I Know What I Like: 50 Snapshots of Great Modern Artworks

On the face of it, taking snapshots of works of art is a pretty worthless activity. A photo taken on a cheap camera or a mobile phone is never going to capture the depth of the original. Also, the resulting picture (like several in this collection) is likely to be distorted, as it’s hard to get square on to a painting on a gallery wall. And there are so many professionally produced reproductions available, from postcards to prints and shiny coffee table books. I own some of these – but I still take my own snaps. For me it is the best way to ‘possess’ an artwork. It proves that I have seen the original and liked it enough to want a personal memory of the work, its context and the occasion when I encountered it.

So for years I have been visiting galleries and museums and taking occasional photos. I have recently spent many enjoyable hours going through over forty years worth of snaps and in this article I present a selection of fifty of my favourites, which together provide a snapshot (pun intended) of my taste, and a kind of overview of modern art.

I have arranged this selection in (mostly) chronological order of the dates of birth of the artists. I prefer museum collections to be arranged chronologically rather than thematically, as at Tate Modern and some others, as to me it makes it easier to put works into their context (in a couple of places I’ve placed younger artists earlier than older ones, to highlight links and progressions). The artworks themselves however can come from any point in the artists’ careers and don’t necessarily reflect their best work – it depends what was on display and what caught my eye. The oldest artist (Edouard Manet) was born in 1832 and the youngest (Ron Mueck) in 1958, making him 67 years old at the time of writing. This means that my definition of modern art is both broad (covering a period of over 120 years) and curtailed, in that no artist who is not eligible to draw a pension is included. This essentially represents my taste, and my wariness of ‘contemporary art’, about which I have written in another article. Virtually all the works in this collection are paintings and sculptures and there is little of ‘conceptual art’. I’ve not restricted myself to one work per artist (a couple have four works included) so 39 artists are represented in total.

What can we glean about my taste from this selection? 23 of the photos depict paintings, while 27 depict sculptures or installations. There are overall more abstract than representational works. My definition of ‘sculpture’ is of necessity very broad – and not all the paintings are standard oil on canvas. The proportion of sculptures/installations increases as we come nearer to the present. Only four women artists are included, reflecting largely the limited opportunities for women during the ‘modern’ period, and for the same reason all but two of the artists are white, and European/American. Some movements (e.g. cubism, surrealism, pop art) are under-represented, while there is plenty of abstract expressionism and minimalism. And there are no ‘young British artists’ (yBas).

The photos were taken in the UK, France, Spain and the Netherlands, at modern art museums and sculpture parks. The number taken on the continent partly reflects that it is easier to motivate oneself to visit museums when on holiday than to make a special trip to one in the UK, but it is also reflects that, in the days before my phone became my main camera, it was pot-luck whether I took a camera with me when visiting a gallery. I have paid a number of visits to Tate Modern, Tate Liverpool, the Royal Academy and the modern art museum in Edinburgh that have gone unrecorded. This has led to many gaps in my photo collection, where I have seen artworks but not photographed them. I particularly regret having nothing by the Fauvist painter Andre Derain, the slick abstract sculptor Constantin Brancusi, the Abstract Expressionists Jackson Pollock and Clifford Styll and the British figurative painter Lucien Freud (I’m also surprised that I haven’t taken any photos of paintings by Vincent van Gogh, despite ample opportunities to do so). For good or ill, my photos reflect my taste and my taste alone.

So, biased, incomplete, fuzzy, wonky and decidedly uncool, here is my photo gallery of great works of modern art.

Oh, and there is one cheat, and one bonus photo.

1. Edouard Manet (1832-1883)

Le Dejeurner sur l’herbe (1863)

The Louvre, Paris, France (now in the Musee d’Orsay)

This photo was taken on a trip to Paris in 1981. It is imperfect, but the image it portrays is unmistakeable. Manet’s painting caused a commotion at the Salon des Refuses, an exhibition in Paris in 1863 of works rejected by that year’s official annual Salon. Manet could mildly claim that it was merely a modernised version of Titian’s 1508 painting Pastoral Concert, which also featured clothed men and nude women, but the impact of the brazenly naked woman staring out of the painting, the bleached colouring of her skin, and the altered perspective of the scene make the painting dangerously unconventional – and arguably the first work of modern art.

2. Paul Cezanne (1839 – 1906)

Montagne Saint-Victoire (1890)

Musee d’Orsay, Paris, France

I came rather late to Cezanne, through reading Alex Danchev’s fine biography, and through an enthusiastic teacher at an art group I was involved with. Although Cezanne was contemporary with the Impressionists (and just seven years younger than Manet), he is usually regarded as a ‘Post-impressionist’, moving painting forward through revolutionary brushwork and use of colour, and presaging the development by Picasso and Braque of Cubism. Cezanne painted over forty pictures of this (small) mountain, which overlooked his home town of Aix-en-Provence.

 

3. Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947)

La Toilette (1914)

Musee d’Orsay, Paris, France

Bonnard is more obviously a Post-impressionist, being born a generation after the original Impressionist group. He is best known for his many nude paintings of his wife Marthe, all in domestic settings and all depicting her as a young woman, despite their fifty year marriage. I have a poster of this work on my wall, and it was succinctly described one day by an eight-year-old friend of my son, who said, “Look, there’s a woman with no clothes on, showing her bum!”.

4. Henry Matisse (1869-1954)

Landscape at Collioure (1905)

Museum Of Modern Art, New York

 This is the one cheat. I haven’t seen this painting, still less been to MOMA. It’s a photo of another poster on my wall – but this is my collection and I’ll cheat if I want to. The original was produced during a painting trip that Matisse made with Andre Derain to the little fishing town of Collioure on the Mediterranean coast. The garish colours and near-abstract style of the works they produced on that trip led to them being labelled as ‘Fauves’ -wild animals – though Matisse was to move on to produce many different types of work during his long life.

Kasimir Malevich (1879-1955)

5. Supremus nr. 50 (1915)

6. Yellow Plane in Dissolution (1917); White Plane in Dissolution (1918)

Stedelijk, Amsterdam, Netherlands

The experiments of the Post-impressionists, Cubists and Fauves in Paris led inexorably to paintings that were purely abstract, though the first artists to take that step were Russian, in the years around the Revolution. Malevich named his approach to art ‘Suprematism’, so called as he believed that shape and colour should ‘reign supreme’ over subject matter or story telling. His use of primary colours and basic geometric shapes resonated with…

7. Piet Mondrian (1872-1944)

Composition No. IV (1929)

Stedelijk, Amsterdam, Netherlands

After WWI, approaching his 40s, Mondrian, like Malevich, turned to producing abstract works based on primary colours and basic geometric shapes, naming his approach ‘Neo-plasticism’. Along with Theo van Doesburg and others, he founded, in 1917, ‘De Stijl’ (the Style), a journal that became an approach to art, architecture and design. It is remarkable how such a simple approach became so iconic, remaining today among the best known and loved images of modern art.

8. Bart van de Leck

The Cat (1914)

Kroller-Muller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands

Van de Leck was an associate of Mondrian in De Stijl, and also made abstract works with primary colours, but before that he painted this strikingly simple picture of...a cat.

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)

9. Woman in a Red Armchair (1932)

10. The Dream (1932)

Tate Modern, London

Three things to know about Picasso: (1) He was a narcissistic and priapic old goat; (2) He could draw like a bastard; (3) He never produced an abstract work. I saw these paintings of Picasso’s then lover Marie-Therese Walter, who was at the time 23 years old (Picasso was 50), at the exhibition ‘Picasso 1932: Love, Fame Tragedy’, which came to Tate Modern in 2018. They are in Picasso’s mature ‘neo-cubist’ style, with echoes of surrealism and a heavy dose of eroticism.

11. Bulls Head (1942)

Picasso Museum, Malaga, Spain

Picasso also had a peerless eye and a sense of humour, as evidenced by this ‘found object’ sculpture, made from the saddle and handlebars of a bicycle.

12. Fish (1952)

Soller Railway Station, Mallorca, Spain

In the unlikely setting of a quaint little railway station in Mallorca is a small exhibition of works by Picasso and local hero Joan Miro (see below). Picasso turned to ceramics in the 1950s and either by himself or in association with professional craftsmen produced many charming pieces, including this one.

Joan Miro (1893-1983)

13. 2+5=7 (1965)

Fundacio Joan Miro, Barcelona, Spain

I was introduced to Miro’s art at the above-mentioned exhibition in Soller railway station, and subsequently visited the Miro museum in his birthplace, Barcelona. In the 1920s, Miro was associated with the Surrealists and some of his paintings include surrealist-influenced symbolism. However others, like this later work are more purely abstract.

14. Torse de Femme (1967)

Fundacio Joan Miro, Barcelona, Spain

In later life, Miro turned increasingly to ceramics and sculpture, making many endearing alien-like near-human forms, such as this depiction of a woman’s body.

15. Ben Nicholson (1894-1982)

White Relief (version 2) (1938)

Kroller-Muller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands

The British art scene between the wars rather lagged behind the European avant-garde, but the much-travelled and well-connected Nicholson brought back some of the latest ideas, in particular abstraction. His reputation today is rather overshadowed by that of his second wife Barbara Hepworth (see below), and he is best remembered for his strongly modernist ‘White Reliefs’, made of layers of painted and carved wood, all produced within a few years of each other in the 1930s.

Barbara Hepworth (1903-1975)

16. Spring (1966)

The Hepworth, Wakefield, UK

Hepworth was born in Wakefield, Yorkshire and studied at Leeds College of Art alongside Henry Moore. They became the dominant figures in British sculpture between the wars, and for many years after. Following her marriage to Ben Nicholson they moved to St Ives in Cornwall, which became a centre for art and artists. However she was honoured by the town of her birth with the establishment of the modern art museum which bears her name and contains a good selection of her works, including this example of her ‘stringed’ wooden sculptures.

17. The Family of Man (1970)

Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UK

One of the last major works Hepworth produced before her death, this is a set of nine sculptures made for an open-air setting (the photo includes just four). I am a big fan of sculpture parks – seeing artworks in landscape settings enhances both the art and the landscape.

18. Henry Moore (1898-1986)

Two Large Forms (1966-9)

Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UK

Overall I prefer Barbara Hepworth to Henry Moore, whose work can to my eyes seem rather blobby. However, this piece is undoubtedly impressive, especially in its park setting on a hot summers day.

19. Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966)

Femme Nue Debout (1954)

Femme Assise (1948-50)

Pompidou Centre, Paris, France

Swiss-born Giacometti’s attenuated sculptures are instantly recognisable. He began to produce them after WWII, and they may have been a response to the horrors that were revealed in Europe in the aftermath of the war. It would be nice to have just a little one to put on my mantelpiece – if I had a spare £10 million.

20. Mark Rothko (1903-1970)

Untitled (1950-2)

Tate Britain, London, UK

In 2016 I visited the ‘Abstract Expressionism’ exhibition at London’s Royal Academy. This movement came to the fore in the United States in the early 1950s, and presaged the shifting of the avant-garde from Europe to America. I had seen paintings before by the likes of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, but I was unfamiliar with Abstract Expressionism as an art movement. The exhibition was an eye-opener, and confirmed to me that what I really liked was modern art (as opposed to the Old Masters), and especially abstract art. Never mind that as a group they were macho, hard-drinking, misogynist Big Swinging Dicks – the energy and scale of their art blew me away. Sadly, I didn’t take my camera to that exhibition but I now look out for abstract expressionist works wherever I go. This is a classic example of Rothko’s ‘colour field’ art, rather incongruously displayed at Tate Britain, where it outshines the tepid British works that fill the rest of the room.

21. Willem de Kooning (1904-1997)

Montauk IV (1969)

Stedelijk, Amsterdam, Netherlands

De Kooning lived up to the classic stereotype of the alpha male Abstract Expressionist, and his art was powerful and in-your-face. He wasn’t afraid to include figures in his art (especially nude women), and this work, one of a number he painted in 1969 in the seaside resort of Montauk, Long Island, includes figurative aspects. In later life he contracted Alzheimer’s disease but continued to paint, with assistance, producing many simple, ethereal and effective works.

22. Barnett Newman (1905-1970)

Cathedra (1951)

Stedelijk, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Newman was perhaps the most ‘minimalist’ of the Abstract Expressionists, specialising in huge, largely single-colour paintings that all included a vertical line down the length of the canvas, that Newman called a ‘zip’. Minimalism is my second favourite art movement, so Newman’s paintings work for me.

23. Kenneth Noland (1924-2010)

Transwest (1965)

Stedelijk, Amsterdam, Netherlands

A generation younger than the above-mentioned Abstract Expressionists but, like them, coming to prominence in the 1950s, Noland’s abstract works are based on geometric shapes and ‘hard edged’ bands of colour. The critic Clement Greenberg coined a new term for the colour field works of Noland, Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis: ‘Post-painterly Abstraction’. Whatever.

24. Roy Lichtenstein (1923 – 1997)

In the Car (1963)

Modern Art I, Edinburgh, UK

I’m not a huge fan of Pop Art, the movement that replaced Abstract Expressionism in the USA in the 1960s (I really don’t get Andy Warhol), but it’s hard to resist Roy Lichtenstein’s massively enlarged comic-strip-esque scenes.

25. Eduardo Paolozzi (1924 – 2005)

St Sebastian III (Figure with Words) (1958)

Kroller-Muller Sculpture Park, Otterlo, Netherlands

Meanwhile, in Europe...artistic life found its feet again following WWII. In the UK in the early 1950s, a group of young sculptors including Eduardo Paolozzi, William Turnbull, Elizabeth Frink and others were given the name ‘Geometry of Fear’, in response to their spiky, twisted alien-like metal figures. Paolozzi was born in Leith and in later life donated a large amount of material to the National Galleries of Scotland – a reconstruction of his studio is a popular exhibit at Modern One in Edinburgh. He made art in many different forms but his angular, robot-like sculptures are his signature works.

26. Anthony Caro (1924 – 2013)

Erl King (2009)

Frieze 2017 Sculpture Exhibition, Regents Park, London, UK

Caro was a contemporary of the Geometry of Fear sculptors, but his art took a different path. Early in his career he was an assistant to Henry Moore, and in the late 1950s he came under the influence of the critic and supporter of the Abstract Expressionists Clement Greenberg (the John Ruskin of his day). Consequently, Caro went down the road of abstract sculpture. In the early nineteen-sixties he produced slender painted-steel abstracts that are regarded as his best work, but this very late work, produced when he was in his eighties (and rather Paolozzi-esque) is also powerful.

27. Yves Klein (1928 – 1962)

L’Accord Bleu (RE10) (1960)

Stedelijk, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Klein was highly original; an early conceptual artist who worked in performance art, photography, found object sculpture and painting, and was a consummate showman. In 1960 he patented an ultramarine blue pigment that he called ‘International Klein Blue (IKB)’. He used it in unusual ways, most notoriously in his ‘Anthropometries of the Blue Period’, a series of paintings made at events where naked models daubed themselves and each other with IKB and smeared themselves onto canvases stretched on the floor and walls. In comparison, this work is almost conventional, made of sponges soaked in IKB and attached to a blue ground.

28 Sol LeWitt (1928 – 2007)

123454321 (1993)

Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UK

Minimalism grew out of Abstract Expressionism in the USA during the 1960s, and I’m a big fan of it. It involves simple structures, clean lines and basic materials. Sol LeWitt was an early pioneer of the approach, while also touching on conceptual art and pop art. This sculpture, made of cinder blocks proportioned exactly 1:1:2, is displayed in a setting chosen by the artist himself.

29. Robert Ryman (1930 – 2019)

Monitor (1978)

Stedelijk, Amsterdam, Netherlands

My eldest daughter disapproves of modern art in general, and minimalism in particular, so to tease her I take delight in sending her photographs of minimalist works, especially the predominantly white paintings of Robert Ryman, who was associated with the minimalists but disliked the label. His works explore subtle variations of shade and texture, and as in this example, frequently leave rough edges, that become part of the painting’s ambience.

30. Carl Andre (1935 – 2024)

Twenty-third Steel Cardinal (1974)

Stedelijk, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Minimalist sculptor Carl Andre achieved notoriety in 1975 when the Tate Gallery purchased his work ‘Equivalent VIII’, which consisted of two layers of housebricks, leading to outrage in the right-wing press at the perceived waste of money. He achieved greater notoriety in 1985, when his wife died following an unexplained fall from their 34^th floor apartment – Andre was charged with her murder but wast never convicted. This room in the Stedelijk is minimalist heaven, with a classic Andre steel plate installation accompanied by white paintings by Robert Ryman (out of view in this picture), Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni and Agnes Martin.

31. Yayoi Kusama (b1929)

Narcissus Garden (1966)

Voorlinden, The Hague, Netherlands

Japanese artist Kusama is a phenomenon. She came to prominence in the 1960s as an early proponent of conceptual art and is today one of the most popular artists in the world, creating eye-catching sculptures and installations, especially her mirror-walled Infinity Rooms. Famously, she has lived for the past fifty years or so as a voluntary patient in a psychiatric hospital. This work, made of highly polished spheres, allows spectators to view themselves (like Narcissus in the Greek myth), but it is also effective with the backdrop of Voorlinden’s fine gardens.

32. Bridget Riley (b1931)

Hesitate (1964)

Tate Britain, London, UK

Riley was (and is) a leading practitioner of ‘Op Art’ (short for optical art), a term originally coined by Time magazine for the work of the French-Hungarian painter Victor Vasarely, who, from the 1930s, developed a style using precise geometry and visual effects. Riley came to prominence in the 1960s, with striking black and white ‘tromp l’oeil’ effects, such as this painting, rather grudgingly displayed at Tate Britain. Dismissed at the time by critics as gimmicky and pandering to the masses, it became one of the iconic styles of the ‘swinging sixties’. I’m a bit too young to have swung in the sixties, but I now find her work groovy.

33. Howard Hodgkin (1932 – 2017)

Learning About Russian Music (1999)

The Hepworth, Wakefield, UK

Howard Hodgkin is my favourite painter. His mature style of small-scale, highly coloured, complex abstract works (and his signature habit of painting over the picture’s frame) sums up everything I like about modern art. He of course claimed that his paintings are not abstract, in that they are his responses to his experiences and memories, and the people he met. Despite my liking for his work, this is actually the only one of his paintings I have seen, as it were, in the flesh. The next time there is a retrospective of his work somewhere, I will ensure I make a pilgrimage to it.

Richard Serra (1938 – 2024)

34. Open Ended (2008)

Voorlinden, The Hague, Netherlands

Serra has been called ‘the last of the abstract expressionists’. His signature style is massive, simple metal forms, often placed in public spaces. This one, comprising two huge steel walls that viewers can walk through, is indoors, in an extensive gallery at the fine Voorlinden museum in the Netherlands.

35. One (1987-8)

Kroller-Muller Sculpture Park, Otterlo, Netherlands

A slightly smaller-scale work, whose impact is enhanced by its outdoor setting.

36. Bruce Nauman (b1941)

My Name as though it were Written on the surface of the Moon

Stedelijk, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Some of the artists in this collection (e.g. Mondrian, Giacometti, Rothko, etc) developed a signature style, that was both artistically profound and popular (and remunerative), and spent much of the rest of their careers producing more and more works in that style. Others were far more varied in their artistic interests and output. Bruce Nauman’s work is perhaps the most varied of all, and the nearest I get to including conceptual art. Since the 1960s he as created films, videos, sculptures, installations and sound art (I attended his 2004 wholly sound-based installation ‘Raw Materials’ in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall). Most accessible, however, are his works in neon. Some are profound, some funny, some rude – and some, like this one, just are.

37. Michael Craig-Martin (b1941)

Wheelbarrow (Red) (2013)

Frieze Sculpture Exhibition 2017, Regents Park, London, UK

Irish-born Craig-Martin began as a conceptual artist and teacher at Goldsmith’s College in London, where in the late 1980s he taught Damien Hirst and other yBas. His best known conceptual work, created in 1973, consisted of a glass of water on a glass shelf, was entitled ‘Oak Tree’, and included a spoof Q & A session with the artist in which he explains how the glass of water becomes an oak tree. In the 1990s he moved away from conceptualism and developed a more commercially attractive style, producing brightly coloured graphic depictions (paintings and sculptures) of everyday objects – and has made a good living out of it. Damien Hirst clearly learnt from his old teacher’s example, combining his own cutting edge conceptual works with mass-produced (but lucrative) paintings of dots, swirls and butterflies.

38. Bernar Venet (b1941)

17 Acute Unequal Angles (2016)

Frieze Sculpture Exhibition 2017, Regents Park, London, UK

I confess to knowing nothing about French-born Venet or his work, but in Regents Park on a warm summer’s day it makes a good picture.

39. Sean Scully (b1945)

Vincent 2 (2015)

Voorlinden, The Hague, Netherlands

Born in Ireland but brought up in London, Sean Scully is my kind of abstract artist; as focused on uniform shapes and deep colours as Mondrian, Rothko or Noland. I much prefer to experience modern art than to analyse it, and Scully’s paintings (and sculptures) let me do just that.

40. Anselm Kiefer (b1945)

Sag mir wo die Blumen sind

Stedelijk, Amsterdam, Netherlands

In the early 1980s, painting was dominated by large-scale, portentous, figurative expressionist works by Keifer, fellow-German Georg Baselitz and the American Julian Schnabel. I can’t say I’m a huge fan of Kiefer, despite his forthright denunciations of Nazism, finding his works overblown and messy. However, this grand display, part of the Keifer/vanGogh exhibition at the Stedelijk is undoubtedly impressive.

Anthony Gormley (b1950)

41 & 42. Critical Mass II (1995)

Voorlinden, The Hague, Netherlands

If Howard Hodgkin is my favourite painter, then Anthony Gormley is my favourite sculptor. And not just mine - iconic works such as the Angel of the North have made him one of the UK’s most popular artists. Along with popularity has inevitably come critical sniffiness, and accusations of egotism for using his own body as the model for his signature ‘gorminators’ (to borrow Eddy Frankel’s phrase). Sixty of these life-size sculptures were scattered around the beautiful grounds of Voorlinden for this piece; these two photos are examples.

43. Amazonian Field (1992)

Voorlinden, The Hague, Netherlands

This piece was originally commissioned for the 1991 Rio Earth Summit. 24,000 clay figures were created by young people from Rio’s favelas – mini gorms!

44. Breathing Room III (2010)

Voorlinden, The Hague, Netherlands

This eerie installation, made of a metal grid covered with fluorescent paint, shows that Gormley’s practice stretches far beyond his ‘gorminators’. As with much of his work, it’s best to ignore the rather overblown ‘blurb’ that comes with it, and just experience its impact.

Helen Chadwick (1953-1996)

45. Ego Geometria Sum: The Labours III (1983-4)

The Hepworth, Wakefield, UK

Chadwick was a highly original artist, her work embracing sculpture, photography and installations, often with a feminist theme, and/or a focus on the visceral aspects of life. She frequently used her own (nude) body in her work, as in this installation, in which twelve plywood models of objects from her early life are covered with nude photographs, with a background of pink curtains and additional personal photographs.

46. Piss Flowers (1991-2)

The Hepworth, Wakefield, UK

Perhaps Chadwick’s best known (as most eye-catching) works are this series of plaster sculptures, made when Chadwick and her husband urinated into packed snow, poured plaster over the resulting melts and inverted the dried casts. Chadwick called them ‘a penis-envy farce’.

47. Anish Kapoor (b1954)

Untitled (2018)

Kroller-Muller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands

Indian-born Kapoor specialises in large-scale sculptures and installations. In a recent (possibly tongue in cheek) quote, he claimed, “I really do feel very strongly that I have nothing to say; I have no message to give the world and nor do I want to give the world a message”. Would that more artists felt that way. This is one of a number of recent sculptures in which a block of stone is carved from the inside out, in this case leaving a stark, egg-like shape.

48. Jaume Plensa (b1955)

Wilsis (2016)

Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UK

Catalan sculptor Plensa’s works are displayed in public places across the world. Many take the form of this example: an elongated head, quiet and dignified, with eyes closed – as you would see if this photo wasn’t in silhouette.

49. Ai Weiwei (b1957)

Sunflower Seeds (2010)

Tate Modern, London, UK

This is the only Turbine Hall installation at Tate Modern that I have photographed (and only the second I have been present at – my visits to Tate Modern have tended to coincide with the six-month fallow period between installations). Ai Weiwei commissioned millions of hand-crafted porcelain depictions of sunflower seeds from small-scale workshops in the Chinese city of Jingdezhen, apparently as a critical comment on China’s consumer-goods-manufacturing economy. The resulting structure is quietly impressive.

50. Ron Mueck (b1958)

Couple under an Umbrella (2013)

Voorlinden, The Hague, Netherlands

Australian-born Mueck specialises in impressively lifelike depictions of individuals, that are either scaled down or, as in this case, scaled up to twice actual size. He was included with the yBas in Charles Saatchi’s ‘Sensations’ exhibition at the Royal Academy, and a sculpture entitled ‘Boy’ was a centrepiece of the Millenium Dome in 2000 - which probably didn’t do his reputation much good; critical responses to his work since then have been mixed, to say the least. For me, as with so many of the artworks in this selection, impact is all, and this installation is hard to ignore.

Bonus Photo

Statue of the Duke of Wellington by Carlo Marocetti (1844) with a Traffic Cone on his Head

Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA), Scotland, UK

 

The statue was erected in 1844, when the building that now houses GOMA was the city’s Royal Exchange. For decades, it has unofficially sported a traffic cone on the Duke’s head. Occasionally the City council removes it, but another one soon appears. No less an artistic celebrity than Banksy has called it his ‘favourite work of art in the UK’, and so we will let it represent the conceptual pieces that have come to dominate the contemporary art world in the last few decades.

Contemporary Art: What Is It, Where did it Come from – and Is It Any Good?

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?

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.

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 resin 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.

 

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.

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 have 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.

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.

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.

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.

 

More Artbollox. From the Hepworth Gallery, Wakefield

Early in 2025, a thinktank named More in Common published a report entitled '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:

 

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

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

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

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!

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

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