(sublinhados meus)
Avant garde is boring
The return of salon art
Of all the places to witness the circus parade of modern French history, you can do a lot worse than the tiny town of Espalion, in the beautiful department of L’Aveyron, in the south of France. Because there are few destinations more unchanged than L’Aveyron, and this extremely French place is where I saw the opening of the French Olympic Games, in an al fresco brasserie. And this is where I sensed a weird unease. No one booed, no one catcalled, no one mocked. They sat there, sipping cold bière, and at times they vehemently cheered and laughed. Yet they also appeared a touch confused, and, I suspect, this is because they thought – like the rest of the world – ‘this is quite often a load of bollocks’. Not least because of that bizarre mockery of Da Vinci’s famous fresco of the last supper, probably the most revered Christian painting in history.
Whether the residents of Espalion were right or not, I concur with their sceptical views, and for very French reasons. Earlier this year I went to see the fine 150th ‘anniversary’ of the French Impressionist exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. It left me with several pressing thoughts. The first was: what a great country France is, what a magnificent civilisation it is, how dare anyone tear it down. France is wonderful. Moreover, it is a pivotal part of British culture, as Britain is necessarily part of Italy, as Italy is crucially part of Spain, as Spain is irreparably part of the USA, and so on. We are all in this together. We are western Christendom. And that is no small thing. It is, indeed, a noble thing. Perhaps the most noble thing that humanity has ever done.
Secondly, as I left the exhibition and wandered the boulevards, I felt a weird echo. Because the Impressionists in their time were genuine rebels. They were so revolutionary they had to establish galleries and exhibitions of their own, because the ‘accepted art’ was reserved for the ‘salon’. That is to say, if you wanted your painting to be received, observed and honoured by the elite, and to be put up on the correct walls to be bought by wealthy customers, then it had to pass certain tests. Those tests, back then, consisted of things like: rightful if not overt patriotism, perhaps a dash of nationalism, maybe a load of classicism, also sensibleness, nothing ‘upsetting’, not too much gratuitous nudity. Meanwhile, you should probably show fishermen looking brave, handsome and Gallic. And so on. This was called ‘salon art’: this was the art approved by the establishment. And it was rightly despised by imaginative people of the time (even if it produced some excellent paintings) because it was an aesthetic cul de sac: it led to evermore deadening dreck, the ultimate swerve to impressionism, and beyond.
That, I suggest, is where today’s ‘approved’ modern art – from the French Olympics opening ceremony to the latest shortlist for the Turner Prize – has ended up now. It is all ‘salon art’. It is sterile, meaningless, repetitive, embarrassing, and – even worse than salon art of the 19th century, which was at least picturesque and craftsmanlike – it is ugly.
Let’s look at the shortlist for the UK 2024 Turner Prize. Eg Jasleen Kaur. She offered an actual car draped with a massive ‘paper doily’. That’s it. A real car draped with an oversized doily. It is so risible it is slightly beyond comprehension. Presumably it is some meta-commentary on Kaur’s Sikh background, but equally it could be a commentary on slavery, racism, the Holocaust, the Spanish armada, the winter fuel allowance, the decline of ITV sitcoms, or the forgotten world of antimacassars.
As for the other Turner Prize nominees, I feel a need to restrain myself so I won’t be mean. Pio Abad offers drawings which are importantly inscribed with the word ‘parapolitics’. If scrawling buzzwords on doodles is art, my shopping list with ‘LATE CAPITALISM’ angrily written across it should be in the Louvre. Meanwhile, another shortlistee, Delaine Le Bas, offers us ‘Incipit Vita Nova. Here Begins The New Life/A New Life Is Beginning’, which seems to comprise a sequence of washed clothes suspended where a pretend horse might see them, thus offering an incisive commentary on, God knows, royalty? Dressage? Chinese laundries? Horses that secretly desire string vests?
The fact is, no one cares about this new salon art, and, worse, no one really notices. All it does – like the French Olympic Opening Ceremony – is make a feeble attempt to shock us with its alleged avant-garde-ness, but it is the opposite of avant garde, or shocking, because we have all been tediously ‘shocked’ by 100 years of this relentless conceptual silliness, ever since Duchamp put his urinal in a gallery in 1917. In truth, it would be far more shocking if someone produced the modern-day equivalent of Da Vinci’s ‘Last Supper’. A work of tangible human genius, a work of art that embodies the skills, brains, and dedication of a complicated and supremely gifted artist approaching a fundamental subject that speaks to the human condition. I mean no disrespect to Jasleen Kaur, and I am sure Kaur is dextrous and clever, but I don’t believe a massive doily on a car should be called ‘art’. Not in the same way we call Da Vinci ‘art’. Indeed it is time we plainly said ‘this is not art, it is boring’.
Meanwhile, back in Espalion, having spent several glorious days picnicking in the hills with my family, I returned to the same brasserie to watch the French win the gold in the rugby Sevens. As a British patriot, I felt a twinge of envy. But I also joined in the joy of the locals, because good rugby is good rugby, and Antoine Dupont is genuinely brilliant. If only modern art could be as honest. Instead, we’re stuck in an endless cultural scrum where a doily on a Peugeot passes for genius.
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