What do we know about art, and what do we like? And why don't the public's favourite paintings include abstracts, asks Gemma Tipton
You'd be hard put to find a house with no pictures on the walls, and yet for many of us, art is something we feel we can take or leave. It surfaces in the news section of the papers when something sells for several million, or annually at the time of the Turner Prize. In terms of column inches then, art is either a Picasso costing more than €100,000 million, or provocative "shite" in the manner of Tracey Emin's unmade bed . . . which leaves out an awful lot in between. The classic cliche of the man-on-the-street looking at pictures: "I don't know much about art, but I know what I like" isn't very helpful. What is it that we do know about art? What are we looking at when we're looking at it, and what do we really like?
Some paintings have an idea of "greatness" attached to them. The Mona Lisa seems to carry an aura, a sense of something transcendental, that lifts us beyond our daily lives. Perhaps this is what great art is? The Mona Lisa was less well-known, however, before it was stolen in 1911. In fact, the theft wasn't even noticed for a couple of days. But once the absence had been discovered, more people lined up to see the empty space where it had been than had visited the Louvre in the entire year before. Picasso was even brought in for questioning (it had actually been stolen by a workman, Peruggia, who simply took it off the wall).
Two years later, the Mona Lisa was recovered, and came back to a place in the history books. For many, myself included, a viewing of the painting in the Louvre brings with it a flat "is that it?" sort of feeling. It's not that I don't like it, it's just unexpectedly small, rather dull, and I never found her famous smile as enigmatic as everybody said it was. That's one of the problems of fame. It can be hard for the reality to live up to the hype. Seeing the Mona Lisa feels more like being at an "event" than having a transcendental experience through "great" art.
So if fame (or, rather, notoriety) is one thing that contributes to how much we value a work of art, what role do subject matter and style play? The BBC and London's National Gallery have just run a poll to find "The Greatest Painting in Britain". From public nominations of paintings, a panel of "experts" (art critic Martin Gayford, portrait painter Jonathan Yeo and BBC governor Deborah Bull) came up with a shortlist of 10. What struck me instantly about the "top 10" (see panel), wasn't that it leaves out Picasso, Monet and Rembrandt; but that it doesn't include a single abstract artwork. While the poll was of paintings, and therefore ignored sculpture, film, photography and installation art, every image on the list is recognisably of "something". And if we are like the British in this, which I suspect we are, an Irish list would yield similar results. So if everyone likes pictures of "something", why do contemporary artists continue to make artworks of "nothing", of lines, dots, squares, or empty fields of colour? Do these art works have any value (or point) at all?
THE PROBLEMS WITH using polls to define anything are well known, and are made worse when trying to classify something as slippery as art. US-based Russian artists Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid have, however, been working on a project to do exactly that. Researching countries from the US to China to Italy, they carried out lengthy surveys of what people wanted in a work of art, and then painted the results. The questions ranged from favourite colour and preferred size to whether "paintings should ideally serve some higher goal . . . challenging their viewers to think about art or life in a different way", or whether they should be just something a person likes to look at (the latter statement generally proving the most popular).
A visit to www.diacenter.org/km proves Americans want a dishwasher-sized country scene including people, animals, water and a tree. What they least want is a paperback-sized abstract of red and ochre triangles. The same is true for France, Finland, Iceland and Russia. In fact, the only countries to reverse this trend are Italy and The Netherlands, Italy forgivably rejecting a Pop-Art image mixing Michelangelo's David and Elvis Presley and The Netherlands saying "No" to paintings of interiors. Komar and Melamid's polls seem to demonstrate that, with the exception of the Italians and the Dutch, we like our art to be recognisable, pretty, serene, pastoral, and predominantly blue.
SO IF THIS is true and these two artists are giving us what we want, why are the results that they have painted so uninspiring? It's not that Komar and Melamid aren't very good artists, or that their pastoral scenes don't quite have the magic of Constable's Hay Wain.
The point is that a diet of nothing but what we already know and like would ultimately become boring, banal and unsatisfying. And while it is easy to say what we like, we also have to remember to leave room for surprises. And that is what makes art so special and important; its power to surprise you with something you didn't see, notice, or think of, before.
The argument used to be that the invention of the camera made representational painting redundant. Portraiture had actually been developed for practical rather than artistic purposes, as a form of early "mug shot". The Romans used images of people to identify them for prosecution as well as for taxation, and so it was important to create an exact likeness. In fact, as contemporary portraits by artists such as Nick Miller and Lucien Freud show, there is still room for paintings that depict recognisable things, while also taking you beyond the simple likeness of a photograph. What the invention of the camera did do, however, was to allow artists the freedom to explore different ways of looking at and showing things.
Sometimes the ideas behind contemporary art are elegantly simple, and the "I could have done that" response to a Minimalist work, can often be true. Anyone could build, for example, a James Turrell sky room, where the frame is the open roof, and the picture the changing sky above. But it was Turrell who did it, and Turrell that we therefore have to thank for the experience of being in it (see for yourself, there is one at Kilfane Gardens in Kilkenny).
Looking at Seán Scully's geometric canvasses, which will be on display in the extended Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane, which is due to reopen in late March, gives not only an impression of the shapes and spaces of cities, walls and windows but a sense of the way they might make you feel. The best of abstract or contemporary art can touch on inner thoughts and express things that can't easily be discovered in words. Entering a vast room laid out with a strip of low aluminium squares and circles (Walter de Maria's Equal Area Series at Dia:Beacon in New York) might leave some people cold. But if in others, myself included, it makes you see the room afresh, makes you think about beauty and infinity, it's worth having. I get the same thrill of feeling something indefinable-but-special looking at the misty blues in a Felim Egan painting; I had it again this year at In Memoriam, an installation Helena Gorey had made in Burnchurch for the Kilkenny Arts Festival.
HAVING SAID THAT, looking at art for a living does mean you get to see an awful lot of it, and not all of it good. And there's plenty of art I just don't "get". You can go for ages not liking anything that much. But you don't expect to like, or fall in love with, everyone you meet either. A lot of Saatchi's "Brit Art" seems to me to be a group of not very interesting people having a conversation amongst themselves and thinking they're very clever. The rest of us get to know it's good because Saatchi pays millions for it. Occasionally, works escape the general smugness, but - a bit like the Mona Lisa(though obviously not as "great") - there's so much hype it's hard to see what it really is you're meant to be looking at.
And that's the trouble with working out what matters and what doesn't in contemporary art. We're in the thick of it, and it's difficult to separate the values of commerce, fame and fashion from the lasting values that an idea of "greatness" brings. If you go on a holiday to Florence, you'd be amazed at the amount of dodgy paintings of Jesus with his mother that were painted during the Renaissance, and these are just the ones that have survived in collections and churches. There were originally many more. So, it's hard to assess exactly what will, in 500 years, have survived from the period we are in. What will be seen as the "Greatest Artwork" half a century from now? Probably not, I imagine, Tracey Emin's bed.
Meanwhile, the BBC poll for "The Greatest Painting in Britain" was so successful that Brave New Worlds, the company who came up with the idea, are now launching similar votes in countries including the US, Australia, Italy, Spain, The Netherlands, Germany and France, and culminating in a global vote next summer for "The Greatest Painting in the World". And even though I don't particularly like it, my money may very well be on the Mona Lisa.