Through the Looking Glass: Art Appreciation 101

Through the Looking Glass
Art Appreciation 101

Margaret Mascarenhas

I’m filling in for abstract artist and art critic Swatee Kotwal who is on leave this month, with a subject she and I have been discussing for some time: what differentiates good art from bad art? What is the criteria? Who decides?

In 1995, Keio University professor Shigeru Watanabe, and two colleagues published a paper showing that pigeons could learn to distinguish between Picasso paintings and Monets – a study that earned him a Nobel prize. More recently, he trained pigeons in art appreciation, teaching them to differentiate between 'good' paintings and 'bad' paintings, using colour, texture and pattern cues to predefine an aesthetic set of values. In the study, watercolour and pastel paintings by children were first categorised by a panel as either 'good' or 'bad'. The pigeons were put into a holding area where they could view a computer monitor displaying the images, and taught to recognise pre-selected 'good' art through food rewards. Recognising 'bad' art was not rewarded. The birds were then shown a combination of new and old, 'good' and 'bad' painting images. According to Watanabe, “The results suggest that the pigeons used both colour and pattern cues for the discrimination and show that non-human animals, such as pigeons, can be trained to discriminate abstract visual stimuli, such as pictures and may also have the ability to learn the concept of ‘beauty’ as defined by humans.”

The idea that your children could be learning art appreciation from pigeons is surely a disturbing one, but these next stories turn the whole raison d’etre of art criticism on its head.

In 2005, the following news item appeared in The Australian:

“MORITZBURG, Saxony: A German art expert was fooled into believing a painting done by a chimpanzee was the work of a master. The director of the State Art Museum of Moritzburg in Saxony-Anhalt, Katja Schneider, suggested the painting was by the Guggenheim Prize-winning artist Ernst Wilhelm Nay. ‘It looks like an Ernst Wilhelm Nay. He was famous for using such blotches of colour,’ Dr Schneider confidently asserted.”

It turns out the painting was actually the work of Banghi, a 31-year-old female chimp at the local zoo. But this wasn’t the first time the hallowed practitioners of art criticism were comically exposed as emperors with no clothes. The most notorious case occurred in 1964 when Ake Axelsson, a Swedish newspaperman from the Göteborgs-Tidningen, installed several paintings at the Gallerie Christinae, claiming they were the oeuvre of avant-garde artist Pierre Brassau. Almost immediately the work began to draw critical attention. Critic Rolf Anderberg wrote this eulogy: "Brassau paints with powerful strokes, but also with clear determination. His brush strokes twist with furious fastidiousness. Pierre is an artist who performs with the delicacy of a ballet dancer." (Time.com) Pierre Brassau turned out to be a four-year-old chimp named Peter from the local zoo.

Excuse me while I roll my eyes and laugh hysterically.

Toward the end of his life Picasso was putting his name on ashtrays, a number of which were proudly collected by Richard Attenborough. But is it art?

The infamously subversive Marcel Duchamp, as Kotwal wrote in a previous column, initiated the use of “ready-mades” in his art installations, the best known of which was a prank submission of a urinal called “Fountain,” under the pseudonym R Mutt. In response to this article and the pictorial depiction of “Fountain”, one horrified reader heatedly objected to the publishing of such an image, deeming it inappropriate for family viewing. Though this image is one of the most well-known in modern art, and though the traumatised reader entirely missed the point of the article, which was to draw attention to the bizarre arbitrariness of critics who would define such work as “art”, his visceral response to the visual representation exemplifies my own contention: that occasionally the ordinary viewer, without benefit of an education in art history or aesthetics, can be the more reliable critic. (Though I will not endorse the notion that the right to critique includes the right to suppress, as we have seen in the case of MF Husain)

What is art? And what is the role of an art critic?

I was taught, and still am inclined to generally accept the view, that fine art (like literature) is essentially a deliberate arrangement of elements in ways that affect emotions, senses, perspectives, in ways that provide a new insight and/or experience, and in ways that transcend the limitations of the chosen medium and strike a universal chord. To elaborate, I would say that for something to be called art (or literature), it should have goals besides pure self-expression, and should do at least one, but preferably some or all, of the following through the use of skills and ability in handling the building blocks :

• communicate ideas

• explore the nature of perception

• generate strong emotion

• stimulate insight

• possess an aesthetic value

• possess a cognitive value

• facilitate intuitive rather than rational understanding of something

What then to make of Damien Hirst? Perhaps the most recognised bad-boy in the global artist community, his celebrity is entirely dependent, not on any traditionally recognised set of manual or even intellectual skills, but on his capacity to generate shocking and provocative concepts—concepts, which are in fact executed by a swarm of employed artisans, a practice now being employed by a number of our own home-grown artists of repute. Add to that the blurring of the line between artist, curator, gallery owner, collector, auction house, and critic, and the nexus between all, some of whom play two or three of these roles simultaneously and quite actively.

Confused?

If we define the role of art criticism as defining a rationale for art appreciation, making art accessible, and highlighting emerging talent, this blurring of the line can be dangerous, in a way that undermines artists, corrupts the creative process, and hoodwinks the public. It is not a secret that international elite coteries comprised of established artists, curators, collectors, gallery owners, auctioneers, and critics exist, whose primary objective has less to do with aesthetics or the discovery of emerging talent and its nurturing, and more to do with helping each other to stay on top of a frighteningly recessive market. In such a market turf war it is no wonder so many nay-sayers and newcomers are either summarily ignored or beaten back with sticks.

Of course, there is nothing new about art becoming the cultural capital of the wealthy, both as status symbol and commodity. And to be fair, most art education programmes and private museums are gifts to the public domain by the super-rich. Traditionally artists have required the patronage of the elite in order to work, which of course has generally been subject to certain biases, tastes and preferences of whomever is paying. But lately patronage by the big names in the international art world has assumed a circling shark quality. A number of shark observers have applauded New York-based Tino Sehgal’s successful manoeuvre to take the “ownership” of art away from the purchaser, by creating performance artworks that can be sold at phenomenal prices but leave nothing behind, not even a receipt, as a veritable coup d’etat. But though he has managed to raise his personal bank balance in an ingenious way, he hasn’t exactly contributed in any way to the democratization of art, the mantra of the street artist.

Closer to home, an especially depressing development for the emerging artist and ordinary viewer alike is the burgeoning of facile “art” critics with neither the credentials or the appropriate analytic ability, much less the honesty to actually “critique”, in the Indian press. In one of his recent blogs, Abhay Maskara, collector and owner of an up-and-coming gallery in Mumbai, ridicules in particular the latest propensity for listing “top artists” in the media. He says, and I agree with him:

“The real danger of these prophecies is that the reading public is left with too many ‘invisible gaps’ to fill and s/he is never really sure of why the artists selected actually deserve a place on some infamous list that has been thrust in their face.(sic) I think ‘list-makers’ have a certain kind of responsibility to articulate more clearly the criteria (as loose as it may be) that informs any such selection… Throwing a list of names together and seasoning it with one example each from a variety of sub-categories such as ‘modern artists’, ‘contemporary artists’, ‘women artists’, ‘diasporic artists’, ‘video-artist’, ‘performance artist’. ‘curator-artists’ may be convenient but it is certainly not convincing. Even if one were to condone the generation of such lists and look for parallel examples from the world of music or cinema, we will see that even a ‘greatest hits’ chartbuster or a box office generated ‘top films’ blockbusters is based on some logic that is not gravity defying.”

We shouldn’t actually rely on the event pages of the daily news for informing ourselves about art. And newsmedia that truly want to inform the reading public, as opposed to merely titillate, should hire art writers who actually know what they are talking about, or at the very least are prepared to do their homework. As for the general public, unless buying exclusively for investment purposes, I would say, take a class, visit galleries, read art books and art magazines, and even top ten lists, if you so choose. But when you buy, always choose an artwork that moves you, even if you’ve never heard of the artist before.  (ENDS)

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First published in Goa Today, Goa - April 2010