Art World Wars Of Word

"People ask for criticism, but they only want praise."
W. Somerset Maugham.

"Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship."
Zeuxis, from Pliny the Elder, Natural History.

In late 2005, I started posting blogs on my art and reviews of
exhibitions I had seen in Dublin and abroad. At first such writing was
merely the kinds of things I would later cut and paste into my
autobiography 'The Panic Artist'. However because of the very positive
reactions I received from readers of my blog - I started to use these
posts as a means of advertising my art and getting people to visit my
website.

Writing (even after fourteen years) remains my second love - something
I do when I have run out of art materials - or want to explain and
justify my art - not something I pursue as an art in itself. Which is
not to say that I don't gain great pleasure from writing - I do. Nor
is it to say that I don't put a lot of work into it - I do. But it is
nothing compared to the high I get after producing a great oil
painting or ink drawing.

I am not a man of much formal education - since I virtually left
school at sixteen. I am not an art historian and I have no scholarly
basis for my knowledge in art (what I know is self-taught). I have
never taken an exam in my life, and I failed my first and only year in
Dun Laoghaire Art College, Co. Dublin. I even got an E on my one and
only essay written in art college (on Picasso's 'Les Demoiselles
d'Avignon')! I am a chronic speller and my knowledge of grammar is
just as bad. Partly its laziness, partly it is because of my dyslexia
and partly it's a result of the number of disruptions in my school
life (because of my mothers metal illness) when I should have been
learning these basic grammatical skills.

When I was in school my efforts at analyzing literature were mediocre.
However I often received very high marks (A's and B's) in my
imaginative essays - it was not something I had to work hard at - I
seemed to have a talent and passion for it. But I had no need for
these skills until in 1994 when I chose to write a brief manifesto on
my art. Early versions of these texts were easy to write - in a blunt,
aggressive, hyperbolic and theoretical style devoid of traditional
prose virtues. But as I moved on to write my auto-biography I began to
realize just how crude my prose was in comparison to great writers on
art like; John Richardson, Robert Hughes, Harold Rosenberg, Brian Se
well, Will Durant and Ernst Cambric.

I quickly realized that it was not good enough to have all the facts -
one had to present them in a manner that would grip the reader. I
still remember how I had to teach myself the most basic elements of
writing - how to start a paragraph, how to construct a sentence, how
to use similes, how to shape a story.
For over fourteen years I have been obsessed with art criticism, not
only in terms of how it effects my work, but also in how it shapes the
prestige of other artists. For me knowledge equals power. All my life
I have intensively studied areas of knowledge in which I feel most
powerless and bewildered. So at sixteen I read Feminist and
pornographic texts in order to understand women. At twenty I read
psychiatric books in order to understand my self and the actions of my
psychiatrists - and at the age of about twenty-three I began to
intensively read art critics in order to understand my own art and the
criticisms of others.
There are many kinds of writing in art; the art college thesis, the
cataloger essay, the newspaper review, the art magazine article, the
art book aimed at the general reader and the theoretical book aimed at
the academic. As a self-made intellectual I remember dearly all the
authors who educated me in my youth (Harold Rosenberg, John Berger,
David Silvester, Robert Hughes, Donald Kuspit, Camila Paglia, Leo
Tolstoy, Brian Se well, Will Durant, Mathew Collings, Kenneth Clark,
Robert Cumming, Julian Spalding, Julian Stallbrass and Ernst Cambric),
and many of them I continue to read simply for the pleasure of
relearning their opinions and the delight of their prose.

I probably read (and have done so since my teens) about a half dozen
books, catalogs, magazines or newspaper reviews on art a week. But
only a tiny fraction of this writing ever strikes me as an honest and
scrupulous analysis of the art and its relative quality. Most of it is
publicity, promotion, propaganda, or dull witted hack work. But I
suppose that it is so pervasive because it is so effective. Real art
criticism has little or no effect on the sales or careers of art
stars, because the art world system is as effective as a political
party in courting and deluding the wealthy with advertisements,
Zeitgeist propaganda, theoretical-spin and sales talk. So the art
world does not rise and fall on the opinion of critics it rests on the
opening up of the checkbooks of the rich who reduce art to a 'Whose
In? Whose Out' tracking of fads and fashions.

The first critical book I ever read was Harold Rosenberg's 'The De-
Definition of Art'. I loved it and continued to re-read it time and
again. I found Rosenberg's writing - witty, subtle, inventive and
lacking in the dogma and partisan quality of Greenberg. The kind of
writing I have aspired towards in middle age - is the newspaper review
that grips the reader and sparks debate and consternation as much as
praise and admiration. In this genre I think Hughes and Se well are
unsurpassed - but for different reasons. Hughes is by far the more
modern and tolerant of the two. He is also the better writer -
conjuring up more quote-able observations on art than any critic I
know. However when I first started reading a connoisseur critic like
Robert Hughes I was filled with rage at his bitter dismissal of my
youthful hero's (like; Basquiat, Schnabel, Baselitz, Clemente, Warhol,
Koons, Hirst and Chia) and perplexed by his high praise for artists I
hated (like; Murray, Skully, Diebenkorn, Rothenberg, Morley). However
I was entranced by his prose style!

It took me far longer to appreciate Brian Sewell's even more
Conservative and abusive writings. Sewell's writing is more vitriolic
and can descend into mere insults (though much of this is done with
such hysterical 'grumpy-old-man' humour that it is hard to be mad at
him) - moreover he has an almost Victorian hatred of modern art. If
you think that all contemporary art should be talked about and rated
only in terms of its novelty and it's own era's talents - then you
will utterly hate Sewell. But if you think as Sewell does (and I now
do too) that all art should be judged in terms of its entire (genius
filled) history then you will find much delight in Sewell's pin-
pricking of the hot air balloons of the contemporary art
establishment.

As the years progressed I came to love both Hughes and Sewell's real
interaction with art, moral integrity, forthrightness and willingness
to make bitter enemies of everyone in the art world. I still rejected
their severest judgments on the kind of artists I have mentioned - but
I respected their honesty and understand at least where they were
coming from. Indeed as I grew older I weired of my own solipsistic
opinions and sought to understand the views of others about art. What
I discovered in this process was just how little I knew about art and
just how enjoyable an imaginary debate about art was with other
critics.

Never the less I tend to not take seriously any modern critic who does
not acknowledge that 95% of contemporary art is a con or incompetent
or plagiarist - perpetrated by utterly self-deluded, technically
incompetent pastichers - utterly incapable of self-criticism or
insight into themselves or their art. While art before the French
salons of the 1880's could be good, bad, or indifferent - it was only
with the dawn of modern art that it could be an utter swindle. A key
moment in this shift was in 1883 when the humorist Alphonse Allais
hysterically showed in the 'Incoherent' exhibition his work 'Anemic
Young Girls at their First Communion in the Snow' - it was just a
blank white sheet of paper!

The problem I have with theoretical writing on art (genres like
psychoanalytical and philosophical writing) is its lack of a direct
relationship to the art under discussion. Frequently one feels that
the observations are too general and could be applied to almost any
artist (this was certainly the complaint that Greenberg had with much
of the Existential writing on Abstract Expressionism).

Remember the origin of philosophy is in slavery. Had the Greeks like
Plato not had slaves to do all the manual labour - they would not have
had the time to sit around and debate the meaning of the shape of
their navel. I have the time because I am mentally ill and on a
Disability Allowance! Today subjects like philosophy, and sociology
thrive in the modern university and art magazines like Artforum.
Virtually nothing these mills of sophistic verbiage produce has the
slightest impact on or value to society out side the college or
publishers walls - but that dosen't stop the deluge. This mental
masturbation has no practical meaning in the real world - but it has
unparalleled meaning to the equally useless art world.

One notable example of this to me was Thomas McEvilley editor of
ArtForum. I first became aware of him when I read (in July 1993 in the
Stedelijk Museum library in Amsterdam) his brilliant philosophical
essay 'Read This' (1989) in Julian Schnabel's Fox Farm Paintings
cataloger for The Pace Gallery. It was a wonderful example of
philosophical spin. In it McEvilley trounced the tradition of
aesthetic taste that started with Immanuel Kant and praised
Schnabel's willful disregard for conventional 'good-taste' in his
willful paintings. But I doubt that Schnabel ever read never mind
understood Kant's 'Critique of Judgment' (1790)! He then tried to
promote Schnabel as an identity artist concerned with issues like
cruelty to animals and the A.I.D.S crisis. All this at a time when the
critics had fatally lacerated Schnabel's reputation and worse still -
the art band wagon had moved away from Neo-Expressionism to Neo-Geo
and Identity-Art. But what McEvilley failed completely to do was pass
a judgment on the actual quality of the work (I liked Schnabel's work
and would have enjoyed a technical justification for his style and
personality). As the years past and I first read McEvilley's book 'Art
& Discontent' (1991) and then his 'Art & Otherness' (1992) my
exasperation rose. Most of this philosophical waffle seemed to tell me
nothing real about real art. It seemed to me that McEvilley work was
one of mental masturbation in the cause of justifying the lunatic
extremes of the art world.

Although I have known a number of journalists, musicians,
philosophers, poets and alliterative types. In my adult life of about
two dozen close friends only three were artists (Micheal Arbuckel,
Shane Cullen and Danielle Kraay). So I have never lived and befriended
these ArtFroum types - but I have wondered what kind of world they
inhabit? As a young pimply art student I voraciously read these kinds
of magazines, and really thought (along with these writers) that the
art world was the center of the universe. But that was before I
started making friends with real people! The world and people I now
know ridicule most contemporary art and are pretty indifferent to art
in general. It was interactions with ordinary people that made me
realize that in my youth I had been seduced and lost in a cultish view
of art and life that bore no relation to the real, resistant and
cynical world.

I loath academia, I loath writers who use jargon and I chastise myself
when ever I descend into it myself. If I come across three, four or
five terms and words (I as a constant reader of twenty-six years have
never heard of) my hackles rise. If I continue to read the text and
find myself getting more and more lost - I rebel. No matter how grand
the ideas or revolutionary the concepts are in a text - if I as a
general reader cannot understand them - then I see no point in them.
Thus I have no time for all that poxy French writing (and American and
English versions of it) which have become common place in art writing.
Too often the academic sitting in his college library spends more time
thinking up more and more obscure philosophical observations than
actually looking at the art they are writing about.

The problem with academic writers was summed up for me in a quote by
James Elkins in his otherwise gripping book 'What Happened To Art
Criticism?' (2003). Elkins talked of how he wished there was more of a
two way discussion between academic writers and newspaper critics and
vice verse. "In order for that to happen, all that is required is that
everyone read everything. Each writer, no matter what their place and
purpose, should have an endless bibliography, and know every pertinent
issue and claim. We should all read till our eyes are bleary, and we
should read both ambitiously - making sure we've come to terms with
Greenburg or Adorno - and also indiscriminately - finding work that
might ordinarily escape us." What he should have said is "We must look
and look and look again at art in museum and galleries and only then
back up our perceptions with reference to artistic texts." I am firmly
convinced that a consultant in Sotheby's or Christies can tell you
more real things about an artist (almost any artist) than the entire
academic art faculty in Cal Arts, Yale, Goldsmiths or The Royal
Academy. Moreover their expertise is based on experience, day in day
out in looking at paintings, and seeing their effect on art lovers
willing to part with their own money to possess them - that's as real
as art ever gets.


My attitude to historical texts (like those major exhibitions
commission for their catalog's) is one of mind numbing boredom brought
on by an overdose of historical minutia. Most of the facts in an
historical text are of interest to only the most rabid specialist in
the subject. While some of the tedious research work that many
historian do is invaluable - far too often it results in a pedantic
and joyless regurgitation of dates and facts - without any
interpretation of their meaning.


I am also equally skeptical of formalist critics like Roger Fry,
Clement Greenburg and Micheal Fried - since in its own way this kind
of writing is incapable of dealing with the nature of the art market,
the personality of the artist or art movements like Dada, Surrealism,
Pop and Conceptual ism which are not based on formal values. However
Clement Greenberg was my first art critic hero. Watching Greenberg
being interviewed (while chain-smoking and drinking heavily) on
'Modern Art and Modernism' on the Open University on BBC2 at the age
of eleven bewitched me. When I was in my late twenties I read all four
volumes of his collected essays on art, and an auto-biography on him
by Florence Rubenfeld. His reduction of the story of Modern painting
(from Manet through Cezanne then Picasso, then Kandinsky to Pollock
ending with Jules Olitski) to a pursuit of the flatness of the
abstract canvas was compelling because it explained so many French and
American's art. However like most art theories it was limited,
historically selective and destructive to the tradition of Western
ancestral art. Moreover his writing conspired with the Abstract
Expressionist to destroy the heredity skills of life drawing, realist
painting, and naturalistic sculpting.

But my doubts about Formalist are nothing compared to my fury at
Marxist's critics like John Berger. I find his writing impossibly
moralistic, politically correct and historically dated. Bergers
Utopian-Marxist critique of the capitalist commodity aspect of
painting and his view of women as passive victims of 'the-male-gaze' I
find hopelessly simplistic. He pretty much stands for everything that
I am against in art, politics and philosophy. I would like to write a
vicious review of Jacques Derrida and especially his book 'The Truth
In Painting'(1987) but frankly I can't make head nor tail of it. I
tried very very hard to understand it - but it was utterly beyond me.
I even got my friend who is a lecturer in philosophy to explain his
work to me and I still could understand a word of it. But what I do
know is that Derrida (and his massive influence on art bull****)
stands for everything I hate about the so called intelligentsia today.

One writer who takes a psychoanalytical approach to art is Donald
Kuspit and I have enjoyed his writing for at least ten years. His
analysis of artists' psychology and the pathology behind many modern
art masterpieces I found fascinating. He was also one of the very best
advocates for Expressionist art. I remain very fond of his writings
even though at times it can be too jargon filled and indulgent.

But the writer who in my opinion best described the art world of the
1990's was Mathew Collings. If you want to know how artists really
think about art and discuss it amongst themselves - Collings is your
sardonic man. His 'slacker' like prose style which admits constantly
to his bewilderment by modern art and philosophical ideas - rings true
to how we really look at and try to understand new art. Collings seems
utterly incapable of criticism of art and leaves that to others like
Julian Stallabrass (an excellent successor to John Berger). Instead he
shows how much the art world of the last twenty years has been driven
by the whims of fashion and taste. He reports on art the way a fashion
report might describe a new Chanel show in Paris - and that is the
honesty and weakness of his style.

As for the army of undistinguished Feminist writers on art - I have
found many of them unbearably politically correct, academic and
bigoted. Their connoisseurship is often tainted by their politicized
gender which leads them to over-praise minor female artists and right-
off great male artists they find too macho. I still to this day - fail
to see any female artist of the first rank in art history (artists who
could match the likes of Giotto, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Rembrandt,
Goya or Picasso). Though I am sure in time there will be. In my
opinion, many Feminist inspired curators, critics and writers have
sought to give far too much undue attention to tenth rate female
artists simply because by accident of birth they were born women - and
thus part of the sisterhood. With the instincts of movie producers
they go after catchy stories of female artist hero's. In a sense
'Frida' (2002) an otherwise brilliant movie was the ultimate in this -
the story of a female, Mexican, handicapped and bisexual artist - you
can't get more politically correct than that! This aesthetic war of
reappraisal waged by visually blind, historically ignorant, yet
haranguing loud mouths - has done more to damage connoisseurship than
nearly any other theoretical movement of the late twentieth century -
reducing as it does art to mere gender politics and sales talk.

Not only has modern feminism criticism and re-revaluation singularly
failed to produce a Picasso or Pollock it has failed to produce a
Braque or Warhol or Kiefer. I admit that female artists like Artemisia
Gentileschi, Georgia O'Keeffe, Frida Kahlo, Germaine Richter, Louise
Bourgoies, and Paula Rego are of third rank importance and that
artists like Berethe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Gwen John, Bridget Riley,
Eva Hesse, Susan Rothenberg, Marlene Dumas, Jenny Saville, and Tracy
Emin are of fourth rank interest (in other words roughly as good as
me).

But for contemporary female artists of my era like; Anges Martin,
Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine, Sylvie Fleury, Kiki
Smith, Marina Abramovic and Sarah Lucas - I have nothing but contempt.
The question might be: "Is their gender holding them back." But the
answer is that today it is hurtling them forward beyond the limits of
their talent or potential.

When it comes to female artists like; Sofonisba Anguissola, Angelica
Kauffmann, Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun, Rosa Bonheur, Suzanne Valadon,
Tamara de Lempicka, Barbara Hepworth, Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler
and Rachel Whiteread - I frankly fail to see what their relevance is
to art history - they bore me to tears. Their work is too slight, too
dependent on male models already arrived at and too technically,
emotionally and spiritually bland to inspire anything in me. Their
work is hopelessly mediocre and aesthetically weak compared to a
legion of fifth rate male artists of their day already consigned to
the waters of oblivion - while their female contemporaries bob up and
down on the life-rafts of female empowerment.

The one 'Feminist' writer that I immediately took to was Camila Paglia
(her Feminism was dubious to me because so much of what she said about
the sexes seemed to sound like misogyny). Like with Hughes and Se well
I admired her rebellion against the politically correct balderdash of
the late twentieth century. But Paglia was not just a Conservative
lover of art history - she was also; Pro-Porn, Anti-Censorship, Pro-
Sade, Anti-Rousseau, Pro-Capitalism, Anti-Marxist, Pro-Freud, Anti-
Lacan, Anti-Academic, Anti-Political-Correctness, Pro-Gay, Anti-
Lesbian, Pro-Abortion and so on! In fact there didn't seem to be
anything - she did not have an opinion on! In interviews on television
she was a firecracker exploding with learning, aggression and
controversy. I ****ing loved her! I didn't care if I did not agree
with everything she said - I simply admired her honesty and courage.
As a lesbian 'Feminist' Paglia was able to attack many of the
assumptions of Feminism in a way impossible for male critics. Paglia's
Feminist credentials always struck me as dubious, but in her
masterpiece Sexual Persona (1990) she clearly dammed both genders.
Paglia fully credits the genius of male creation - but describes it as
at war with 'Mother-Nature' a battle it always loses. Paglia
dynamically describe the visceral power of female beauty and fecundity
over men and all mans attempts to master it in civilization.

You would think that the best writers on art would be artists. This is
not the case, in fact in my experience almost the total reverse is
true; the worst writers on art are artists! Not that it matters a dam!
Pollock could barely string a sentence together but his art did enough
talking. Most artists writings are full of egotism, hyperbole,
propaganda, sales talk, self-pity, or sophistry (just look at Giorgio
de Chirico, Julian Schnabel or Tracey Emin). Artists are usually the
worst judges of their own work, and their observations on the art of
others is usually hopelessly impressionistic and competitively
subjective. There are of course exceptions - Vasari, Celeni,
Delacroix, and Van Gogh all produced written work as great as anything
in the canon of art writing. My personal favorites are the latter two,
for I find such humanity, honesty, and intelligence in their personal
battle with art and in the way they tell their personal story - while
still singing the praises of other artists.

In my writing and in my blogs I strive to be as personal, subjective
and individualistic in my response to art. I try to take a
fundamentally realist attitude towards art. For example while all
paintings of genius are so much more than paint on canvas - most art
is nothing more than that - paint applied to a surface by a human
being in a certain way with the hope of achieving praise from oneself
and ones friends, family and critics or to gain a certain sales price.
The Internet is full of impersonal badly written and frankly boring
lists of facts about art - which is why personal writing about art is
so important. It is also why I see the future of art criticism to be
in Blogs written by ordinary people with an unpaid passion for their
subject. For me the nine most important issues around an artist and
their work is as follows;


1. Their Vision.
2. Their style.
3. Their technique.
4. Their character/psychology.
5. Their biography.
6. Their career history.
7. Their market place and history.
8. Their politics/religion.
9. Their society and times.