The BBC recently ran two programmes about Goldsmith’s College in London, or

rather, Goldsmith’s University of London as it styles itself.  The title almost put me
off – Goldsmith’s: But is it Art?

This was enough to make the heart sink – anyone with any interest in the arts will
recognise that recurring situation, a sort of Groundhog Day moment, when one is
cornered by someone who, with wide-eyed innocence, says “But don’t you think all
art is just a matter of opinion – of personal taste? And what about modern art? Do
you really think …?”

And you know that you are headed for an utterly sterile discussion, one in which the
innocent will gradually reveal himself to be deeply hostile to the idea of art, and will
unburden himself (it usually is a ‘him’) of opinions formed from sensationalist press
headlines, a primitive world view that effortlessly encompasses homophobia, racism,
sexism, paranoia about young people, crime,  a desire for the restoration of capital
punishment and a denial of man’s contribution to global warming, or perhaps even a
denial of global warming itself.

But inexorably I get drawn in, in the almost invariably mistaken belief that this
person may just be a truth seeker, wanting to understand …

My knowledge of the arts may best be described as limited and partially informed.
Certain art forms are virtually a closed book to me – ballet, some musical forms
and some aspects of literature. I do appreciate literature and music, but my
experience and preferences tend towards what is sometimes called popular culture
– cinema, popular music and jazz – but with a limited knowledge and appreciation
of orchestral and chamber music and literature.

I do also have a very definite bias towards form and structure in the arts, and a
respect and admiration for technique in art.

The first of the two BBC Goldsmith’s programmes started, depressingly, in a manner
entirely consistent with the sub-text – but is it Art? – with a young Irish student
whose chosen art form consisted of stealing objects, ingesting them and then
excreting them. She seemed calculated to arouse every prejudice imaginable against
art, and doubtless when yellow press get around to it, she will be mercilessly
pilloried.
But equally, it is entirely clear, to use her own favourite word, that she won’t give a
****, indeed she will turn such attacks, if they materialise, to her own pecuniary
advantage. This is an artist who managed to persuade another artist (Simon Starling)
to invite her to Spain to view his art work involving plants, then uprooted and stole
one of the plants and brought it back to Goldsmith’s. (So far she has not proposed to
ingest the plant and “shit it out” - that would be something to see!)

The Yiddish word chutzpah might have been invented for her – a quality once
defined as the ability to murder your parents then plead for clemency in court on the
grounds that you are an orphan.

I would wish her well in her career – which she describes as “what I can get away
with” - but she clearly does not need my good wishes - or anyone else’s – and she will
make her own way in a blistering hail of four letter words to success. Nobody that
single-minded can fail. I think she herself is the art work, one that I can only marvel
at …

WHAT IS ART?

This question is like asking What is Jazz? – one that prompts an Ellingtonian
response along the lines of “That kind of talk stinks up the room …” But the question
will continue to be posed, because art is a multi-billion dollar business and art is
always political, not least in the area of arts funding and education.

I would venture to to say that most artists, like most jazz musicians, never ask
themselves this question – they are driven by an imperative to create, not by
definitions and labels. But once they want money, want to sell their art, or want a job
in the arts, the question will arise in one way or another.

Walter Pater’s dictum that all art aspires towards the condition of music may be a
useful point to start, although it is one of the most over-worked clichés about art,
trotted out by every arts critic and blogger at every opportunity.

A musical anecdote -

In the mid-1970s I took up a new appointment as a personnel manager. A

colleague, Derek English was a passionate lover of classical music, and quickly
assessing my limited knowledge in this area, set out to educate me by generously
offering to loan me items from his treasured LP collection.

“I’ll start with Beethoven,” said Derek. I then crassly replied that I didn’t like
Beethoven. I got a long speculative look, then the observation that was a kind of
Damascean moment for me.

“It’s OK not to like Beethoven, Peter, so long as you realise that the problem lies
with you, not with Beethoven …”

So - what is Art?

I reach for my New Oxford dictionary, realising that I have never read a dictionary
definition of art, and the content surprises me.

art noun 1 (mass noun) The expression or application of human creative skill and
imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be
appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power … works produced by such skill
and imagination – creative activity resulting in the production of paintings, drawings or
sculpture.

No mention of music, literature,  or drama  - they come under the arts.

This takes me full circle, because this is what I understood as art as a child and as a
young man, and it is perhaps what most people understand as art – painting,
drawing and sculpture. The arts, a concept I came to later, embraces music, and
drama. And of course, Goldsmith’s offers much more than painting, drawing and
sculpture – it teaches music, literature, drama, design and more besides. The art
college is simply part of the Visual Arts department. Much art - including my son’s
art - includes text, music and dramatic elements as well as painting, drawing and
sculpture.

So I must offer my thoughts on the question What is Art? in the wider definition of
the arts.

Let me start with jazz, now generally accepted as an art form.

Immediately, we run into the definitions problem – what is jazz? – and the firm
assertion of many ‘jazz’ musicians that they play music, not jazz, and are not
prepared to be restricted in their creativity by a label.

What is jazz? Well, I know it when I hear it, but my judgement perhaps  reflects my
age and my generation, although I believe that I could establish a consensus with
most jazz musicians and committed listeners on what is and what is not jazz.

Most Edinburgh, Scotland  aficionados of ‘jazz’ over about sixty five years of age or so
would,  in my experience define it as so-called New Orleans jazz or Dixieland through
to mainstream jazz, as performed by a legion of small groups of musicians and
vocalists of a similar age and era. I suspect that most natives of the great city of
Glasgow would define it as mainstream or bebop, and most younger people would
recognise  it as bebop - or later dialects of the bebop language - or as smooth jazz,
although they might not recognise the terms – hard bop, fusion, etc. Some in both
camps would reject utterly one or other of the forms as being jazz, echoing the
narrow-minded divisions of the 1940s triggered by the emergence of bebop. Asked to
define the music, they would tend to fall back on concepts of improvised or not
improvised and instrumentation, none of which define jazz, and few would think of it
in terms of art.

Yet jazz, almost uniquely, has the capacity to crystallise in a moment - for me at any
rate – the answer to the question What is Art?

An anecdote -

When I completed my army service in 1955, I already played the clarinet, but my
plans to earn some part time income from music were limited by the fact that a
clarinet player could only find work in a traditional jazz band, and had to have a
reasonable  ear, some improvisational skill and the ability to ‘busk’, i.e. play without
written music. I had none of these skills – I was a fair reader and a reasonable
technician and could play in tune, but that was about it. In jazz parlance, I was a
slave to the dots (I still am!) and needed written music to perform.

That meant I had to get a saxophone if I wanted to enter the world of the semi-pro
and become a gig musician. (gig in those days meant an engagement for a musician,
and only musicians ‘went to the gig’. Today, the young person defines a gig as a
concert or performance and the audience goes to the gig.) The saxophone god in 1955
was Paul Desmond, alto player with the Dave Brubeck quartet, darling of the
American college circuit, and the man associated for ever with Take Five, that radical
– for jazz – excursion into 5/4 time, and a jazz best seller, then and now.

Paul Desmond had a light, ethereal tone and a deceptively simple improvisational
style, and he seemed to epitomise jazz – and accessible jazz at that. I would have
killed to play like Paul Desmond, but I was rooted in older styles, and had more in
common with Earl Bostic and Benny Carter than Desmond.

I had acquired an alto saxophone, was taking lessons from the best Glasgow sax
teacher, Derek Hawkins, and was gigging within six weeks of buying the alto. I was
also reasonably well regarded in the big band rehearsal groups that proliferated in
those days because of my relative technical and reading abilities.

I was becoming complacent and reconciled to not playing like Paul Desmond when,
to  my intense annoyance, a musical colleague, Alan Watson, a tenor sax player of my
generation, told me of another Glasgow musician, younger than me, who “played alto
like Paul Desmond”. I moved swiftly into denial mode, and said that although he
might sound a bit like Desmond, he couldn’t possibly play jazz like him.

And then a seminal moment – I saw a  young, shy musician, acutely short-sighted,
with beer bottle bottom spectacles, pick up his alto sax and play a few bars of music –
maybe 20 or 30 seconds of music. What I heard was the essence of jazz and was
undoubtedly art, and I knew in an instant that if I played and practised for a hundred
years I would never be able to do what Pete Hilforty did so effortlessly that day.

That moment has been repeated a thousand times since then, often with musicians
simply warming up before a performance, but always with that instant recognition of
the art of jazz – not a matter of technique or study, but an innate artistic and musical
sensibility and something called at its lowest level talent and at its highest, genius.

But here I must make a fundamental distinction. It is possible to play so-called

traditional jazz (a very British term) with very basic instrumental technique and little
or no theoretical knowledge but huge emotional intensity, but without a relatively
high level of technical skill, and a sound understanding of harmony allied to a good
ear, you won’t play bebop, or as it used to be called, modern jazz, a term now
inappropriate for a musical form that is about seventy years old.

Another question therefore presents itself – Is art enhanced or inhibited by

technique – by technical proficiency?

THE NATURAL ARTIST – TALENT versus TECHNIQUE

The Goldsmith’s programme made the point that the college has never emphasised
technique, concentrating instead on helping the artist to define his or her objectives
and artistic concept, and it can certainly point to a glittering record of success of its
alumni, a record of both prestigious art prizes and commercial success. The names
are a kind of litany of British art – Damien Hirst, Antony Gormley, Lucian Freud,
Mary Quant, to name but a few – and many Turner prize winners are in this number.

Goldsmith’s, for better or worse, is also associated with the art collector Charles
Saatchi … So the tutorial regime and policy seem to work, insofar as one accepts the
art world’s definitions of success.

Does technical facility in itself deliver artistic validity? Does a well-made

painting, drawing or sculpture equate to art?

The New Oxford definition again - the expression or application of human creative
skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture,
producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power
… works produced by such skill and imagination – creative activity resulting in the
production of paintings, drawings or sculpture.

Not a word about technique, unless you regard it as being implied in creative skill –
and note that “beauty or emotional power” which seems to imply that a work of art
can have emotional power without necessarily having beauty. If that was the
intention, the converse could not have been intended, since (I would argue) a work of
art cannot have beauty without also having the power to stir the emotions. There also
nothing about the intellect or intellectual power, but then the mathematician
would argue that a fundamental mathematical proposition can have intellectual and
emotional power and beauty …
Let’s take for the purposes of analysis technically skilled ‘artists’ who produce work
for corporate clients, ‘artworks’ that will be placed in public places, in the foyers of
public buildings, that will stand or hang in boardrooms. I place the words artist and
artworks in parentheses so as not to beg the question.

(As an aside, the phrase begging the question, currently widely misused as meaning
requesting or demanding that the question be asked, in fact means presenting a
proposition that demands proof without actually presenting proof. In other words it
means avoiding a necessary justification.)

There can be little doubt that much of this kind of ‘art’, however technically
impressive, requiring considerable technical skill, is not art in any real sense of the
word. If a work of art results from this process, it is either serendipitous, or the
patron has found a true artist, not just a skilled technician. For example, the music,
painting, sculpture, drama and film produced during the Third Reich was in the main
competent and well-executed, but was not usually art. But the propaganda
documentary film of the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremburg, Triumph of the
Will, was high art and an enduring masterpiece of cinema, because the Nazis chose a
highly gifted artist to make it.

(The film incidentally showed many examples of execrable Nazi art, something that
Riefenstahl must have been aware of, whatever her personal allegiances.)

Of course another position may be taken on artworks – that they are all art, but some
are bad and some are good. The only criterion is – did the artist intend them to be
art? But then we are back to the question – can a work of art be produced
inadvertently by someone who had no such intention? A photograph that was 
perhaps simply intended to be an accurate record of a scene or events, may turn out
to be art, and utilitarian objects and buildings may likewise be judged by an
experienced and expert eye to be art.

Other perennial questions arise, among them -

Can art result from unintentional or random effort?

Are beautiful patterns in the sand on a beach or ice crystals on a window art? They
may certainly be beautiful – beauty does not necessarily require intent or creativity,
unless one invokes a Creator – a Supreme Being – or a Gaia principle, but they are
not art. From the Lascaux Palaeolithic cave paintings through to Damien Hirst, art
requires a human creator and an artistic intent – a vision.

Must an artist also have a motivation to communicate with an audience?

Most certainly do, but I have known artists who, for all or part of their creative lives,
seemed to wish to communicate only with themselves. Some indeed appeared to be
satisfied with the process of producing the artwork, and destroyed it after
completion. And historically there have been artists who wished only to
communicate with their God.

My son reminds me that Samuel Pepys had no apparent intention to communicate

with anyone during or after his lifetime, yet undoubtedly produced a great literary
work of art. That other great essayist, Michel de Montanus – Montaigne –
initially had no thought of producing art or literature, but he achieved both, and did
publish in his lifetime, but with no intention of achieving a wide circulation. Since I
cannot conceive of life without either of them, I can only be grateful that their
intentions were frustrated by posterity.

Must a work of art communicate with and be appreciated and enjoyed by a large
number of people before it can be considered as art?

I would answer a pretty definite no to the question, indeed some artist only achieved
success posthumously, but the works were clearly art even before the judgement of
posterity. And some great works of art have only ever been appreciated by a
comparatively small number of people, but a small group that could tell shit from
Shinola – people who have devoted their lives and their energies to art, and who
know what they are talking about.  An elitist argument I know, but although as a
citizen I am a democrat and believe in the voice of the majority of the people, in
matters of taste I am unashamedly elitist.

To the argument that it’s all a matter of taste, I reply, yes – good taste and bad taste.
The problem lies with you, mate, not with Beethoven, or Van Gogh  or Leonardo Da
Vinci or Goethe.

SOME TENTATIVE STATEMENTS ON ART

The production of a work of art demands -

An artistic concept, idea or vision

A wish to realise that concept tangibly and to communicate it to an audience,

however small, and perhaps consisting only of the artist

Sufficient technical capacity to realise the concept or vision, however imperfectly

The verdict on the artwork by art experts, leaving aside entirely commercial
judgements will usually include seeing the work in the context of its intentions, its
impact on the observer, the artist’s other work (few artists achieve a reputation solely
on the basis of one work, although its does happen) and to some degree its technical
competence.

When a work of art has been consistently highly regarded by experienced art critics
and collectors over an extended period of time – decades, perhaps centuries – then it
may well be styled a masterpiece. Some art is very much of its time; it is in vogue
then it becomes part of art history, but perhaps no more than that.

Bear in mind that all of the above represent the thoughts of someone who is not an
artist, has a rather narrow range of artistic understanding, but to whom art has
always been a vital part of life. In that sense, I perhaps understand the ordinary
man’s perception of art better than the art expert, and I may have an insight into the
thinking of the art Philistines, whilst rejecting their negativism.

And so back to Goldsmith’s – But is it Art?

Many of the undergraduates featured in the programme were   consumed with self-
doubt and apprehensions  (with the notable exception of the young Irish artist,
stealing, ingesting and excreting and not giving a fuck) about the validity of their art
and where their futures lay.

Among the things that concerned them were recognition of the labour involved in
some forms of art, e.g. painting and sculpture, and – a key issue – control of their
own work. Most were also spending money to make work and receiving nothing in
return.

The student who had been a designer of armour (body armour for police and security
services, etc.) was grappling with the change in mindset required in coming from a
highly structured profession engaged with hard realities and tangible things into the
Goldsmith’s philosophy of the artistic idea and intent behind the work. He also
struggled with his tutors’ idea that if an art work could be ‘read’ quickly, it was not
good art.

Preparing for the exhibition of their art, many were clearly uneasy that all their work
and study rested on the success of this show, and they found the preparation and
lead-up to the show highly stressful. Not the least of their worries was which of their
existing artworks and projects they selected to showcase their work. Each artist was
allocated a space for their personal show, and when they saw their space for the first
time, some were unnerved by the need to consider how their artwork would be
presented in a three-dimensional space that would include those viewing the art.

Art exists in the mind, in the eye, in the ear,  in the senses (tactile, taste, smell) and in
space and in time.

For the painters, with one or more two-dimensional objects to display, dealing with
the challenges that this presented seemed threatening. One must assume that, as
artists, they regularly viewed art in museums, galleries and public places, but the idea
of their own art in a space seemed to come on them as a bolt from the blue.

(For my son, whose art is mainly installation art, utilising images, text, music and
live performance, the concept of placement in space and time is fundamental, as it
is to all such artists.)

The choice of work and spatial positioning dilemmas were most in evidence in the
artist who featured Olympic mascots from Beijing in his work. He seemed to lack
confidence in his own work (to my eye, it was the best in the show) and launched
uncomfortably into a typical piece of artspeak, going on woodenly about it being a
critique of the Beijing regime.

The tutors liked his art but disagreed with his choices for the show, and for his
placement of the paintings.

The idea came up of an artwork being an argument – a proposal to the world. There
is no doubt that many art movements and some notable artworks have been just that.
But the idea that was absent in the programme, if not in the Goldsmith’s philosophy,
was one that is central to my concept of art – the expression or capture of a unique
view of the world and its hidden meanings, the ones that lurk tantalisingly just below
the surface of things. Photography, when it is art, captures this innate strangeness
and mystery in what are often seemingly banal scenes of ordinary life.

Then we had the paintball gun. Well, it’s not Jackson Pollock, but I suppose it has
some sort of validity. An artist needs many technical gifts, but I had never thought of
his ability to aim a weapon being one of them. One tutor drily observed that since he
could do all that with a brush, the gun had to be on display to help the visually and
imaginatively challenged to get the point. Our artist, having striven to adapt to the
Goldsmith’s view and abandon his own literal-mindedness, felt that this was a bit
literal, and was confused, because as he said “I’m trying to play by their rules …”

There were some reminiscences about a former student who had shit noisily in a
glass bottle then painted it green. This had scandalised the students who had
watched the artist straining at stool, but it had met the criterion of provoking a
response. This brought the Punk movement to my mind, but the less I say about
punk as a musical form or an art form the better.

The last word goes to Roisin, our feisty Irish artist. In response to the suggestion that
she should be ready to sell herself to those viewing the show by getting cards printed,
she responded “I'd rather spend the money on a few ****** drinks …” Brendan Behan
would have loved her.

© Copyright Peter Curran 2010