So Knowing

Some time ago I wrote piece about the changing nature of art, of how it’s been stolen by the academic and clerk. In passing I mentioned the gangsters of commerce; art these days sold as fashion statement and investment. At the low-end it’s burgers and pizza, though the patter is all high-class cant. Banksy made a film about such a fast-food franchise. But before we Exit Through the Gift Shop let’s do a little sniffing around.

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Like an ordinary working day, it opens with the cash register and closes with all that lovely money inside. It begins in a shop. For a time we leave it. Then the shop returns at the end. We’ve been watching a businessman who wants to do cool things; by freeloading off those who lead more interesting and meaningful lives. A member of the audience he dreams of being in the film. It is to mistake an advert for the product, hucksterism for the real thing.

Banksy, what have you done?

Thierry Guetta does not change. When the film starts he is selling secondhand tat to rich kids, who confuse fashion with sophistication. I tell them that a bit of odd stitching is designer, he says to camera. So knowing. He’s smarter than these dumbos. And he’s making a nice living. It is not enough. When the film ends he’s raking in a fortune, having found an infinitely more profitable line of business: art. The rich suckers for a cynicism they mistake for irony. Exit a Candid Camera for wealthy fools - they may be laughing with each other, but we, along with this Svengali, are laughing at them. Nothing has changed. Thierry remains the same. So has his clientele, though now they’re spending a ton of money on a different lot of tosh.

Businessman as artist. It’s the life we live. Retailers and admen the artists now. But we’ve come a long way from Warhol; 1960s New York the other side of a continent to 1990s LA. He was the real thing, an artist who picked apart the meaning of mass culture, that commonplace aesthetic born on Capitalism’s production-line; every home decorated by advert and brand, which so ubiquitous merges into the background of our lives. Then Warhol framed it and put it on the wall; isolated, outsized, given due aesthetic reverence, the brand loses its force of number and ubiquity, to become visible again. Soup cans our landscape paintings, Jackie and Monroe today’s icons. Inside Warhol’s Factory art was manufactured out of ads, to give us a sudden illumination: we live inside a cartoon world. An unnerving experiment. No longer Nature we inhabit a synthetic scenery.

Decades later the artist is kicked out of his studio. Today the advert is the art. 

In the hours before his exhibition, Guetta, rather than help organise the show, is doing interviews…. He knows the score. When selling high-priced kitsch you have to hype it. The only art in this gallery a salesman’s talent for selling snake oil. He’s a master at it. But, having listened to Bansky’s fatal suggestion - why not create your own? - he has come to believe himself an artist, selling the same as making. It’s not, of course. But there’s genius here. This shopkeeper is in perfect pitch with the times. Art is now business. Another stage in the bourgeois capture of the globe. First the bohemians were pushed out, today it’s the turn of the artists: no place for them in the galleries and TV studios of the culture industry.

Guetta doesn't have any artistic talent. So be buys it in! He employs a team to do this stuff, to which he adds his brand: Mr Brainwash. So knowing….

Art has been transmogrified. Not to create a thing but sell a thousand things under a corporate logo. Is it all just a con trick? That moniker suggesting a very clear, too cynical mind…. Like all public life, which relies on artifice, we suspect a more complicated picture: Guetta knows he’s no artist and has convinced himself that he is one. We respect the cynicism: there is an honesty here. Not like those talentless naifs, who, with no aesthetic sense, proclaim themselves artists, and cadge thousands from the public purse. So earnest. These virtuosos of the grant application and self-sell.

We have to go back to Warhol to understand this change. Warhol straddled the border between art and business, art and design, art and kitsch. Yet somehow he stayed on this side of the aesthetic divide; because he thought as an artist. This was a time, as I explain in Train Them Good, when academics were pushing aside the artisan, to replace skill with meaning. Warhol thus stood at the intersection, when art was going off down another road; away from that track to a craftsman’s cottage, and towards the main highway and the corporate city. A modicum of talent and one massive idea: the beauty of repetition. Even some of the greatest of artists have had less…. Until modern technology and modern art this wouldn’t have been enough. Skill would always have to match meaning. Even with photography there was a craft to be learned; and the best photographers have the aesthetic eye. Dada stopped all that. However, it wasn’t until Warhol that it became possible to be an artist wholly of the concept. It is not what an artist makes but the ideas they think up that defines the modern ‘genius’. Not unrelated to the rise of the university, and art’s conquest by the critical establishment, both of which think in concepts, the bigger the easier to grasp; an art for simpletons. Artists no longer to appeal to artists and the connoisseur, who can appraise the technique and feel its value and meaning; today the academic and critic bestows their views on the work. Art not a craft but a discursive practice. And the standard? The exam paper and the journal article defines both the nature and quality of what is no longer an aesthetic object.

Art became so important. And the rich began to buy it at high prices. Yet art is for a different elite, the elite of the talented and the learned. But how is this possible in our democratic times, when everyone should be able to emulate a Rembrandt or understand a Picasso? Easy, my dear. First, we’ll turn it into an idea, then make this idea really simple. Once this magic has been performed anybody can make-believe they are an artist. Even to sign somebody else’s canvas is an act of art.… There was a reason Duchamp chose an urinal as a ready-made; but then such jokes are only for the sophisticated.

Academics are not good with humour. But they love a concept, which they are apt to treat like a naive schoolchild her first love-letter. It’s why they believe that organising an event or running an art-school are themselves art; providing the organisers identify as artists and call such activities ‘art’. Anything is art because art is now nothing but a concept, which - unbeknownst to the epistemologically innocent - can, if stretched enough -  and these academics love to stretch - be applied to all things. Such concepts no different from a label. Or a brand.

Once a brand meant a certain quality. Today we know it can be stuck on any old junk. It is the same with the concept; post-modern academia seemingly unaware of how close is their treatment of ideas to the corporate language of the mass-sell. Detach the concept from material reality and it can stand for all things and for nothing. Add a large dose of pop-populism, plus the knack for minting money and we have…Mr Brainwash.

Today art has lost all value, the academics have stolen it. They have made it easy for confidence tricksters and hucksters to sell their gear to a gullible public, who have been educated to believe trash artistry. Indeed this trash is art, our experts tell us so. But then why does Banksy feel something has gone wrong, and why do I think something has gone very badly wrong…. In a world of adverts how do you know the quality of what you are buying? The answer: we don’t. For we can’t trust the salesmen. It’s the same with the academics. I suspect these ‘experts’ don’t know anything about art; and it is they, not the innocent public, who are the dupes.

Repetition. Warhol’s great insight. An object becomes meaningless through repetition. His art restoring the meaning by a limited series of isolated repeats of iconic products. Today, the concept has taken the meaning out of art. Put a tin of tomatoes in a white room. Write ‘art work’ across the window of a charity shop.… A contemporary curator no different from a stall-holder in Petticoat Lane.

Guetta acts and thinks like a businessman. There is no meaning in what he does. He is simply a retailer who has branded himself an artist. Yet nobody can tell the difference, though it is noticeable he doesn’t get the best critics and curators visiting his store. This is a game for kids and celebrities. It’s the pop world where fashion and cliché go together like Dolce & Gabbana. No. His audience has not changed. Still the same rich young, their ignorance advertised on their over-priced t-shirts. Like such clothing Mr Brainwash’s ‘art’ creates the fantasy of the cool and up-to-date. But then they are hip, being rich in LA, the home of the facade and the illusion. 

Are we being hard on Thierry Guetta? After all, he’s giving these youngsters exactly what  they want. In shop or gallery these pretty young things can meet and be happy together. They’re not really looking at these crude copies of Jasper Johns or Rauschenberg. They’re enjoying the scene, being loud, foolish and flashy in a crowd.… Though no artist Mr Brainwash has the businessman’s knack of making his customers feel good, by selling them some fabulous idea about themselves. Who wouldn’t buy it?

When anything can be art, Mr Brainwash is inevitable. He stands at the end of Western Civilisation; where, after two millennia, all its meanings have been rinsed clean. 

But he’s better than the profs, with their interminable prose. After long travel through dusty deserts, what better than a smiling host, welcoming us to a Holiday Inn….

Are there silver-linings here? Possibly. ‘Mr Brainwash’ is winking at the audience he’s about to ‘programme’. Yet in choosing this name he shows he has already been indoctrinated by the culture that makes him so self-aware. It’s Guetta who’s brainwashed! He just came late to the show. It was academics who eviscerated art objects of their aesthetic value. Just a concept, they said. Then came the clever salesmen who saw that with this concept they could sell an enormous amount of tut. But they were clever and knew the business. It takes a real genius to believe one’s own hype. Mr Brainwash the Michelangelo of ballyhoo.

(Review: Exit Through the Gift Shop)