Clive Davis

WORK IN PROGRESS

I meant to post this on St George's Day, but as I've already explained, things have been hectic around here. That quintessentially English artist, Stanley Spencer is the subject of an affectionate tribute in the arts festival on my home patch, with dozens of local painters creating a gigantic, open-air reproduction of one of his late works, Dinner on the Hotel Lawn. I think he would have liked it.

You can see the original - held at the Tate - if you click this link.

THE WAY THEY LIVED THEN

The Burleigh Family taking tea at Wilbury Lodge, Hove, (c.1947) by Charles Burleigh.

The truly radical art of our time has nothing to do with Damien, Tracey and the other gilded self-publicists. The truly radical art is an exhibition of paintings of middle-class people doing middle-class things in middle-class homes. That's why, as soon as I have a chance, I'm going to visit the Geffrye Museum's new show, boringly entitled Home and Garden, 1914-1960. I wouldn't say the two pictures on the link - including Burleigh's family group - are particularly outstanding, but they still convey the illicit thrill of a taboo subject. And any excuse to see the work of Carel Weight or Paul Nash is worth taking.

Richard Dorment's review in the Telegraph touches on a provocative social sub-text:

Call it what you will - a loss of nerve, psychological damage, the end of an era - the show chronicles the disintegration of a whole class. After two centuries of growing self-confidence, two world wars took an appalling toll.

Dorment thinks the Burleigh picture is an example. I can't see the connection myself, but that's another reason to go and see the work in context.

AN ART CRITIC SPEAKS THE TRUTH ABOUT GILBERT & GEORGE

Not something that happens all that often. One of the most tedious experiences of my life was visiting G&G's acclaimed Nineties exhibition,The Naked Shit Pictures.  Since then the artists have grown and grown, commercially speaking, that is. The New Statesman's Sue Hubbard visited the new Tate Modern extravaganza, and yawned:

To an extent, they are the Joe Ortons of the art world, only without Orton's wit. In works such as "Shitty Naked Human World" (1994), with its crucifix of four brown turds, and "Spit Law" (1997), which shows them bent over, baggy Y-fronts crumpled around their ankles to expose their bum holes, the artists are reminiscent of small boys behind the bike shed who think they are being ever so smutty when, in fact, they are simply being boring...

Gilbert and George's work is not objectionable because it is crude, raw, or in-your-face: many paintings by Picasso are cruel and ugly, and surrealism relished the profane and degraded. But with this pair, there is the suspicion that their fat bank accounts and international reputations are supported by the sycophancy of much of the art world. There is nothing real behind these works - no vituperative anger, no despair, no existential doubt, no love or passion - nothing, in fact, that makes art a meaningful and important human activity. That we accept it as great work worthy of such huge space at Tate Modern shows how lacking in confidence we have become about insisting that art should actually show what is painful, true and meaningful.

NOTEBOOK

[My Christmas present, by special request, was a copy of Robert Hughes' The Shock of the New. I'd never read it before.]

It seems obvious, looking back, that the artists of Weimar Germany and Leninist Russia lived in a much more attenuated landscape of media than ours, and their reward was that they could still believe, in good faith and without bombast, that art could morally influence the world. Today, the idea has largely been dismissed, as it must be in a mass media society where art's princpial role is to be investment capital, or, in the simplest way, bullion. We still have political art, but we have no effective political art. An artist must be famous to be heard, but as he acquires fame so his work acquires "value" and becomes ipso facto, harmless. As far as today's politics is concerned, most art aspires to the condition of Muzak. It provides the background hum for power. If the Third Reich had lasted until now, the young bloods of the Inner Party would not be interested in old fogeys like Albert Speer or Arno Breker, Hitler's monumental sculptor; they would be queuing up to have their portraits silkscreened by Andy Warhol. It is hard to think of any one work of art of which one can say, This saved the life of one Jew, one Vietnamese, one Cambodian. Specific books, perhaps, but as far as one can tell, no paintings or sculptures.

KOZ WOZ HERE

The empty chair belongs to Cosmo Landesman, Sunday Times film critic and all-round loon. We were having a low-budget lunch in Soho on Friday when he decided that the fries served with his burger weren't freshly made but had come out of a bag. No, no, insisted the waiter. Yes, yes, said Cosmo. I had a taste, and they seemed fine to me. After more wrangling, Cosmo was invited to visit the kitchen to see for himself. He came back unconvinced, although he did get a free plate of fries for his trouble. Oddly enough, those ones did taste like oven chips.

Afterwards, as I was treating myself to a day-off, I wandered over to the National Portrait Gallery to see the much-lauded David Hockney retrospective. Didn't really enjoy it. First of all, the galleries are far too small to cope with the crush of people. (Art critics, with their glasses of wine and leisurely press views, tend to overlook practicalities like that.) As for the work, I came away with the overwhelming feeling that I'd been subjected to a succession of styles - lots of impeccable craftsmanship, but no soul. Perhaps it's something to do with the fact that so many of Hockney's sitters are self-conscious members of the culturati: looking at them is like listening to the Upper East Side types in a Woody Allen film.

Frustrating, in the end, because whenever I see Hockney being interviewed he seems a genuinely profound and likeable character. I want to the work to move me, but it simply doesn't. (Although I did like the portraits of his parents. My favourite piece of all was the photo-montage of Billy Wilder lighting a cigar.) It was only after I left the gallery that I remembered I'd once spent several weeks staring at Hockney's California landscapes when I worked as a gallery attendant at the Royal Academy in the early 80s. Those didn't do anything for me either. So perhaps it's time to just accept the inevitable.

BTW, Cosmo loves Borat:

At 2am, my wife woke up and said, “Why are you laughing like a madman?" 

He doesn't think I'll like it because I can't stand that other British titan, Ricky Gervais. But I intend to follow his recommendation and grab a ticket as soon as possible.

RODIN IN THE SUN

               

I haven't had a chance to go to the latest blockbuster at the Royal Academy, but I just stumbled across this picture of the Rodin sculpture garden at Stanford. Taken last year, during my week at the Hoover Institution. There's a copy of The Gates of Hell nearby. Something very incongruous about seeing them glinting under a Californian sky.

TATE, TAT

Telegraph critic Tom Horan tries the new fairground attraction at Tate Modern, and wonders what all the fuss is about:

The Carsten Höller slides may look awesome in the pictures – but don't be misled. They're pitifully small. In the Turbine Hall they're completely lost. They look like four spanners in the back of a Transit.

MORE: Scroll down for a punter's eye-view of the ride.

NOTEBOOK

Now, evening in the cell, I have been thinking back on the regime's interest in beauty, which in fact was very marked. The ruthlessness and inhumanity of the regime went hand in hand with a remarkable feeling for beauty, for the virginal and unspoiled, although that feeling often degenerated into the sentimentality of a postcard idyll. Today I sometimes read statements to the effect that all this was merely camouflage, a calculated manoeuvre to distract the attention of the suppressed masses. But that was not so. Of course the regime's craving for beauty also had to do with Hitler's personal taste, with his hatred for the modern world, his fear of the future. But there was also an unselfish social impulse at work, an effort to reconcile the unavoidable ugliness of the technological world with familiar aesthetic forms, with beauty. Hence the ban on corrugated iron roofing for farm buildings, hence Autobahn maintenance buildings in half-timber style, hence birch woods and man-made lakes at army camps.

Albert Speer, Spandau: The Secret Diaries.

WELL, WHAT DID SHE EXPECT?

Lynne Barber discovers that serving as a judge on the Turner Prize has just about killed off her passion for contemporary art:

  On the other hand, I did once see Keanu Reeves in Vyner Street admiring an artwork in the Modern Art gallery, a blue, plastic rectangle, I seem to recall, that looked like a Formica offcut and cost 20 grand. Reeves described it as 'almost Kleinian', which is artspeak for blue.

Great piece, although she could have saved herself a lot of time and effort if she'd just sat down and watched Tony Hancock in The Rebel.

THE HIGH CHURCH OF ART

In the aftermath of the Berlin opera fiasco, Popcorn vendor Martha Bayles analyzes the modern cult of transgression:

Its creed is really quite simple: If law and custom allow 25 yards of freedom in which to make art, and the artist feels that 50 yards is needed to create the work, then he or she must take 100 yards, thereby "pushing the envelope" of what law and custom will tolerate.

In previous centuries and most other civilizations, 50 yards has been enough, and artists have sought the middle ground between the constraints of society and the demands of the muse. But that is not good enough for today's high priests of art, such as Deutsche Oper director Hans Neuenfels...In the high church of art, Mozart is a semi failure who secretly yearned to play football with the severed heads of prophets, but due to the repressive attitudes of various princes and archbishops, was forced to write gorgeous, immortal music instead.