'THERE is no such thing as Art," wrote Ernst Gombrich, at the outset of his hugely influential book, The Story of Art.
"There are only artists." For Gombrich, writing more than 60 years ago, "Art with a capital A has come to be something of a bogey and a fetish."
In trying to appreciate art, without a capital A, he advised us to discard habits and prejudices. We must try to look at things with informed and open eyes. Only by looking hard can we hope to educate our taste. And, of course, the greater the work of art, the longer we spend looking at it, the better we appreciate it.
What would Gombrich make of Damien Hirst, a retrospective exhibition of whose work has just opened at Tate Modern, and to which culture vultures are expect to flock in their gawping thousands?
Hirst perplexes many critics who can't quite make up their minds about him. On the one hand there are those who see him in the mould of Andy Warhol, whose celebrity is impossible to disentangle from his modest talent. Like Warhol, Hirst makes tills ring dementedly. Even people who can't stand his work want to own something by him. As you exit the retrospective you must pass the gift shop where, for a mere £36,800, you can buy what's described as "household gloss on plastic skull" which may – or more likely, may not – have been made by Hirst himself.
Others, however, view Hirst as a consummate conman who is no more artistically gifted than a supermarket shelf stacker. Subtle he is not. Rather, his intention is to shock, especially those who are easily shocked.
As Tracey Emin, his female counterpart, is best known for an unmade bed, which was shocking only because people queued round blocks to look at it, Hirst's signature work is a shark in formaldehyde. How shocking is that? My reaction to it was the same as it was to Emin's divan: an unstifled yawn.
This is not, however, the way many art critics look upon it. According to one: "It invites the visitor to gaze directly into its dark maw: to confront death face-to-face from that same glassy distance as we daily confront the possibility of our own existence."
Hirst's admirers, and there are many more of them than you might think, see him as something of a seer, crediting him with telling us that we are bound die. How perceptive is that! He is labelled a conceptualist, which means you can put a blank piece of paper in a frame, call it Nothing and suggest it is symbolic of the spiritual emptiness at the heart of contemporary society.
Attend degree shows and you will see lots of work in a similar vein. It's all very knowing, ironic and, ultimately, puerile. My most cherished example of this was hung in the Royal Scottish Academy and consisted of a six-inch nail driven through an A4 sheet of paper.
Art colleges teach drawing reluctantly, and who can blame them when you can win the Turner Prize for any old idea. To want to paint is regarded by many lecturers as subversive. In any case why would you when you can get other people to do the work for you? Of course, artists have always had assistants: Botticelli, Michelangelo and Leonardo all did. But today, post Warhol, it is often the uncredited assistants who slog the hardest. Hirst makes no apologies for his hands-off approach. Aren't Ferraris, he insists, produced in factories? Indeed they are, but so too is everything in Poundland.
Real art though, art which truly deserves a capital A, art such as that produced by David Hockney, who is not trying to emulate what can be done in factories, is that which the artist not only conceives but executes.
Is Hirst such an artist? A critic called Harry Mount suggests he is second-rate. This seems to be me to be too generous an assessment, especially if we consider who must be ranked first-rate. I'm reminded of Harold Ross, the legendary editor of the New Yorker, who, when asked why he published the cartoons of the "fifth-rate" artist James Thurber promptly replied, "He was third-rate."
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