Is this Art?

Every now and then, usually when we have people visiting, I take a trip to the Tate Modern. I can usually count the works I like on one hand.

To say that I don’t like modern and contemporary art would be too generalising. There are several contemporary artists who I admire and respect. It is really only conceptual art that I have a problem with.

Shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1999, Tracey Emin’s unmade bed had everybody talking: is this art? Personally, I’m still undecided. I am immediately drawn to the argument that it’s easy, uninteresting and crude but I can also see the argument that it has something to say, that it tells a story, that life is art. Far more interesting, in my opinion, would have been a series of real life unmade beds: how do we perceive their owners; whose lives are we looking at; what stories are caught between the creases?

Amongst other things, Emin was making a valuable feminist point: that we judge a woman differently for a stained, untidy bed than we would a man. But wouldn’t this have been more powerful if the audience were shown several different beds, if they were forced to face their prejudices? For me, My Bed was too obviously designed to shock. It made some good points, but they were masked by the stir the piece caused.

Since I started writing this post, Dave and I have been arguing about the value of ‘found art’. He takes the Russian Formalist approach: ‘found art’ takes ordinary objects and makes the audience see them in new ways. I can see the argument, but I think most of it fails to do this.

Despite my reservations, I am much closer to respecting Tracey Emin’s unmade bed than I am other conceptual pieces. I have far more trouble with such things as the ‘found art’ of Duchamp, whose work is currently featured at the Tate Modern. His most famous piece, Fountain, is a urinal signed R. Mutt. It shifts the focus of art onto intellectual interpretation: life is art. The summary that was displayed alongside the original piece in 1917 read, Whether Mr Mutt made the fountain with his own hands or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view – created a new thought for that object.

He undermined himself, I think, when he left it in a gallery. Perhaps he would have made the point that art is in everyday life if he had put it back again, or even if he had put a glass case around the urinal in its original place. OK, so he’s arguably created a new thought for the urinal, but why? It doesn’t mean anything.

Dave disagrees. He says Fountain needed to be brought into a gallery in order for people to see the art in it. I say if that’s the case, it needed to be put back in context afterwards. Removing something from its environment may make you look at it in a new way but what’s the point if you don’t reapply it to real life? And honestly, how many people have seen Fountain and looked at the urinals they’ve seen subsequently in a new light?

Perhaps the first time it was done, it said something; perhaps Duchamp had a point; perhaps it really did allow people to see the world in a new way. But the more random objects are put in glass cases, the less meaning any of it has. Where is the art in taking every object you can find out of the world and trapping it in a gallery, in sterilising it, in making it unreal?

Perhaps the reason I am less scathing of Tracey Emin is that she puts herself into her art. In My Bed, you can see her pain. Perhaps. Someone like Damien Hirst, however, who doesn’t even construct his pieces himself, who pays other people to preserve animals that he can call art, I am less tolerant of. When confronted with the idea that anyone could have created The Physical Impossibility if Death in the Mind of Someone Living, Hirst said, ‘but you didn’t, did you?’ That, Mr Hirst, is because we have better things to do.

I like art that makes me consider my place in the world; I like art that makes me question. But when I look at a piece of art, I don’t like the only question I ask to be, is this art?