Saatchi Sunday September 11, 2005
“Roll up, roll up! Come and see Tracey’s unmade bed!”
“No thanks, I can go and look at mine and it will cost me nothing”
This exchange partly summarises an event on London’s South Bank, September 2004, and partly refers to an inner dialogue I never expressed. I was invited into Charles Saatchi’s gallery, along with hundreds of other people, by young people standing at spaced intervals along the promenade. They were offering a free tee shirt for the privilege of seeing the unmade bed, the dead shark etc. I enjoyed seeing this, because it made the commercial interests abundantly obvious, and arguably devalued any aesthetic pretension these people have. You don’t get people standing outside a gallery offering free tee shirts when you see the Mona Lisa. Was the gallery losing money? I don’t know but that’s the risk of any business or advertising enterprise: you project the figures, and it may or may not succeed.
There are two factors underlying and supporting the boring ephemera of the young British artists, who are now middle aged and very wealthy. The first is financial backing, and the second is the intellectual vacuity of art criticism and its relationship to the fashion based market. Saatchi’s patronage allowed the entire phenomenon to happen; Tracey and her gang have admitted they would never have been successful without his money. I knew his gallery existed but when I physically saw it, I realised how it fits into the overall situation. He is an advertising guru, conversant with the techniques of manufactured consent. He understands mass unconscious desire and how to tap into it, as Edward Bernays described in his groundbreaking 1923 book Crystallising Public Opinion. Saatchi understands the power of the brand. He knows how to make money – lots of it. And my guess is, he recognised the commercial possibilities inherent in a facile art world based not on qualitative value, but on celebrity branding and the media theatre. Marketing? You don’t even need to pay for it – it happens every year at the Turner Prize, when the £20K reward is a very minor factor in relation to the spin-off publicity all around the world. Why did he pay tens of thousands of pounds for a dirty unmade bed? Because he knew you can make something art by calling it art, that hype generates hype within the sheep-like media world, that he could create exclusivity by paying large sums of money for ridiculous tatty stuff – and this exclusivity would act like compound interest. As with designer clothes, so with the art market: establish an exclusive brand and charge for it accordingly. And in the art world you establish the brand by paying for it i.e. buying it – large sums for us, but actually complete peanuts for Charles Saatchi. He knew he was onto something.
It’s complete nonsense; no one discusses the unmade bed etc in artistic or aesthetic terms, and no one appears to notice this or care about it, when the surrounding discourse is always strangely abstract or ‘conceptual’. Art-world commerce is thus disconnected from aesthetic value, replaced with an infinitely more malleable medium: the domain of clever-dickery, the vacuum world of relativity where no one can say ‘this is rubbish’ and have an impact, because it is precisely this intellectual level where all the fuss is made, and fuss = publicity = £, and when you raise any objections you just fan the flames. It’s a game of intellectual judo where objections are easily and predictably nullified in clever-dick terms based on your apparent ignorance. You don’t understand; this work exemplifies the postmodern void of an arbitrary world reflecting indeterminate identity in the existential contingency of millennium society in an empty Nietzschean universe when God is dead and so is the Lyotard grand narrative of the deconstructed Lacanian hierarchical discourse and what you are presented with is your own spiritual emptiness and awareness of your body when you stand in the room with the bed. Whatever. Basically, you can’t discuss this kind of art in aesthetic or creative terms because there’s nothing there to reward your perception. So, you make up a lot of clever-dickery instead.
In phenomenological terms there is no difference between Tracey’s bed and mine, apart from the specifics of the linen and the related narratives, summed up in the disparaging words of one critic I saw on TV: the boring rubbish of a Kentish trollop. Her bed’s seen a lot of action; some of it quite sordid, apparently. As Saatchi understands more than most people, as with advertising so with art: sex sells. Roll up, roll up, come see the evidence of a sluttish autobiography. And basically, it’s a stage set in a theatrical media world that you, I or anyone else could produce. Nice work if you can get it, and a nice investment if you understand the way this works and capitalise on the market of rhetoric.
I realised a few years ago that my literary training (English degree) was a useful skill in relation to contemporary academia and the media. To make sense of art world criticism you have to deconstruct it in literary terms, exposing its slippery and fatuous basis at the level at which it operates: self-referential rhetoric. If I were teaching A level English (I did for a short time) and saw an essay written with that kind of trite vacuity, I would cover it in red ink. Yes but what do you actually mean, what exactly are you trying to say here, do you actually mean A, B and C when you are saying PQRSTUVWXYZ?
A++ for clever-dickery, but this is A level English and you only get a D-. Good attempt, try again.
In historical terms, art criticism is a recent phenomenon. The contemporary art I am discussing only makes sense in relation to this rhetoric, so you have a situation where the words literally create the art. This is the reverse of what you would intelligently expect. A bed is just a bed with nothing to reward your perception, but if you say it’s art and invent elaborate clever-dickery to justify yourself, then it becomes art. The advertising equivalent is convincing people that ice cream leads to orgasmic experiences, or Armani-this, Dior-that will give you a wonderful social, professional and sexual life. Because you’re worth it, as Estee Lauder said? No, actually because you’re a fashion victim, manipulated like a puppet by psychological techniques. Because you are chasing a tissue-like dream that is image rather than substance, based on manufactured but imaginary exclusivity. Because it is a capitalist world, where manipulative psychology is where real money can be made.
Photography is also afflicted with these capitalist hierarchies, where you see famous and expensive work devoid of talent or interest. It’s hung on rarefied white walls, beautifully presented on expensive art paper, and cited in the essay-writing part of photography degrees. As with art, so with photography: you make it interesting and meaningful by spinning clever-dick webs into which people fly. This applies to some contemporary photographers, and one of the delights of the internet is how it subverts this situation. Spend some time at www.photo.net or www.pbase.com or www.flickr.com and you will find work equal to some of the famous and expensive images with world-class gallery status. How wonderful: there it is, 24/7 for the entire world to see, more visible in fact than the exclusive work paraded in galleries with their geographic and temporal restrictions.
I don’t actually know who is in and who is out, who the contemporary photographers are – with the exception of a few people like Mary Ellen-Mark, for example, whose work is based on non clever-dick values. I tend to gravitate towards the old school, who operated within a less clever-dick world. Imogen Cunningham for example was one of the first photographers to achieve artistic status, and one of her well-known images was of an unmade bed. A classic black and white photograph, it has that lovely semi-sensuality derived from tone, texture and lighting, where you almost feel the rumpled linen with a poignantly simultaneous awareness that it is only a 2D representation. Photography is an inherently surreal medium, based on ambivalent referential value: real, but not real. Cunningham’s image rewards your perception. You don’t explain or justify it with complicated verbiage; it nourishes you because it is beautiful and that is sufficient. By contrast, a scruffy unmade bed expresses a kind of contempt for the viewer, implying that you are not worthy of anything more. That life is like this, that this experience represents and derives from a general characteristic of the Western world. Whatever.
When The Beatles sang All You Need Is Love, they were amassing substantial sums from impoverished youth. When Andy Warhol proclaimed the one dimensional and non-hierarchical status of art – that anything and everything was art and had equal value – he was secretly furnishing his home with expensive classical works. He was probably the most influential person in this trend whereby popular-media logic has replaced old school aesthetics, and in his private world he had different opinions. Gillian Wearing admitted on BBC4 that it was a great laugh carrying some tatty rubbish on the top of her car to a gallery where it was then carried with white gloves and sold for thousands of pounds. It would be nice to think the YBA phenomenon was very ‘punk rock’, and correspondingly interesting, but that’s not correct: it was a trend manufactured and valued within the establishment, with capitalist, media-driven values. Charles Saatchi is famously elusive and never gives interviews; I wonder why. Is it because he is aware of the power of mystique, that less is more, that you don’t expose the inner workings of a stage magician? And Tracey? Who knows. Who cares? – the last of her I saw was some diary pages covering the expensive walls of Tate Britain (September 2004). Art? Well, what we do know is she is rich, worth millions, and my guess is her bed is now luxuriously expensive.