I've recently been reading a book called "The Museum as Arena", which is a collection of artists' writings about galleries and art institutions. I've been reading some other books that discuss this subject from curators/ owners and art historical/ critical perspectives, but I hadn't heard what it was like from an artists' perspective. I was shocked to discover that there's a proportion of artists that despise institutions; the MoMA comes under much scrutiny.
I was reminded of the Manchester Contemporary Art Fair and how repulsive blatantly commercial art seemed to me as there are many suggestions and links between the gallery and the marketplace. I thought it was also interesting to find out that, just as in "The Artist Is Present" there was a complex web of what could and couldn't be done above the artist that seemed to have the final word.
In addition to this, large art institutions seem quite irrelevant today to art, I think. There are so many artists and with the advent of new media literally everyone can be an artist, but art large art galleries seem to circulate the same few artists and have the same artists housed in their permanent collection; the obligatory Beuys, Warhol, Klein, possibly a Bourgeois, a Hockney... they're all rather samey.
Because art galleries are so all-consuming and not many seem to question their relevance, ability to function or even existence, does this mean that artworks are now created "for" the gallery, rather than being housed in a gallery as a method of display but actually existing in their own right? It all seems to have gone a bit backwards. But the white-washed walls and white cube-esque spaces that art schools promote seem to make an un-moving subconscious assertion within the minds of "the artists of the future" that a gallery is where they will display; no questions asked. Even land artists have to record the actual artwork in some form so that they can display at least something in the art gallery, after all, that's what an artist does, don't they? I think the "be all and end all" idea of the gallery is something that needs to be questioned because I believe it restricts how people think about and create art; we need to move beyond four white walls and a concrete floor.
Galleries do seem to have struggled to justify themselves recently and come up with the idea of "education" as a shield between themselves and scrutiny. But think about it, who are they educating? Galleries have ALWAYS been places that shun or don't target anyone but the middle or upper classes. The lower class is exclusively not invited. But now they decide in a very condescending manner that they will "educate" the people they have tried to avoid for the past so many hundred years? It seems quite hypocritical and unbelievably arrogant that they should even possess an education that free-thinking people should want to be involved with. Art is important in education, but there are better ways to educate within it, surely. Whilst studying art, I encountered a workshop at Tate Britain, it was an educational day. But we had to travel from the North of England, how could someone who wasn't as privileged or lucky to be able to afford the train fare get there? It pretends not be elitist, but art galleries will always be elitist, in education, visitors, staff and even artists displayed.
In the 1960s and 1970s artists tried to move away from galleries and make their own spaces or new arenas for art, but this soon saw artists returning to the already ingrained institutions of art galleries. They are so powerful that a move away can collapse easily, but I believe this is widely down to money (again). Why else would they move back?
I think it's a shame and slightly inauthentic for artworks such as land art or performance art to be documented and in a way exploited by the artist to still be able to appear in a gallery and gain the sort of recognition and attention that "gallery" works do - I think they're two different types of art and to profit from a different meaning is slightly contradictory. I understand that artists still want to promote their work to an art audience but I find it hard to get my head around the fact that no-one has come up with a decent alternative.
But here, I think is the biggest problem that I can't seem to understand in art today; the artist and money. I'm quite cynical of the link between art and money. Art is perhaps too romantically attached to truth and beauty. There appears to be no comprehensive or equatable truth or beauty in profiteering in a consumerist/capitalist way. To capitalize on art is surely to miss it's meaning and see it as a value or a price tag. Perhaps the meaning of art has changed and I have missed the point, but I personally despise the obvious link between artist and money and the detrimental effect this has on the authenticity, creativity and development of work. Artists are meant to be the free-thinkers of society; the innovative - so why haven't they dared to have a proper go at moving away from galleries? There must be other possibilities and it seems a shame that the traditionally financial and social aspects of the current format should hold people back from possibly something better.
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