Playing to the Gallery

It’s fine being terribly cynical and ironic when I’m out in the evening and I’m with my mates, but when I want to look at art, I want to have a sincere on-to-one experience with it because I’m a serious artist. I’ve dedicated my life to it. So I go to exhibitions in the morning on my own when I can go, “Hmm,’ and maybe have a little bit of a moment. I have to protect my tender parts from that wicked irony.

An artist's job is to make new clichés.

Art history is a global version of that old children's game Chinese whispers.

We live in an age where photography rains on us like sewage from above.

Keith Tyson, a winner of the Turner Prize, did a piece once where he just got the things already in the gallery and made them into artworks with what he called his ‘magical activation’. So he looked at the light switch and he called it ‘the apocalyptic switch’ and he looked at the light bulb and he called it ‘the light bulb of awareness’. He was using his power as an artist to designate things art, but it was within the art context.

When we talk about the culture we consume it is often a dance around how we wish to be seen: what we enjoy reflects on who we are. I always cringe when I hear myself having a ‘oh you must hear this’ moment, when I want to share my current musical taste with a friend. He is obliged to listen to it and I fear rejection of my very soul.

If you go back to 1980 – that’s a long time ago in computer land – there were two artists called Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz and they created a work called Hole in Space. They set up a video screen in Lincoln Center in New York and another video screen in Century City in Los Angeles with a live satellite link between them so that people could see and talk to each other in the other location. It was an unannounced event and the public’s reaction was ecstatic and spontaneous – you can see it if you put ‘hole in space’ into YouTube – they’re incredibly enthusiastic about it. The artists called it a public communication sculpture. In a way everyone involved was witnessing the grandmother of Skype!

This is funny but it saddens me that ‘art project’ is now a byword for useless, unskilled amateurism. You know that often someone who’s not very good at making television programmes becomes a video artist, and someone who’s not particularly good at writing hit songs becomes an art band.

Alix Rule, a sociologist, and David Levine, an artist, fed the texts of thousands of press releases for contemporary art shows in public institutions through a language-analysing program and they came up with a few observations about what they called ‘International Art English’. ‘International Art English rebukes ordinary English for its lack of nouns. Visual becomes visuality. Global becomes globality. Potential becomes potentiality. And experience of course becomes experienceability.’ They describe the metaphysical seasickness you get from reading this sort of text, where it all sounds a bit like inexpertly translated French.

This concept was brilliantly parodied (or at least I hope it was a parody) in 1998 by a group of Leeds art students. They got a £1,000 grant for putting on their degree show at the end of their term at art school. And when it came to the exhibition, theirs consisted of a series of holiday snaps of them on the Costa del Sol, frolicking on the beach, and some holiday souvenirs and the air tickets. And of course there was outrage and the papers got hold of it and it was front-page news: ‘Art students spend grant on holiday and call it art.’ I thought it was very funny. But then the real coup that these students pulled off was that they’d faked it. The money was still in the bank; the tan had come from a salon; the beach they were on was Skegness; the souvenirs had come from the charity shop and the tickets were fake. They brilliantly wrong-footed the media who held this common idea that if everything can be art, then art is this stupid mucking about, the idea that you can do something and then just call it art.

Here’s a quote from the musician Tracey Thorn of Everything but the Girl. I think it’s great. It really describes the problem of irony: ‘It is difficult for people in the arts to be entirely sincere about things without looking like they have not thought it out properly. The problem with irony is that it assumes the position of being the end result, from having looked at it from both sides and having a very sophisticated take on everything. So the danger of eschewing irony is that you look as though you’ve not thought hard enough about it and that you’re being a bit simplistic.

The sound a box of Lego makes is the noise of a child's mind working, looking for the right piece. Shake it, and it's almost creativity in aural form.

Since 1960s pop art the art world has been happy for artists to use the lowbrow to add zest and authenticity to their works. But middlebrow has resonances of the suburban bourgeousie who might see art as aspirational by association.