duo Gilbert and George posed as ‘living sculptures’, to emphasise that anything can be art, including artists themselves. Dressed in suits and with their faces painted gold they circled around a platform to the sounds of Flanagan and Allen’s music hall song, ‘Underneath the Arches’.
In 1970 the Irish artist Michael Craig-Martin explored the nature of conceptual art by putting a glass of water on a glass shelf on a wall and naming it ‘Oak Tree’. Next to the piece was a written ‘explanation’ in the form of an interview with the artist in which he relates how the glass of water becomes an oak tree.
The Korean artist Nam June Paik pioneered video art. In 1975 he created a work named ‘Three Eggs’, which comprised an egg with a video camera pointing at it; a television monitor apparently displaying live footage of the egg and another monitor with the screen removed and replaced by another (real) egg. Which egg was most real, or had the most salience?
In 1975 the American feminist performance artist Carolee Schneeman stood naked before an audience and gradually unravelled a paper scroll from her vagina. From this she read out a fictional account of a meeting with a male film maker who had criticised her work.
In 1977, American artist Jenny Holzer created Truisms, a purely text-based work in which aphorisms or slogans, often with a political or social justice message, were printed (in capital letters) onto posters and signs and displayed in public places across New York.
These artworks have little in common other than that each was original, pushed the boundaries of what (at that time) was regarded as art, and contained a message – if viewers could interpret it. Some explored themes of social justice or politics, and some nudged the edges of decency. None (except Klein’s finished works, and perhaps Craig-Martin’s Oak Tree) could be hung on a wall, and several now only exist in grainy photographs or films. But these and other such works paved the way for the free-for-all that is contemporary conceptual art.
The 1980s and the Young British Artists (yBas)
While conceptual art continued its advance, painting and sculpture continued to predominate during the 1980s. Heavyweight expressionist painters such as Anselm Keifer and Georg Baselitz (from Germany) and Julian Schnabel (from America) were leading figures, while the sly American sculptor Jeff Koons exploited the aftermath of Pop Art. In the UK, the Turner Prize was set up in 1984 under the auspices of the Tate Gallery as an artistic equivalent of the Booker Prize for literature. It is awarded annually to a British-based artist for work produced during the previous year. Early winners included Howard Hodgkin, Gilbert and George, Tony Cragg and Anish Kapoor, while the list of those nominated but not chosen contained such luminaries as Derek Jarman, Helen Chadwick, Paula Rego, Sean Scully and Lucien Freud. The numbers of top-rank women artists grew steadily worldwide from the 1970s onwards.
Towards the end of the eighties a loose group of young artists made Britain briefly the centre of the contemporary art world – and for a time made contemporary conceptual art the new rock-and-roll. The group’s de facto leader was Damien Hirst, who studied at Goldsmith’s college in London, under Michael Craig-Martin, as did several other of the yBas, (as they came to be called). While still a student, the entrepreneurial Hirst arranged an exhibition named ‘Freeze’ in a disused warehouse in London’s Docklands, displaying work by himself and fifteen fellow students. This, and subsequent larger exhibitions, attracted the attention of the advertising mogul and contemporary art collector Charles Saatchi, who bought many works by the yBas. In 1997, Saatchi helped organise an exhibition of works from his collection by forty-two artists, including many leading yBas, at London’s Royal Academy. The exhibition was titled ‘Sensation’ – and it became, well, a sensation, attracting large numbers of visitors and much media coverage. Contemporary art became cool, and British art briefly dominated the global art world. The exhibition has been credited with providing the impetus for the foundation in 2000 of Tate Modern, in a former South Bank power station.
The yBas’ influence, or notoriety, stemmed from their dynamic, entrepreneurial spirit, that resonated with the individualism of the Thatcher years, and from the shock factor that accompanied some of their best known works. Damien Hirst, whose talent was for titles (and money-making) as much as (or more than) art, led the way with The impossibility of death in the mind of the living, otherwise known as The Shark; A thousand years, a glass cabinet that held a swarm of flies, a cow’s head and an insect killer, and For the love of God, a sculpture of a skull made from real diamonds. Tracy Emin followed close behind, with Everyone I have ever slept with, a tent embroidered with their names (included were her young siblings and unborn foetuses, as well as lovers), and My Bed, an installation of an unmade bed surrounded by the detritus of her life. Sarah Lucas produced minimalist ‘sculptures’ such as Two fried eggs and a kebab, a depiction of a female body that consisted of...two fried eggs and a kebab. Marc Quinn made a sculpture of his head out of ten pints of his own blood, allowing it to slowly melt while on display. The brothers Jake and Dinos Chapman created unsettling sculptures from mannequins of children with body parts swapped around. Chris Ofili attracted attention to his large-scale paintings by including within them balls of elephant dung. Rachel Whiteread created House, a full-size depiction in concrete of a derelict house that was demolished around the sculpture, and filled the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square with a concrete replica of itself – placed upside down on the original. And the most controversial work in the Sensation exhibition was Marcus Harvey’s Myra, a depiction of the Moors murderer Myra Hindley formed from hundreds of children’s handprints.
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| Chris Ofili's USP is his use of balls of elephant dung in his paintings. From a work displayed at Modern One, Edinburgh |
The yBas were fixtures on the Turner prize shortlist during the 1990s, and it was won by Rachel Whiteread in 1993 (the first female winner), Damien Hirst in 1995, video artist Gillian Wearing in 1997 and Chris Ofili (the first non-white winner) in 1998 (Tracy Emin never won it, despite submitting My Bed in 1999, and other significant yBas such as Sarah Lucas and the painter Jenny Saville were never nominated). Their influence extended outside the UK, with the Sensation exhibition touring to Berlin and New York. It is hard to think of another contemporary art movement anywhere that has had the same impact as that of the yBas. Their renown persists; while many of the artists included in their various exhibitions have had journeyman careers (Marcus Harvey for example was something of a one-hit-wonder), seven yBas were among the 500 top-selling artists worldwide in 2023-4 (Hirst, Emin, Lucas, Whiteread, Ofili, Saville and Quinn). Emin and Whiteread are now Dames of the British Empire and Hirst reputedly turned down a knighthood.
But were the yBas any good? From the outset, the movement was criticised for embracing style over substance, shock for the sake of it and recycling themes from the past. Julian Stallabrass coined the term ‘high art light’ when describing their work. Damien Hirst, always with an eye for the main chance, quickly turned himself into a brand, and has made much of his considerable fortune not from cutting edge installations but from simple abstract paintings of dots, butterflies or spun splashes, mass-produced by a factory full of assistants who at their peak numbered some 350 souls. Tracey Emin, whose subject matter has always been herself, now specialises in doodly, semi-pornographic paintings of her naked body, and it is hard to separate her talent for art from her talent for self-promotion. A major retrospective of her work will be held at Tate Modern in 2026, allowing for an assessment of her continuing popularity and an in-depth critical appraisal of her oeuvre. Charles Saatchi, the yBas early supporter has subsequently said that he does not believe their reputations will last (and he has sold much of his collection of their work). However, former yBas such as Sarah Lucas, Rachel Whiteread and Jenny Saville continue to garner critical praise – and high prices at auction.
The New Millenium
In 2000, a sculpture named Boy by the Australian artist Ron Mueck, who had participated in the Sensations exhibition, was a feature of London’s Millenium Dome. In the same year, Tate Modern opened on the South Bank and quickly became a major part of British artistic life and a highly popular visitor attraction. While the museum’s permanent show was criticised for adopting a thematic rather than chronological format (apparently to hide gaps in its collection), it has staged many exhibitions of major nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century artists, and its flagship Turbine Hall has hosted significant specially commissioned installations. Those still remembered fondly include Louise Bourgeois’s huge spider sculpture, Maman (2000); Olaf Eliasson’s massive setting sun (The Weather Project, 2003); Carsten Hollar’s adult slides (Test Site, 2006); Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth (2007), a stark crack that ran the length of the hall, and Ai Wei Wei’s Sunflower Seeds (2010). Subsequent installations have been somewhat less memorable.
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| Ai Wei Wei's Sunflower Seeds (2010), each handmade from porcelain, was the last really impressive installation in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall |
In 2002, a significant art event took place in Kassel, Germany. It was known as Documenta 11 (the eleventh staging of a quinquennial art exhibition that had been held in the town since 1955). Its curator was Okwui Enwezor and it has been seen as the beginning of the globalisation of contemporary art, with the majority of participants from outside Europe and America. This trend has continued, and it can be safely said that the white, male, Euro-American hegemony of modern art is today a thing of the past.
Contemporary Art Today
So the contemporary art scene today is a globalised one, and there has never been so many opportunities for artists to ply their trade, and for collectors and the public to see new art. The number of ‘Biennials’ – public art exhibitions that take place across a town for a period of time every two or three years, has multiplied worldwide since the millennium, along with the number and size of commercial art fairs. The internet and social media ensure that everyone can access art images at will on their phones. Contemporary art is truly everywhere.
However, given this cornucopia, why does the contemporary art scene seem so, well, boring? As I’ve said, I find myself puzzled by the contemporary art sections of galleries I’ve been to, and reading books introducing contemporary art to lay people hasn’t helped. There have been no installations in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in recent years that have matched the spectacles of the noughties, and the regular changing of the contemporary works on Trafalgar Square’s fourth plinth passes these days without comment from the media. The Turner prize, which was once televised live and received reams of press coverage is today largely ignored, and most recent winners have not seen the light of day since their victories. The critic Laura Freeman, writing in the Times has commented, “The Turner prize feels utterly moribund. Time to revamp this sorry embarrassment of a prize, or retire it completely”. The latest iteration of the Liverpool Biennial, the leading British biennial, received lukewarm reviews. The heady days of the nineteen-nineties, when contemporary art was cool, are long gone.
Part of the issue is that, as Natalie Rudd puts it, “Contemporary art has yet to be pushed through the sieve of art history”. The overall quality of today’s artists is diluted by their sheer numbers. There are an awful lot of artists, and only a few will endure. This has always been the case; in any age the majority of artists, including many who had successful careers, will be forgotten by future generations. Even awards and honours such as a knighthood may not be sufficient to save an artist from future obscurity (Sir Matthew Smith, anyone?) But it is hard to see who, out of those who have emerged since the turn of the century, will be exhibited, written about and purchased in fifty or a hundred years time.
Museum Art versus Popular Art
Just as there is a gap between ‘literary’ and ‘popular’ fiction, there is a gap between what I call ‘museum art’ – the art that curators select for leading modern art museums and biennials, and that critics write about – and ‘popular’ art – the art that collectors pay high prices for, and ordinary people like to have on their walls (in reproduction). There are two terms that art critics use as terms of abuse for what they see as purely popular art: ‘illustrative’ (where a piece simply depicts its subject without making a deeper artistic statement about it), and ‘decorative’ (where a piece simply sets out to look pretty). Of course, most people want to fill their houses with pictures or objects that are illustrative or decorative, and much contemporary, conceptual, museum art is neither.
To demonstrate the gulf between museum and popular art, here is a crude comparison. This is a breakdown of the type of artwork produced by the top fifty contemporary artists by auction turnover in 2023-4 (taken from the 2024 Contemporary Art Market Report), as a snapshot of the type of art that is most popular today:
Type of artwork Number of artists
Painting: Abstract 15
Painting: Expressionist 12
Painting: Realistic/Figurative 10
Painting: Naive 4
Total painting: 41
Sculpture 4
Multi-media 3
Installation 1
Graffiti 1
Total 50
By contrast, as a snapshot of the kind of art that is valued by the museum art world, here is a breakdown of the top 50 artworks of the twenty-first century listed in March 2025 by the respected American-based ARTnews magazine:
Type of Artwork Number of examples
Video 19
Installation 10
Sculpture 6
Painting 5
Photography 4
Performance 3
Bioart 1
Digital art 1
Participatory art 1
Total 50
This is a less than rigorous piece of research – my categorisation of artists and their works is often arbitrary. Another set of judges would doubtless produce a different list of the fifty best twenty-first century artworks. Auction prices are notoriously fickle; someone popular one year my dive the next. Many forms of conceptual art are intrinsically difficult to monetise – you can’t buy a performance. But the contrast between the lists is stark. Judging by what people are prepared to pay, paintings are overwhelmingly the most popular form of artwork, while just five paintings make the museum art list – even fewer than sculptures (very broadly defined). Videos are comfortably the most approved of artworks in the museum list, followed some way behind by installations. Just two artists appear on both lists: the abstract painter Julie Mehretu and figurative painter Kerry James Marshall.
Another contrast is that while the works of the popular artists are mainly decorative (or art for art’s sake), the majority of the museum pieces are ‘about something’. A wide range of topics are explored, but there are some consistent themes, including critiques of capitalism and state control; the condition of the environment; the experience of migration and issues of identity. Today’s modern art museums are essentially political – while our living room walls are not.
But what of the contemporary artist who is by some way Britain’s most popular, the only one whose new works are talked about in the press and on television, and who was ranked tenth worldwide in auction turnover in 2023-4? I refer of course to Banksy, the anonymous graffiti artist. While his identity is known for sure only to a few (though the internet is awash with rumours), it is accepted that he is a he, and is currently around 50 years old. This makes him ten years younger than the yBas, from whom he has clearly learnt. Like them, he has an attention-grabbing USP, in his case, his persona as an anonymous graffiti artist, whose works seem to appear spontaneously in apparently random places. While he does not use shock tactics, as the yBas did, his works, like theirs are eye-catching and immediate; clear images conveying a simple, sometimes vaguely political message. Banksy’s graffiti works, like the yBas’ conceptual works are, as Julian Stallabrass put it, ‘loss-leaders’, that do not make him money, but have allowed him to amass a fortune from selling authorised reproductions of his best known images. In short, Stallabrass’s label of ‘high art light’ applies perfectly to Banksy – whose works have, unlike those of the yBas, not troubled the major museums, or the Turner prize.
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| Banksy's Girl with a Balloon, in a version displayed at the Instagram friendly Moco museum in Amsterdam. In 2018, a painting of this image was sold at auction for £1 million, but as soon as the gavel came down, the picture was partially shredded by a device hidden in its frame, apparently as a comment by Banksy on the art market. The market had the last laugh however; the sale went through and a few years later the purchaser sold it - for £18 million |
The Problem with Conceptual Art
So, much museum art is conceptual art, in a bewildering range of formats, and with ideas rather than aesthetics as its basis. But is it likeable? Does the museum-visiting public really want to have to think, rather than have an enjoyable aesthetic experience?
I recently visited an exhibition at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk museum of works by a respected Swiss artist, 46-year-old Pamela Rosenkranz. At risk of coming across like Paul Hogan, I will share my reactions to her work, as an example of contemporary conceptual art.
According to her representative gallery, Rosenkranz’s work, “questions the subjective element in the apprehension of an artwork, shifting the viewer’s focus toward the material, biochemical and neurological determinants of human behavior.” The exhibition filled several rooms, but a recurring motif was her use of plastic drinks bottles filled with silicon coloured pink to match ‘Caucasian’ skin shades. Apparently these ‘sculptures’, “satirize the bottlers’ esoteric advertising promises of self-optimization and internal body cleansing by interpreting them literally and presenting perfectly smooth, synthetic skin as the actual contents of the bottle”. Now, to me there is nothing aesthetically pleasing about a plastic drinks bottle, pink and satirical or otherwise, and the accompanying blurb, couched in pure “artbollox” (to use a term coined by the critic Nancy Durrant), makes Paula Morrison’s explanation of her Centipede sound positively coherent.
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| Rosenkranz's installations include many bottles filled with pink silicon |
Also included in the exhibition was an abstract painting and accompanying accessories, entitled ‘Sexual Power (Viagra Painting, Strong Currents)’. It is one of a series of paintings that Rosenkranz produced after taking the erectile dysfunction drug Viagra. Apparently these are examples of “her investigation of objective evolutionary and biological aspects, neurological reactions and psychotropic phenomena that have a far-reaching impact on the aesthetic experience but are traditionally considered part of the “subjective” aspects of artistic creation”. No, me neither. And there’s nothing sexy about these images.
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| Sexual Power (Viagra Painting, Strong Currents) by Pamela Rosenkranz. Apparently this concoction was produced after the artist had taken Viagra |
Sadly, too much of the contemporary conceptual art that I have seen is of this nature: obscure, over-intellectual – and just plain dull. And in the past few years, another factor has come into the equation, that has further alienated some from contemporary art.
Art and Woke
As we have seen, the health of contemporary art in the UK has declined since the heady days of the yBas, and particularly in the last ten years or so. Visitor numbers at Tate Modern have decreased markedly since the pandemic, and the Turner prize and other artistic events today receive scant attention. Among right-wing commentators – and not only them – the reason for the malaise is clear: contemporary art has become too woke. The globalisation and politicisation of contemporary art, as exemplified by ARTnews’s fifty best twenty-first century artworks, has led, in this view, to works being selected for display at museums and nominated for prizes for their cultural and political, rather than artistic merits.
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| More Artbollox. From the Hepworth Gallery, Wakefield |
Early in 2025, a thinktank named More in Common published a report entitles 'Shattered Britain' that divided the UK population into seven ‘segments’, based on their views on social, cultural and political issues. One segment, counting for 10% of the population, is named ‘Progressive Activists’, defined as,
“A highly engaged and globally-minded group driven by concerns about social justice. Politically active but feeling increasingly alienated from mainstream party politics, they prioritise issues such as climate change and international affairs. Occasionally outliers on social issues, they maintain a strongly held and sometimes uncompromising approach to their beliefs.”
This group is likely to be young and university educated – and they are outliers by being more likely than the population as a whole to be politically engaged and concerned about the environment, to support migration and to prioritise the rights of less heard and disadvantaged groups. In short, they are woke. They are also the demographic that includes many of the curators and frequenters of contemporary art museums.
So has contemporary museum art been hijacked by an elite ten percent, who use it to pursue their own woke agenda? Worse, do artists feel obliged to create works on themes that are most likely to attract the attention of woke curators (just as in the nineties, it is said that young British artists deliberately used shock tactics in their work in the hopes of pleasing Charles Saatchi?) As mentioned, it is not just right-wing commentators that think so. The Guardian’s critic Jonathon Jones commented: “It is by embracing the earnestness of today’s high-stakes culture wars that the Turner prize has lost its edge, the art getting more careful as the ideologies loom larger”. Another critic whose work appears in the Guardian, Eddy Frankel, believes that much contemporary art has become difficult to criticise, as so many artists are from disadvantaged backgrounds, have disabilities, or have suffered trauma. As he puts it, “We have arrived in a censorious age where an artist’s tragic backstory and politics matter more than the art itself. Welcome to the tyranny of context” (How dare I be scornful above of Mona Hatoum's work, given the current situation in Palestine?).
Such arguments can be readily countered. For years (centuries), art was dominated by white, male, European/Americans, and the current globalisation of art is no more than a much-needed corrective. Similarly, it is right that disadvantaged artists should be allowed to shine. There has always been a political edge to art, and today’s themes are worthy ones that we should all be embracing. But if the purpose of contemporary art is simply to promote identity politics and other woke themes, then it risks losing those who want other things from it. As the artist and media personality Grayson Perry put it, “I believe in what they [Tate Modern’s curators] are doing, but it’s the tone: it’s a bit scoldy, a bit finger-waggy. You go to the museum on your day off. You want to have some fun. You want to see some lovely things, have an interesting story.”
Conclusion
I began this inquiry into contemporary art hoping to understand it better and appreciate it more. I think I have succeeded in my first aim, but not the second – I am no more fond of contemporary art than I was before. It seems to me that the gap between ‘museum’ art and popular art has never been wider. Both in its formats and its messages, museum art has become an entity in itself, divorced both from the art of the past and the art that the majority of people today appreciate. It speaks mainly to the ten percent of ‘Progressive Activists’, and while its creativity and sense of purpose are not in question, it risks becoming irrelevant to the art loving public as a whole. Looking at yet another uninspiring but worthy found-object concoction about migration by an artist whose pronouns are they/their, I find myself remembering Winston Churchill’s comment when his wife put him, for his health, on a diet of tomatoes: “I have nothing against the tomato, but I do think I should be allowed to eat something else”. Too much of the contemporary art diet consists of endless woke tomatoes.
At the same time, there are artworks made in the last few years that I have enjoyed and found inspiring. Some are recent works by established artists, who have been ‘pushed through the sieve of art history’ and come out the other side. Others are by younger artists who are open to including spectacle and joy in their work. Here is a small selection - none are particularly woke, all have (to me) a strong visual appeal, and several have a sense of fun:
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| British artist Monster Chetwynd (born Alalia Chetwynd in 1973) makes works in many different media - but her best works have a crucial element of fun. This is from her installation Salamander 2, displayed at Modern One in Edinburgh in 2018 |
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| Italian artist Mauricio Cattelan (b 1960) is another who doesn't take contemporary art too seriously, but does very well out of it. In 2019, he taped a banana to a wall at an art fair, called it Comedian, and sold it for $100,000. This piece, on display at Voorlinden, the Hague, Netherlands, looks non-descript - until you realise it is less than a metre tall |
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| South African artist William Kentridge is now 70 years old, and also uses many different art formats. This is one of an impressive group of new sculptures currently displayed at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park |
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| Meet the Islanders (2012) by Scottish artist Charles Avery (born 1973), on display at Voorlinden, the Hague, Netherlands. It depicts a group of residents of a fictional island off the coast of Scotland, Cool hats! |
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| Studio Drift are Dutch artists and designers Ralph Nauta and Lonneke Gordijn. In 2018, they had their own exhibition at the Stedelijk, Amsterdam, which included this floating concrete block |
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| London born Jade Fadojutimi (b 1993) has in a short time achieved massive attention in the art market (22nd best selling contemporary artist worldwide in 2023-4) with her near-figurative abstract paintings. Is it social media hype; is it an example of light-weight decoration trumping more serious work - or has she got something? Time will tell, but I like this painting displayed at the Hepworth Gallery, Wakefield |
So I will continue to visit museums and galleries, and look for pearls among the dross. But what of Paula Morrison, the hopeful young contemporary artist with whom we began this piece? Well, it has been a theme of modern art that sometimes artists take on imaginary personas, that become a component of their art. Duchamp had a female alter-ego named Rrose Selavy, who appeared in some of his works. Grayson Perry has an alternative, female persona named Claire, who received the Turner prize in 2003 on his behalf. And, if you haven’t guessed already, Paula Morrison is similarly imaginary. She is herself a work of art.
Books Used
Cerasi J (2021) Contemporary Art Decoded. London: ILEX
Cottington D (2005) Modern Art: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford : OUP
Hopkins D (2000) After Modern Art: 1945-2000. Oxford: OUP
Jones J (2018) Sensations: The Story of British Art from Hogarth to Banksy. London; Lawrence King Publishing
Rudd N (2023) Contemporary Art. London: Thames & Hudson
Stallabrass J (1999) High Art Light. London: Verso
