It is far from proven that newspapers sell art, but art certainly seems to sell newspapers in Britain these days. At least that must be one explanation for the enormous space given to London's contemporary art scene by the British press. Newspapers no longer cover major art shows as cultural events but as news stories, while the media's devotion to the celebrity cult routinely turns Y.B.A.'s -- as young British artists are now known here -- into show-biz stars.
True, the key variable in all this is perhaps not art, but shock: art and artists are usually only deemed worthy of the news pages if their work or behavior can be presented as scandalous. Thus, given the intense competition among Britain's nine morning newspapers, any art that might conceivably give offense -- say, a maggot-filled cow's head (Damien Hirst) or an unmade bed plus used condoms, soiled underwear and liquor bottle (Tracey Emin) -- is assured of ample coverage.
Young artists, new galleries and old museums all seem eager to play their part in this Faustian bargain: loads of publicity, rising prices for contemporary art and good crowds for exhibitions in exchange for what a British art critic, William Feaver, calls ''headline art.'' Like news, art marketing has become a today operation; whether the product lives any longer than the hype is tomorrow's problem.
So it is that, even before it opened this week, the Royal Academy of Arts's new exhibition, ''Apocalypse: Beauty and Horror in Contemporary Art,'' received press coverage here that even those perennial favorites Monet and Cezanne would envy. It helped of course that the show includes a life-size wax figure of Pope John Paul II being struck down by a meteorite, a large pile of garbage and a jumbled video that includes brief images of live sex (forbidden viewing for those under 18).
The once-venerable Royal Academy is again playing the game, eager to match the success of ''Sensation: Young British Artists From the Saatchi Collection,'' which drew 300,000 visitors in 1997 thanks to massive media attention and a controversy over a portrait of an English child murderer made with handprints of children. (When ''Sensation'' went to the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1999, it was Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani's noisy objection to elephant dung attached to a painting of the Virgin Mary that ensured the show was noticed.)
Still, in fairness, ''Apocalypse'' is not simply more of the same. It escapes some of the criticism aimed at ''Sensation'' in that it does not show works from the private collection of Charles Saatchi, the wealthy former advertising executive who more than anyone is responsible for the rise of the Y.B.A.'s. Only 5 of the 13 artists in this show are British, only 2 of them -- Darren Almond and Dinos Chapman and his brother, Jake -- are Y.B.A. veterans of ''Sensation.''
What seems not to have changed is the desire of the Royal Academy -- and its exhibitions secretary, Norman Rosenthal -- to cause a fresh sensation, although Mr. Rosenthal describes his intent as that of challenging received wisdom about art.
''On the whole, people like what they know, and the older they get, the more they insist on liking only the things that they know,'' he explained in an interview with The Sunday Telegraph. ''Their minds don't want to open up. They don't want to face psychological, social and aesthetic realities about the world they're living in. They want it to be pretty.'' And he added, ''Art is not there to make the world a better place.''
As a self-supporting institution, though, the Royal Academy does need art that draws good crowds in order to pay its way. (Last year's ''Monet in the 20th Century,'' with 735,000 visitors, was its most popular ever.) And while some of its critics complain that its aesthetic choices are now being dictated by monetary needs, the academy's embrace of contemporary art also reflects its desire to be seen to be in tune with the times. And this necessarily includes a high profile in the media.
The Royal Academy, though, is hardly alone.
The massive publicity that surrounded the opening of the new Tate Modern this spring has already brought more than two million visitors to the converted power plant on Bankside. Tate Britain, housed in the old Tate Gallery on Millbank, recently made a bid for attention by holding its own contemporary show, ''Intelligence: New British Art 2000.'' The steady inflation in commercial galleries handling Y.B.A.'s is proclaimed as evidence that the art boom is here to stay.
This month in the run-up to ''Apocalypse'' the London press opened its columns to a Gillian Wearing retrospective at the Serpentine Gallery through Oct. 29. Ms. Wearing, a video and photo artist who won the coveted Turner Prize here in 1997, does not in fact exploit shock. Rather, her thoughtful work focuses on the clash between external and internal appearances, as in ''Trauma,'' in which mature people wearing youthful masks recount painful moments of their childhood. What caught the media's eyes, though, was ''Drunks,'' a 23-minute three-screen black-and-white video of a group of drunks staggering about her studio.
Days later the Saatchi Gallery opened ''Ant Noises II'' -- ''ant noises'' being an anagram of ''sensation'' -- to display the latest additions to the Saatchi collection. The show, which runs through Nov. 26, includes works by Mr. Hirst, Ms. Emin, the Chapman brothers, Jenny Saville, Sarah Lucas, Gavin Turk, Ron Mueck and Gary Hume, who were all part of ''Sensation.'' They and assorted other opening night London trendies duly filled the gossip columns.
For newspaper readers, on the other hand, the work given most attention -- ''shocking'' in the category of ''Is this art?'' -- was Ms. Emin's installation, ''The Last Thing I Said to You Is Don't Leave Me Here,'' a reconstructed beach hut representing memories of childhood and recent sexual encounters, accompanied by two photographs of the artist naked. One of these, called ''I've Got It All,'' could not fail to be reproduced: it showed Ms. Emin with splayed naked legs ''giving birth'' to a large quantity of money.
In contrast, the new works by Mr. Hirst, the original Y.B.A. enfant terrible of shark-in-formaldehyde fame, seemed positively tame: a vast ashtray filled with fetid cigarette butts; and a glass cabinet containing medicine bottles labled ''sausages,'' ''mushroom'' and the like. More disturbing was Mr. Mueck's ''Untitled.'' Having displayed a miniature ''Dead Dad'' in ''Sensation,'' his new work is an equally realistic miniature of a man lying in the fetal position wrapped in a blankets.
With ''Apocalypse,'' after the pre-opening media buildup, the opening night fund-raiser, paid for by the Prada fashion house, was another must for the tabloids thanks to the attendance by the actor Ewan McGregor, Sir Elton John, Courtney Love and a host of local celebrities. ''We'd suspected it all along,'' Alison Roberts reported in The London Evening Standard, ''but this was proof: the art world is now more fashionable than fashion itself.''
As for the art, the Royal Academy has given each of the 13 artists a gallery of his or her own (Mariko Mori, a Japanese conceptual artist, is the only woman), with Mr. Rosenthal and the independent curator Max Wigram choosing the works to fit their apocalyptic theme. The very first installation, Gregor Schneider's ''Cellar,'' requires visitors to climb through a tiny trap door into a labyrinth of dank rooms and corridors, a reconstruction of part of this German artist's own home in Rheydt and presumably some sort of metaphor for paradise lost.
Maurizio Cattelan's ''Nona Ora,'' or ''The Ninth Hour,'' is the work showing the pope felled by a meteorite, lying beside broken glass from a shattered skylight that suggests the meteorite's path. (Upset Catholics are assured that the Italian artist is a devout Catholic.) The link to the Apocalypse seems less immediate in Luc Tuymans's oils and Ms. Mori's ''Dream Temple,'' a mysterious octagonal shrine; it is more evident in ''British Wildlife, 2000,'' the garbage collection by the British artists Tim Noble and Sue Webster that, when illuminated, shows them in silhouette at the top of the pile.
Mr. Almond's ''Bus Stop (2 Bus Shelters)'' confronts the Holocaust with an installation that reconstructs the bus stop outside the former death camp at Auschwitz in Poland; in a previous work he photographed the shelter on a damp gray day, first with and then without waiting passengers. Even more direct is the Chapman brothers' truly apocalyptic ''Hell,'' nine glass cabinets arranged in the shape of a swastika filled with tiny figures, naked or dressed in Nazi uniforms, many of them corpses in mass graves.
Chris Cunningham's ''flex,'' quickly nicknamed the ''sex video,'' portrays a more personal hell. Accompanied by loud disjointed music, it shows a couple floating through ether who first fight violently and then make hurried love, albeit all somewhat disguised by rapid cutting and fleshy close-ups. It is Mr. Cunningham's first work of art after a brief career making advertising spots and rock videos.
How the British public responds to this show has yet to be seen, but there must be few newspaper readers who have not heard of it. Reviews by art critics may stir interest, but even negative coverage in the news pages awakens curiosity and draws crowds. For example David Aaronovitch, a columnist in The Independent, poked fun at many of the works in ''Apocalypse,'' but he nonetheless said he enjoyed himself. ''It's innovative, brash, callow, shallow and sentimental, which itself is significant,'' he said.
There is no shortage of commentators ready to trash the entire Y.B.A. boom as a market-driven exercise in self-promotion. ''The shed is Art now, you see,'' wrote Anna Murphy, the arts editor of The Sunday Telegraph, of the beach hut in Ms. Emin's latest work, ''and if you don't understand why, that's because you are not clever or cool enough -- a case of emperor's clothes if ever there was one.'' On the other hand, to draw attention to her article, it was accompanied by photographs of Mick Jagger, Stella McCartney, Steve Martin and ever-present Y.B.A.'s at the opening of ''Ant Noises II.''
沒有留言:
張貼留言