A Draft, for publication in an art journal.
If you don’t keep interrogating what art is, if you just make art as if there is such a thing, then you will always make ‘not- art’.
If you think you can make ’art’ and then sell it as if there is some imbued value in your considerations in making it, then you’re wrong.
There is no such thing as ‘art’ and that means that everything shown, sold or not sold that has masqueraded as ‘art’ is not art.
It’s not bad art. It’s just ‘not-art’. There’s art and ‘not-art’.
Such a notion does not serve the art industry that thrives on ‘not-art’. The art industry is not obliged to question what art is, if, in the process of asking, it undermines its foundations.
Art is always an inconvenient truth because it undermines everything because that’s what art does!
‘Art’ is that which the artist retrieves from darkness, which was not previously visible.
There used to be scouts who would spot art as it emerged from the dark, to confirm it was real. There were astute collectors who were themselves half steeped in darkness to qualify. There were curators, trained in the interpretation of heritage material to be Johnnies on the spot.
And there were the critics.
Historically, when newspapers were widely read, the art critic was feared and loved in equal measure. They were necessarily solitary in their lives and in their profession. They were even lonely to guard against compromise, against the prospect of favours ill- dispensed.
Now, they are a side dish.
And there was the journal, which promotes art and artists and that is good and necessary, but it needs to be hot as well, too hot to casually pick up and flick through, while the flicker seeks distraction.
Like art does, the journal needs to interrogate itself as it does here, by publishing this.
The heat this short piece brings makes the paper of the magazine hot and all the other articles here sheepish.
Please watch this space for further deliberations on Art v Not Art.