Art Critic In “Being A Bit Pretentious” Shocker

August 2009

According to the Guardian, Bristol council have taken to allowing the public to vote on which graffiti gets removed and which is good enough to be left as ‘street art’. I think that’s pretty excellent. I love art when you least expect it. I think that’s exactly where art should be. Seeing it in a gallery makes it a bit clinical for my tastes, like seeing a gorilla in a zoo just sitting there doing nothing. Like it’s been put there with an implicit instruction saying ‘appreciate this or you’re an uncultured pleb’. It’s like trying to piss on demand.

photo credit: Daquella manera

No, I like my art to be out in the wild. I love Slinkachu’s tiny figures left in city centres. I love the paving slab outside Leeds Gallery with the phrase ‘YOU ARE A ROCK’ carved into it for no clear reason. I thoroughly enjoyed the melting writing someone did on one of Manchester University’s shoe bins with insulation tape. And I love the huge, elaborate murals randomly spray-painted on walls. The one on New Wakefield Street was amazing until it was heartlessly painted over earlier this year. That’s proper art – you can’t sell a mural, so what else could it be?

And I utterly object to anyone who says something isn’t art just because it’s spray-painted on a wall. I think that’s the most awful, pretentious snobbishness.

“The two words ‘graffiti’ and ‘art’ should never be put together,” said the art critic Brian Sewell. He added the council were “bonkers”. “The public doesn’t know good from bad.”

Now. Normally, of course, I’m the first person to berate the general public for their godawful taste in just about everything. Chart-topping bands are mostly dross, the top-rated TV shows are generally dreadful, and then there’s Peter Kay. But these are majority-popular things. They come out on top because they’re widely accessible and heavily promoted. Very few people, I think, genuinely consider The X-Factor or The Sound Of Laughter to be art. They just enjoy them and consume them on that basis.

“For this city to be guided by the opinion of people who don’t know anything about art is lunacy. It doesn’t matter if they like it. It will result in a proliferation of entirely random decoration, for want of a better word.”

Oh, I do hope so.

My point is that ‘art’ is an impossible concept to pin down, and in attempting to solve that problem I think Sewell has decided that, as an expert on art, he gets to decide what’s art and what isn’t. From there it follows logically that he’s an expert in it. It’s circular reasoning, and it’s true only if you agree to his definition of, by which I mean ‘taste in’, art. Essentially, Brian Sewell is an expert in the kind of thing that Brian Sewell is interested in, just like everyone else, only he has the audacity to base his definition of the word ‘art’ around it.

…for Sewell, the [Banksy] exhibition’s popularity was another sign that “the art world has gone absolutely crazy”.

“Any fool who can put paint on canvas or turn a cardboard box into a sculpture is lauded. Banksy should have been put down at birth. It’s no good as art, drawing or painting. His work has no virtue. It’s merely the sheer scale of his impudence that has given him so much publicity.”

That, Brian, is part of the art.

Art only exists as a construct of the people who create and consume it. If all humans vanished overnight then art, like money, would cease to exist as such. The deserted world would just be littered with pointless canvases and engraved metal discs which would confuse the hell out of any visiting lifeforms. What wouldn’t happen is the aliens saying (in alien) ‘well, the haphazard spray-paint pattern on the wall of this building we can’t fathom out at all, but this colourful piece of fabric in a wooden rectangle… well, that I feel compelled to exchange a lot of these engraved metal discs for’.

But in Sewell’s world, it sounds like only his kind of people are allowed to be the creators or consumers of art. If anyone else does it, well, that’s just not art. And I really hate to put words like that into his mouth, because I suspect they’re unfair, but ultimately I can’t understand how deriding an entire movement like street art can ever be anything more than bigotry.

And I fully realise that I’ve been guilty of similar ways of thinking in the past, and as much as I like to think I’ve matured since then, very possibly I still am. And if so, I really hope you’ll all call me on it.