We have to price quickly, to guess what people might pay, to weigh up one piece in relation to others totally different. It bring with it thoughts about how random pricing art is in all contexts, and about what is valued. An eloquent piece on such issues such as Tracey Emin's "I've got it all", which expresses many dichotomies and conflictions about worth, value, money, and opposing self worth, would actually have very little monetary value at Koestler because we have to judge that it is just a photoprint, a moment, compared to a model that may have taken hundreds of hours to complete.
| Tracey Emin. I've got it all. 2000 |
http://t3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSkabGZgcFjPtm2Vy9zBo7hn238E3JIBaSo-ZKNbXfvFSyf7smE (accessed 12th June 2011)
That is not to say that the artistic elements of Emin's work would not be appreciated and perhaps given an award by the judges, but it's monetary value to sell, as an anonymous photo, would be relatively little. How are we to compare such work with that of a secure patient who may be performing and recording such acts through psychosis?
Insightful, creative, skilled or unskilled as work may be, it matters where it has come from. We do not encounter work anonymously. Not usually. Even if we see art randomly in what may seem like an anonymous encounter, it is usually already filtered through galleries, agencies, some sort of system. The art of secure patients and offenders is not usually distributed freely. It can matter terribly to find out the provenance of artworks. Perhaps the goal is complete objectivity, regardless of the history or character or even the personality of the artist. If we do not like the artist, can we like the artwork?
Every so often the Koestler Trust finds itself enmired in media controversy when someone objects to the exhibiting of art from a notorious criminal. Koestler always stresses that the art is chosen, judged and curated anonymously, which is true. Notorious murderer Colin Pitchfork has exhibited with Koestler. I don't know how it became known that the work was his, but knowing who made it does completely change everything about it.
independent.co.uk deborah-orr-this-artwork-was-made-by-a-killer-it-is-no-less-valid-for-that
 |
| Colin Pitchfork. Bringing Music to Life. 2009 |
http://www.independent.co.uk/multimedia/archive/00163/14-orrdeb_163832t.jpg (accessed 12th June 2011)
The idea of Koestler is about throwing a lifeline, a gleam of a future or a chance of insight to people who have made mistakes, or who were caught, or who were unlucky, or of course much worse. If it was your family member or friend who had been killed, it would be abhorrent to see the killer's art rewarded.
Currently at Koestler, while we are hanging all the work floor to ceiling, there are some images more worthy of note than others, with such evidence of intricate skill and time, which alone makes them sellable in Koestler terms. Amongst all the hundreds and thousands of pieces, I had noticed a series and admired them. I was truly shocked and actually gutted when I discovered who had made them. Discretion must prevail, as this is not open knowledge as in Colin Pitchfork's case, but these pieces were made, and are contributed every year, by one of the country's most notorious and prolific serial killers. I am left with a feeling of complete revulsion, to think that the same hands who painted on the paper I hung committed such terrible acts. I can't get past it. I can never see these pictures in the same way again, nor do they make them valuable or interesting in a different way.
Knowledge changes everything, for good or ill.
 | ||
| Painting by Adolf Hitler |
When we regard a painting by Adolf Hitler, what would be the point of considering it in purely artistic terms, or in terms of art at all. We may look at it for early signs of delusion or other clues as to psychosis, but as art it is totally tainted, We could never hang it on a wall as a pleasant view of a countrified scene. Such paintings have a value, sometimes as a distorted trophy, but they can never be considered in the way one considers other art.
My mother has a vase in her house which once belonged to Oscar Slater, who had famously been wrongly convicted of murder in the early 20th century.
The provenance of this object, and the brush with a seedy underworld of crime, transforms it from the ordinary. Somehow the passage of time makes these things fascinating rather than horrific.
Morality can be the subject of art, but whether art cancels itself out by the immorality or not of the artist is subject to debate. Biographies, especially posthumous, are full of aspects of artists, writers and composers that sometimes we wish we did not know about, as objectionable attitudes and acts now edge their way in to our consciousness, spoiling our own enjoyment and relationship with their work.
Recently I saw and article or programme on TV where an artist had no qualms about stealing objects from shops and premises for her work. (I will follow this up with a reference when I can rack my brains and google in remembering where I saw this). She seemed to be of the opinion that is was a sort of justified theft, as art was a higher purpose than everyday morality. I thought this was really objectionable, and evidence of inflated ego rather than inspiration, and yet, it always takes someone to enact the exception to prove the rule.
Other people are as complex as criminals are as complex as artists. We are entitled to some of our prejudices and censorships. We do generally value morality over immorality and do not regard all things as equal or all art and artists as equal.
| Damien Hirst with For the Love of God. 2006 |
http://t3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTrXNbJeXu0IhH2u3bRg2kzofa9VH9NQQWr6qiMwZNiHXp3o2ck (accessed 12th June 2011)
An artist may be any sort of person. Sometimes we are lucky if we see art without knowing about the worse parts of an artist, and other times it is enlightening into darker aspects of the human soul.
12th June 2011
No comments:
Post a Comment