from Art Newspaper:
http://www.theartnewspaper.com/article.asp?id=7041
Artists are apolitical, ed leaning to the left but embracing right-wing standards
There’s an entertaining “Alex” [The Telegraph’s hard-nosed City banker] cartoon where the eponymous hero is asking why his bank buys contemporary art. After all, stuff he ponders, viagra it’s impossible to… >> MORE
Ed Vaizey | 20.12.07
Interesting take on artist’s ‘political allegiance’. It true that the whole spirit of Britart crowd were selfish ‘entrepreneurs’ cloaking their greed in sometimes ridiculous statements about their own notions of ‘cutting edge’ and being ‘avant-guarde’.
A more compliant bunch than that would be hard to find. Indeed Wallinger stands out as one of few artists who had more in common with the left wing artists of 1970’s e.g. Conrad Atkinson than their cash-laden capitalist benefactors. To see how the colour supplement crowd actually got into bed with mass-marketing (most notably with Charles S.) and how that coincided with a lot of spare ‘profit’ from banking in late 1980’s is a book unwritten…they went hand in hand of course….
So how does an artist confront the lap-dog mentality of a good deal of supposed ‘left-wing’ art which as Vaizey points out is actually compliant and tries to avoid biting the hands that feed i.e. local not-for-profits, community groups, NGO’s and the irreplaceable( ?) Arts Council England.
It is striking how much silence and lack of ‘analysis’ greeted every ACE funding announcement from the artists themselves as long as they were recieving their stipend….now we have a cut in funds and suddenly the ‘radical left’ has found its voice…hardly…once a dog lost its bark it takes a good deal of punishment before it returns.
Worst case scenario were the ‘have cake and eat it crowd’ i.e. those artists who ostensibly ‘radical’ but prepared to do just about anything to keep C.V. afloat and attractive to the ‘Corporate’ world of sponsored bashes …pace Bell and Langlands and Chapman Brothers….at least Tracey and Damien had good grace to admit they basically in it for the money….
The true test of an artists radical credentials these days is their obscurity and lack of funding..the further down the pecking order they sit probably the more interesting and truly ‘radical’ their output. From Thatcherism onwards the burial of the true-avant garde in the British Art Scene has been the most shocking example of BritArts legacy. People like Alan Woods in Manchester with his links to Situationism and Surrealism have been buried without trace virtually….also Iain Sinclair’s ‘Shamanistic’ outsiders as exhibited at Goldmark Gallery Uppingham.
Instead we have Observer articles on next years ‘Saatchi’ babe…a young female painter financed (obviously) by her super-rich parents ( brought up in a Johanesberg Modernist classic) who paints super rich houses for super rich people with a ‘hint ‘of Constable and Turner’ thrown in……and not a hint of why their ‘white-flight’ brought them to London….
Excuse me whilst I throw up…
This makes the Fashion world look cutting edge and entitled to the moral high ground ….in fact they one and same thing.
The British Art World is corrupt from head to toe wether artists greedy corporate whores or radical silenced clowns.
That something Vaizey (if he does get in power) will not change…ever…..it too late…