ARTS AND CRAFTS

Dick Pountain/18 October 2009 14:22/Idealog 183

I've just had a very arty week indeed. On Wednesday we went to see Anish Kapoor's show of sculpture at the Royal Academy, and then the very next day we took in the Frieze Art Fair in a big tent erected in Regent's Park. Kapoor's show was quite stunning, particularly the disturbing red wax works that put you in mind of raw meat flying through the air or smeared on the wall. But more relevant to this column was his third room, in which you pick your way through a maze of waist-high mounds of extruded grey concrete that look like guts, snakes, maggots, faeces, pasta and much more. In the brochure Kapoor explains that these were created by a "new and specifically developed technological process... a computer-controlled three-dimensional printer excretes cement, strictly following a preordained design formulated by the artist. Thus the means of production is subverted".

After that Frieze was a disappointment, but even so a similar theme raised its head in the big tent: everywhere was evidence that artists were employing computerised technologies to remove any obvious element of handicraft from their work. There were lots of digitally printed 2D images, but also sculptures clearly produced via CAD/CAM, and even human figures executed as wire-frame, faceted solids. Though painting was still the predominant medium, almost all the work was actually conceptual rather than physical - the artist had had an idea, then had it executed in the quickest, least personal way possible, probably by some small engineering firm on an industrial estate.

It appears that any appearance of handicraft is becoming deeply uncool, akin to manual labour, and I believe the reason has to do with populism and anti-elitism, albeit of a flawed and inconsistent kind. Computers have made the physical execution of every art-form easier: the word processor and grammar-checker; the synthesiser and sampler in music; the automatic digital camera and camcorder; and now, it would appear, even the 3D printer for sculpting. That means you no longer need to spend long years of apprenticeship honing your technique the way a Mozart, a Shakespeare or a Giotto did, and that in turn means that anyone can potentially become an "artist" overnight. As Panasonic's advert for its latest GF-1 digital camera has it, "Because capturing your creativity matters".

Does that mean everyone can become a *good* artist? Of course not. To take a good picture you still need an eye for composition and an idea of what to shoot. To write a good song you still need an ear and a story to tell. What computer technology does is permit everyone to pretend to be an artist, while at the same time undermining (or "subverting") the criteria by which we distinguish good art from bad. Five hundred years ago it was fairly easy to tell whether or not your kid was as good as Michelangelo, but nowadays we're confused about whether an abstract painting by a chimpanzee is art or not. Technique has never been all that determines good art, but while acquiring technique was difficult that had the beneficial side-effect of eliminating all but the dedicated and the talented from the race - a kind of natural selection.

The hypocrisy and inconsistency that underlies the populist stance is this: deep-down, professional artists don't *really* want everybody to be an artist because that would mean they could no longer charge four, five even six figure sums for their work. A case in point. The standard of photography at Frieze was lamentably poor and I've seen far better stuff on Flickr. (The only prints I'd have given house room to were by Diane Arbus and Robert Mapplethorpe from over 30 years ago...) But if an amateur like me tried to get my pictures shown in that tent I'd soon find out what "anti-elitism" really amounts to.  

This all links back to what I was writing about here a couple of months ago, intellectual property. As they simplify production and reproduction, what computer technologies really subvert is the very concept of property in ideas. If all art is becoming in effect conceptual, its actual execution outsourced to paid artisans, then all the artist is really selling is an idea. There were a couple of clever sculptures at Frieze that I liked, but which I could fairly easily make for myself were I prepared to steal the idea, rather than pay the artist £4000.

So am I defending personal craftsmanship against the impersonal and the machine-made? Only up to a point. I want there to be people in the world who paint better than I do, play the piano better than I do, sing and write better than I do, and I'm very happy to pay for their efforts since they enrich my life a little. I'm not fetishising the element of manual craft though: well designed, mass produced artefacts can be satisfying too, like Vespa scooters or Fender guitars. It felt to me though as if much of the art on show at Frieze is stuck in the worst of both worlds - pedestrian ideas, mechanically reproduced and executed not for a mass but for an elite audience.