Letter to Sefton

Andreas Serrano, Piss Christ, 1987. Image: © Andreas Serrano.

Dear Sefton,

It all depends on what you think art is.

Being back in Europe, I’ve been recalibrating my thinking towards a more Western sensibility again – away from the cultural cosmologies of your part of the world – and it’s been quite the mind trip. There’s a line in T.S. Eliot’s Little Gidding that I think about a lot:

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”

Revisiting long-held ideas, returning to the familiar to see it anew. Western Europe has been invigorating for me.

What is art for?
The short answer is: I’m not sure anymore. The long one (as you’d have gathered from my Rubberneckers review for Kevin Harman’s recent show) is that art’s very function has been transfigured. So not long ago, I’d have agreed with you that a conceptual idea in art can’t be repeated with the same force or originality. These days, I’m less certain.

Contemporary art feels somewhat lost, its practices atomised into individual expressions of existence – some more profound than others. Which makes me think maybe it’s time to create new meaning for art, especially in the shadow of a new industrial revolution of machine learning, robotics, AI and cybernetics – a (brave?) new world that could transform life itself, let alone art.

What role does the artist have in society now? When meaning depends on explanations in wall texts, artist statements, theory and such like, art almost stops functioning on its own. And while I’ll always believe an artwork’s inherent truth begins with the artist’s intent at the time it was made, its meaning inevitably shifts over time. Once detached from its maker, I like the (still mildly controversial) idea that it’s left to the viewer to make sense of; to create an amalgamated meaning from their own subjective experience. That’s the basic metaphysical exchange: artist, object, viewer – where the work becomes a portal between them, the place of departure to “not me”.

I find that quite exciting, and I wish we could make that the universal ‘way in’ to art for everyone. But for many reasons – from inherited institutional structures and funding, to soft politics and a global paralysis of decorum – this way of experiencing art isn't as common as we might hope. Art seems harder for most folk to engage with these days. It’s an answer looking for all the right questions.

I’ve been writing about Sam Fender recently. I’ve noticed that when it comes to music, practically everyone has definite and immediate opinions on what music means to them at the subjective level. I don't see that with art, although I find the comparisons endlessly fascinating between them. What is it about music as a felt experience that we can express so easily to others, but not when it comes to the visual arts?

Taking the piss
It might have something to do with how we encounter the ‘truth’ of art. Taking Duchamp’s Fountain, to use your example, shows how this might happen. The urinal wasn’t even the conceptual stroke of genius we pretend it was – it was a piss-take. Rejected from the show, intended as satire, later mythologised into genius. The artist’s intent and the work’s meaning became entirely decoupled. So yes, there is a thin conceptual thread here which you could follow back 100 years, but that’s beside the point.

What fascinated me about Kevin’s Rubberneckers was that while the artist and gallery became supporting players; the true protagonist was the cybernetic interaction between machine and driver – a process that accidentally created a form of portrait. It had all the properties of one yet was detached from the hand and eye of the artist. Meaning arose not so much from authorship –  at best, Kevin may have uncovered the possibility of the artwork – but instead from a network of relations between artist, viewer, machine, and gallery. It became an embodied experience of time and context, but one which still nodded in the direction of an intriguing future.

Maybe Art becomes meaningful again when it allows us to imagine something beyond the here and now – not trapped by the comfort of aesthetics, the spectacle of ownership, the cosplay of being “cutting edge” (because you can’t really do that while working for a bank, can you?) and the current structures and apparatus in which we experience it.

How we lost it
Meanwhile, in the real world, art’s slow slide into irrelevance continues. Art history is cut from curriculums, criticism is reduced to PR, blockbuster fatigue is everywhere. Neoliberal education policies like STEM have pushed creativity to the margins, an ‘optional extra’ instead of the essential life force that it is. And don't even get me started on digital; the art industry missed that revolution almost entirely – both as a medium and as a means to reach people. The result is a field that talks endlessly about access but does little to change it at a structural level. We still expect people to walk into these Temple-like buildings which elevate art to a place where it becomes almost too distant from our lives. Plus, I have a hunch that nobody is really prepared for what’s coming with AI.

And yet we know art won’t vanish. It’s hard-wired into the species. From the caves at Lascaux to tiny makeshift shed-studios in suburban gardens, the best artists don’t care about markets or optics – they make because they must. You of all people know this.

Where to from here, then? One thing I worry about is that identity seems to have become the new medium. It’s hugely problematic. As far as art is concerned, Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) policies, good in theory, have simply turned the self into ‘content’. As the critic Boris Groys noted, visibility is no longer a choice anyway; authenticity itself has become performance and the artist is permanently obliged to perform his or her own self, staging their trauma, biography, bodies or politics to remain legible. EDI was supposed to open the field. Instead, it sometimes feels we’ve narrowed it to approved identities only. All while the working class has vanished from the picture entirely (were they ever missed?)

Again, that sort of tokenised correction never seems to happen with music, does it? Can you imagine if Radiohead, or the Royal Scottish National Orchestra for that matter, walked on stage with a bunch of random amateur musos, because hey, “anyone can be a musician.” It would be laughable. Identity itself would have no place on that stage. Of course it’s complex, especially where equity and agency are concerned. Yet in art, it seems we’ve embraced an ‘anything goes’ ethos while simultaneously chucking out risk. I get that EDI was meant to correct centuries of exclusion (for God’s sake, women were denied art history for millennia), but I reckon the pendulum has now swung too far into beige ideological policy, and the resulting work is often just vacuous and bordering on the irrelevant. To make matters worse, now it seems you can only be a particular kindof marginalised person. And definitely not a fascist.

*Terms, conditions, and exclusions apply
I’ve said before I’d quite like to see more fascist art out there. Not because I’m a fascist, or support that cause – but because fascism exists. And because it exists, I consider it a real cultural phenomenon worthy of being explored in art. That’s an important part of what art is for, surely? To poke the bear, look the devil in the eye, wrestle with our demons. Instead, we now live in the ‘broadcast safe’ neoliberal version, where any sort of ‘artistic protest’ (let alone progress) is simply bound by dull conventions of acceptability, or censored before it gets a chance to be seen.

The 2024 Venice Biennale was a perfect symptom. I called out the premise at the time for being nonsensical, if not plain daft. “Foreigners Everywhere.” Jesus Christ, could it get any worse? A theme about empathy repackaged as neoliberal virtue signalling, to position Art as soft authoritarianism. To anyone with half a brain, it was only ever about the control of taste through capital. Not a shred of irony anywhere. Foreigners everywhere, indeed. But only the kind we can sell tickets to.

What genocide?
Then, on our watch, an actual genocide happened. As a generation of Europeans, the Holocaust is sacred to us; it is finite, indelible, unforgivable. So to witness Netanyahu’s relentless thirst for blood was utterly shocking. Yet from the despicable horrors of October 7 to the consequent carnage in Gaza, the art industry pretended to look the other way. I say pretended because artists were sacked for speaking out, contracts cancelled, works removed, and shows edited. If the relevance of art was struggling to get traction before, it’s absolutely fucked now. It’s got all the moral authority of a zombie – apparently one that still covets money. Other than a few brave individuals, the entire art industry has now forfeited its right to claim truth, relevance, or courage for a long time yet.

I have never felt so ashamed to be part of it.

Art is generous enough to give us exceptions. But within its current confines of ideological policy, late capitalism, its inability to envision a future – not least pure neoliberal selfishness – I worry if it’s ever going to be capable of re-establishing genuine meaning at all? All the artist can really do now is present work in a pre-packaged worldview that fits within the rules of accepted convention.

I doubt even Duchamp could have imagined a time when art would have the same cultural relevance as knitting.

But here we are.

Scott