The authenticity factor.

Following on from the idea of the exploitation of misery in the art world, this leads me to think about the extent to which artists exploit their own misery for commercial gain. In terms of art being stimulated by suffering in this context, it can be argued that modern artists today are not so much being genuinely influenced by their own suffering but more that they are driven by a market demand which actually requires them to create a certain type of negative work. This therefore questions the integrity of some of the most successful modern artists of today and the root of their work. If artists have cottoned-on to the fact that ‘negative-art’ sells, could it be that street-savvy artists are either deliberately indulging in their pain to merely raise sales figures, or are they creating an illusion of pain to stay in the commercial fast-lane? Then again, if they are consciously aware of 'faking-it', do they really care? It's all about making money in the end right? (I probably shouldn't say that too loudly). Yet, surely it wasn't always that way; unlike some crazy people I could mention; you could scatter used condoms on a bed, pretend you've been sleeping in it for 10 years and declare it your despair-ridden pit? (Not to mention getting paid an enormous wodge of cash and being able to claim it as art - simultaneously). But it's the norm these days apparently. You can't even take the tube these days without passing at least 20 campaigns - all of which may I say are mostly water off a duck's back. (Don't they realize that when looking at say another holiday sign for Greece - we're just thinking about that cup of tea when we get home?) It's no wonder that we're getting a bit sick of it; it's the classic too much of a good thing. If life's too perfect, you look for a problem; as they say. And I say we look for it in art. One of the worst things in life is when people don't get you. Who cares if you mean it or not? After all, everyone is looking for a little bit of empathy, therefore 'Paint The Pain!' (After all, paint is just pain with a T on the end...)
Lets look at Tracey Emin’s work; its often about bad experiences that have happened to her, but no one can deny her success or her considerable pay-cheque. Having said this, I believe her work is all genuinely ‘borne of pain’ and therefore is not bowing to an art-world criteria. However, someone like Damien Hirst who also makes a lot of negative work (much of which is inundated with morbid themes and depressing concepts - e.g. the calf in formaldehyde in 'Pop Life') appears to be shrewd and on the ball when it comes to making the most controversial, profitable work. This leads us to examine the possibility that artists may be going too far. There is a fine line between what the market expects you to produce, and producing something because you and you alone want to; taking the latter, this exploitation of social demand could easily be classed as either cleverness or crudity. Even in smaller cases it holds true. I watched a certain art student show a piece of work about something deeply personal and private on a huge screen. When questioned if she felt guilty for exhibiting such a delicate piece of work, she replied "No". This is a classic example of how the preconception of what type of art one should be making, is recognised and picked up on by even very young artists. Has an awareness of the world's thirst for more depressing, negative art been sub-consciously planted in each artist's mind before they start a new piece? I leave you to decide.
So is some modern art merely a 21st century version of the gladiatorial arena on which we can voyaristically gloat because we want or need the thrill from our comfortable seat in the stands? And if so why criticise artists for cynically fulfilling that need? Does it actually matter whether the suffering is real or not?
Perhaps without the pretence, the thrill would not be there and so and the work would lose its validity as a tool, maybe their pretence feeds our own need to pretend that we’re really suffering when we’re actually just playing at it from the safety of our sofas.

The ethics of art, the exploitation of others.

So we've talked about people using their own suffering for commercial gain, but what about all those people who were used by OTHERS for commercial gain? Art is not always a one-man-band. Being an artist is always used in the singular: 'I Am An Artist'. You never say, "I'm in a 'group' of artists". Yet that 'one artist' is not always the person who made the art. Hundreds of people have reaped the benefits of relatives, friends or spouses who were artists that died and left behind a tidy little windfall for them to collect. If Francesca Woodman for example had not sunk into deep depression and killed herself at 22, do you really think she would have become as celebrated as if she had not? And what about those people who exhibited her work after she died? Yes it was great for the world to see, but how do we know she would have wanted all that? I have no quams about questioning the moral backbone of those involved in the promotion of her work. Perhaps to them, art is purely a business and Woodman's photographs were a cash cow to be milked. That's not to say that her photos aren't amazing (because they are) but if she had not committed suicide, would her work really have ended up standing out from all the other thousands of depressive, teenage art students'? When you die young and tragically, you're martyred (look at Lennon), and, in some cases, those around you are right there to hit the jackpot on your last quarter.

And not just them, if we look back to the Prinzhorn Collection, by delving more deeply into the ethics of it, I begin to question if it was right that Prinzhorn should have laid bare all these mentally ill peoples' deepest emotions and expressions for the world to see. He collected over 5000 pieces from hundreds of mental patients. Do you really think he stopped to tap on the chicken wire glass of each padded cell to ask if they actually minded their work being exhibited like meat on a slab? Doubtful.

Just because he could make this collection, does it mean he should have? The works that were exhibited in the collection were incredibly personal and, to each patient, an expression of how they felt. Did Prinzhorn really have the right to use this work when it wasn't his own? It's a fine line between exhibition and exploitation. The art that was collected was originally intended to be used diagnostically to assist the doctors with their patients' cases; so surely the display of the collection is on a par with putting the image of a cancer victim's brain scan on a wall of a gallery, or a therapist publishing a patients free-association writing. It's morally skewed and even a little sick and distasteful.

Another side to this, possibly even more crass, is that many of the patients in Prinzhorn's Collection, may have not been drawing their 'sick', 'disturbed' and 'troubled' minds at all. They may have been perfectly happy and just drawn a random picture that happens to look like it's created from pain. If that was the case, it's even more twisted, as Prinzhorn will have been using their (what appeared to be) expressions of torment and misery, to tap into the public's morbid fascination. Because frankly, morbidity and anguish can at times appear fascinating in a voyeuristic way, and I've no doubt Prinzhorn was well aware of this when he was selecting his pieces... clever boy?

Francis Bacon: Pessimism is profitable.

If Koons is an example of some of the happiest, most cheerful, fun silly art you can find; then Francis Bacon's is surely the opposite. This is someone who makes Munch's 'The Scream', look like the subject is singing karaoke. Wanna see a real scream?





Now THAT'S scary. Bacon was once called 'the most astonishingly sinister artist in England, and one of the most original'. His themes run unswervingly to the negative, morbid, ghoulish, and perverse, with a strong surreal element (not unlike Salvador Dali) and carry much pain and darkness. The colours used are generally subdued, often with black backgrounds and frequent splashes of purple and orange. The images are consistently blurred, and rarely does one see a recognisable form, though it is clear that whatever it is you're looking at is a person. This protagonist, usually a friend, lover, character from a movie, historical figure or sometimes himself is cocooned in claustrophobia, screaming in pain or mental distress. His self-taught, recognisable techniques, and constant atmosphere of agony and torture, mark him out as one of the most unique and successful artists of his century.

The macabre nature of his paintings lean almost towards the erotic in their energy (as is a recurring sub-nature to any life and death focused piece). Bacon spoke eagerly about this obsession in a TIME interview 'Distorting into reality' in 1962:

I look at a chop on a plate, and it means death to me. I would like some day to trap a moment of life in its full violence, its full beauty. That would be the ultimate painting.

This man is one of the most celebrated painters of his time. And why? Because we need him. Sure, there are artists who like to paint melancholy images and wallow in depression like a vat of chocolate, but Bacon is the most famous of these, the most praised, and the most unfaltering from his patented 'slit your throat' theme. It was after the 1950s that he started to gain recognition on a really big scale.. and no wonder. These were the days of the housewives, the adverts, the perfect families etc etc etc. Bacon fought Stepford with Suicide and reaped the rewards. To my knowledge there are only several acknowledged reasons why Bacon chose these themes. One was the death of his lover George Dyer, and the other is smaller incidences whilst growing up. His studio in London was such a tiny, cramped hole that it was critically analysed by Aida Edemariam. She states that his preference for working in cramped conditions and unwillingness to work on a larger scale, stemmed from being 'frequently locked screaming in a cupboard as a boy, by a nanny'. Years after this, Bacon was reported to say: 'That cupboard was the making of me'.

Bacon has been a source of inspiration to a vast number of people, including H.R. Giger who's design of the film 'Alien' was said to be based on Bacon's screaming portraits:

It was Francis Bacon's work that gave me the inspiration.. of how this thing would come tearing out of the man's flesh with it's gaping mouth, grasping and with an explosion of teeth.. it's pure Bacon.

He has also been described as being 'One of the most powerful artists in Europe and is perfectly in tune with his time'. Upon first starting out, Bacon showed his paintings only to his close friends, and it was only after World War II that he kept his paintings open for public view for the first time. His style, which was always significant to him alone, was appreciated and renowned not only for its astute portrayal of torture and pain but also for its finesse. This decadence of expression can be seen in his magnificent paintings like, the vaporizing head in front of a curtain and the screaming figure crouching under an umbrella.

Surely a man who has carved out such a high place in the world of negativity and despair in art cannot hold anything but well deserved praise.

Death by advertising - why we hate happiness.

How did we get from Beethoven's 'Ode to Joy' in 1824 to Anthony Burgess' 'A Clockwork Orange' in 1962? Times have certainly changed. It's fair assumption that any work with a cheerful title these days will actually be saturated with irony, and if entitled 'The joy of living', will probably be about someone's painful death. The classic example of this is Todd Solondz's 'Happiness', in which the lives of the protagonists include anything BUT happiness.
So from where did this cynicism arise? Have we become more skeptical of happiness because we are so inundated in this day and age with report after report of human brutality and despair - need I even mention Africa? But then earlier generations saw perpetual war, disease, disaster and genocide and did not seem to have the thirst for miserable art as we do. I mean to say, could you imagine living through the Blitz and still wanting depressing art? Perhaps we crave depictions of unhappiness because, in contrast, we are actually bombarded with incessant images of happiness. Often these images are seen in celeb culture and are frustratingly unrealistic; they leave the world with a sense of deep dissatisfaction. (Do I sound like a bitter, jealous, chocolate lover who's days of size 10 are long gone? It's because I am) Could it be that there is too much happiness (or at least the illusion of happiness) in our world today? Advertising is almost exclusively dedicated to the unobtainable. The exercise and health craze is practically a religion (I think to New Yorkers it literally is). Has anybody spotted the correlation though? The rise of 'unhappy art' has risen at almost exactly the same rate as the emergence of advertising and mass media that attacks our senses with images of perfection and joy. Commercial culture and celeb culture hold out not just an ideal but an ideology and, of course, with the great Gods such as 'Brangelina', and 'Heat' etc being such advocates for them, of course we're hooked... it's killing us though. Our frustration at being such light years away from the images of beauty we see has created a new faith - Cynicism.

Earlier generations were surrounded by images of sadness and despair, if we take Dickens at his word anyway. Life was hard; they worked hard, died young and we're constantly fearful of incurring the wrath of God and of being morally screwed over. The last thing they needed was for their art to remind them of the misery of daily life. Today we see nothing but images of beautiful homes, barbie-esque models, infallible celebrities, and dreamlike holidays. Mass media is surely OD-ing on the 'Be Happy!!'. With such frighteningly unrealistic ideals of perfection - isn't frustration, dissatisfaction and misery an inevitable kick against that pressure? THAT is why we crave artistic depictions of misery.

On the one hand, the news makes us more aware than ever of the atrocities and disasters that are occurring all around the world today, and on the other, we are being force-fed images of flawlessness (who else hates airbrushing?) and sublime happiness. Therefore, when it pops up in our art, how can anything 'happy' be considered as anything else but hopelessly fake?

The Transition from happy to sad.

The job of an artist is generally thought to be to explore and express emotions in whatever way they see fit. That said, however, why is it that in the 21st Century artists choose to primarily focus on emotions that are rooted in pain of some kind? Whoever it is who defines 'serious art' (not naming names, I'm sure Saatchi is a lovely fellow), rarely defines it as being based on pure unadulterated happiness. Yet was this always the case? I think not.

Lets look back 200 years. If you were to make a radical installation out of dead animals and kitchen utensils, it would be more likely you would be deemed a heretic than a hero. Not because the art scene hadn't evolved and Damien Hirst wasn't around to give helpful hints, but simply because art was more positively than negatively inclined. In the Western world - let's just take the UK if we're going to get technical, the main focus outside of their work or practical lives was religion. With the absence of holiday brochures, makeup ads, fashion campaigns, the 'OC'; life was I'm sure, a little bleak. So where do you turn for optimism and hope? ART. Anything to distract from the miserable, mundane, workhorse lives of those unlucky enough to be born in that era. (Gutted.)

At some point during the 20th Century it seems that an increasing number of artists (or at least their critics), began to view 'happy art' as disingenuous, uninspired and.. dull? (Would it be overstepping the mark to suggest that they simply got bored of painting the same chipper, saccharine sweet stuff over and over? Probably.) Tolstoy once remarked 'All happy families are alike'; could the same be true for art? In a relatively short period (a century being not that long in the history of the world), art seems to have leapt from beautiful happy 19th Century art such as Monet's 'Le déjeuner sur l'herbe' and Renoir's 'Bal du Moulin de la Galette', to the more unhappy 19th Century creations such as Baudelaire's 'Flowers of Evil' and 'The Raven' by Edgar Allen Poe. The 20th Century then saw unsettling movements in the world of visual art and classical music became much darker. There are of course exceptions to the rule, like Matisse's 'The Dance', and Kandinsky's 'Compositions' but, in general, those who chose not to focus on a form of despair or distress were branded 'pop' and stripped of credibility as serious artists. Why has the 'credible art' over the last century or so, been at war with happiness? The thought springs to mind that the answer to this question could lie in one of two answers. Either a) folks have grown tired of looking at something that, while beautiful and calming, may be a little too lacklustre for those thrill seekers of the art world, and the crowds have demanded something more. OR b), movements simply run their course, and after a certain time, it's all tapped out. This is an incredibly asinine way of putting it I know but if you observe the time span of an artistic movement, (Eg. the peak of Impressionism was only from the 1850s to the 1880s), you can see that every sudden flame of creation will inevitably die out and be replaced by something else. I wonder if it was not to be expected that after such a history of joyous art, a darker more cynical side of life was just waiting to spring to life in the art of the 20th Century?

Is it simply that we humans do not have the longevity to keep happiness in art going forever, or is there another reason for this radical transition...?

Behind the wheel of creativity - is there a medical link?

When considering the link between suffering and creativity, it led me to question whether or not it can (or has been), medically proven that suffering stimulates creativity. There have been several correlations drawn between the peak point of artists careers and the climax of their depression. I believe it is also a great possibility that suffering enhances certain creative impulses in people. Impulses which may not have been realised fully without this degree of infliction. For example, who can name one artist who was indisputably amazing, indisputably successful and indisputably.. a wacko? Yup... Van Gogh. This is a man who cut off his ear for Christ's sake! Between his blood happy pastimes of ear-chopping and moping however, he did manage to do a few good paintings as well. I think I've seen that Sunflowers one round about...

Anyway, much arguing has been had since his death about the link between his troubled mind and his tremendous work. Here's one little quote that I found fairly illuminating - take a look:

"The developmental period ends at the beginning of 1888. This coincides with the beginning of the psychosis. The works which had influence on us and our time are those of the years from 1888 to 1890. More pictures have been produced during this time than all preceding years. It was a period of vehement and ecstatic turbulence, although always disciplined. The works of 1888 to 1890 are filled with a tension and excitement as if world problems and problems of life wanted to express themselves."

In the same way that athletes may take steroids to improve their performance, 'Schizophrenia helps to create something out of the original telos which would never have come into being without psychosis.'

Theories like this have been supported by people such as Freud who famously deemed art the 'Child of Neurosis'. From a psychiatric viewpoint, many artists and writers have been long considered disturbed and in need of treatment. This to me begs the question: Is it better to be a mad lonely genius, or a sane celebrated amateur? And why did Van Gogh for example, in his suffering, create things of beauty? Perhaps because the world wasn’t at that time demanding it and he wasn’t a cynic? Perhaps because he truly painted what his suffering demanded of him? If both those assertions are true then its reasonable to suppose that in this day and age his suffering and genius would not make the walls of the big galleries but would simply disappear into sad obscurity.

But is it ART, Eddie?

Hilarious! Eddie's Father's coffin is brought into the house, and being in with all the new modern art, Eddie and Patsy mistake it for another piece. Watch from 2:20 to 3:45:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQ3SqJfqf0g