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Profiting From New Art: Julian Schnabelat The Tate 1982
Profiting From New Art: Julian Schnabelat The Tate 1982
A young American painter - Julian Schnabel (b. 1951) - currently enjoys the rare
living artists are ignored by the Tate. They must be wondering why Schnabel and
not them. Is the intrinsic aesthetic quality of his work so remarkable that a one-
man show was inevitable, or are there other reasons for his rapid elevation?
Within the Western economic system some works of art are commodities: they
have exchange and investment value. Art does not merely reflect the general
economy, it is part of it. From the economist's viewpoint, artists are small
artists own their means of production but they generally lack capital and control
over the means of distribution, marketing and publicity.) There are many more
aspiring artists than patrons and collectors, consequently the market in art is
succeed; like Picasso they become wealthy and celebrated. (It is reported that
The artworld
Who determines which artists succeed? In the West it is the artworld; that is, an
elite urban minority consisting of artists, dealers, collectors, patrons, arts council
artworld's taste prevails over that of the general public and the popular press.
Although the artworld, like the rest of the economy, is divided into public and
private sectors, the two sides are interdependent and frequently collaborate
mounted in a public museum with the help of the owners of Schnabel's paintings
- Doris and Charles Saatchi (experts in advertising), Mary Boone and Leo
Gallery in Dering Street in a mixed show of new painting.) Dealers are happy to
co-operate with museums during the early phase of a painter's career but once
there is a queue of buyers waiting for canvases they are much less willing to lend
capital.
galleries signals wider public recognition; the show functions like a hallmark of
state approval. For the artist it is promotion of an extremely valuable kind: all the
public museums throughout the world become potential customers; demand for the
artist's work is almost bound to increase, and as a result it will command higher
prices. The generosity of the collectors and dealers in lending Schnabel's paintings
to the Tate cannot be regarded, therefore, as entirely disinterested. Even when such
people do not benefit financially from their support of new art, they gain in terms of
It should be recognised that power within the artworld is not equally distributed.
The taste of a few dealers and collectors is often decisive for the direction art takes.
Museum curators tend to follow their lead. By the time the art journalists arrive on
the scene, the result of the game has already been fixed; their cries of 'hype' are thus
To succeed in the art market artists must produce the kind of work the
influential ones require (dealers have no use for community murals with socialist
messages and speak of them with contempt); it must satisfy their taste and also their
commercial success because the operation of the market demands it: to distinguish
the new products from the old and from rival contemporary works, the new items
must possess novelty and shock value. The whole history of modern art is the story
point. His works cleverly blend the old and the new: he satisfies the preference of
the market for 'easel' paintings (rather than videos, performances and conceptual
art statements) but he also introduces various novel features: gigantic size, rough
supports, masses of broken crockery embedded in thick paint, a deliberately crude
and 'bad taste' style of painting, an unusual melange of motifs and references.
To make a quick and large profit from investment in art is difficult with established
artists because their prices are high and they rise comparatively slowly. (They may
even fall if the artist suddenly becomes unfashionable.) If, however, a new star can
be created then rapid and large increases in value can be achieved. This is a
primary reason for the periodic emergence of new artists, new dealers and new
styles.
Neo-Expressionism
Schnabel is not alone in the sort of work he produces - complete outsiders and
eccentrics are not liked by the market - he is part of a new movement in painting
rampant in America, Germany and Italy which has been variously labelled 'Neo-
is 'the next thing' in art and has been welcomed as such by the artworld after a
nerve wracking period of uncertainty and 'pluralism' following the rather arid
achievements of the Minimal and Conceptual art movements of the 1960s and
1970s. Dealers have breathed a sigh or relief: the engine of modernism has started
up again.
artists. A sub-group of the so-called 'Friends of the Tate Gallery' has been formed -
'Patrons of New Art' - with the help of the Saatchis. It is planned to use private
funds to purchase new art and, eventually, to house it in a 'Museum of New Art'.
(Are they aware, one wonders, how rapidly new art becomes old art?) Thus the
Conservative politicians. Public museums can always use more money but there is a
It seems axiomatic that the Tate should display examples of new art whenever
possible but how should this be done? Is it really the Tate's role to act as an
extension of the private gallery network? Should not the Tate provide a critical
context for the understanding of new culture? Should it not fulfil an educational
Neo-Expressionism for several years now. Some of the opinions expressed in these
consciousness ... an exercise in bad faith ... cultural cannibalism ... cynical work ...
(T. Lawson) ... Expression for the sake of expression ... decline by way of
made to sell ... the primitivism and simplicity of the child's mentality (D. Kuspit).
In the Tate Gallery catalogue essay by Richard Francis - which provides the only
contextualization of the Schnabel show for the visitor - there is no hint of the
mixed critical reception given to Schnabel's art (Francis only quotes articles by
the artist's friends), of the controversy aroused by Neo-Expressionism, of the
underlying ideological and political issues at stake in the debates. Instead there is
are a hermetic poem and artist's statement, and a photo of Schnabel in a desolate
and intellectual depth that was the hallmark of the Abstract Expressionists.)
Visitors to the Tate are not treated as adults, as people capable of benefiting from
an open and honest discussion of the case for and against the new painting.
but does this mean they have no artistic and social value? It is necessary to
value and its sale profits the baker and shopkeeper but it also has use-value as
food. Bread's use-value is not negated by its exchange-value and neither is art's.
Schnabel's works offer the viewer, prepared to overcome prejudices about what
constitutes 'good' drawing and painting, a great deal of optical, tactile and
causes the viewer difficulty in reading and interpretation. In other words, the
paintings delay perception. This was a characteristic of modern art praised by the
Russian formalist critics in the 1920s. Unlike so much recent art whose only
Schnabel's paintings do have content: they make references to people and events
external to art.
paintings in the Tate. Evidently she did not realize that they are deliberately
terrible in both senses of the word: bad and awe-inspiring. They are at once
repulsive and exhilerating, humanist and inhuman, bombastic and romantic. Like
Punk, they achieve a genuinely new style by a bizarre selection and scrambling of
past and present styles of art both representational and abstract. They are crude,
improvisatory method of work: he rejects his own mannerisms and tastes as soon
as they become routine. The result is rapid change, eccentric shifts of direction,
individual pictures rather than those tedious series of images playing variations
on narrow themes.
is linked, in some respects, to a new school of figurative painting in New York (e.g.
the work of David Salle and Thomas Lawson) which makes use of commercial
illustration and mass media imagery. His relationship to this school is a matter of
and decadent). Some of the artists are also writers and theorists; their aim is to
survey exhibition of the work was needed not a one-man show.) One striking
stylistic feature of this new painting is the placing of painted outline drawings
against flat fields of colour or over the top of other images (see Schnabel's 'Homo
painting').
Reality for Schnabel and the others is not just the external, objective world, it
account of the way art and the mass media constantly mediate reality by
transforming actual events into images and narratives, and by creating fictional
worlds. As a result, their paintings are not realistic in a conventional sense. For
Giantism
Why are Schnabel's paintings so huge? (Only the super rich, museums and big
business have walls large enough to display them; even the Tate would be
embarrassed to own too many.) Is their jumbo size an index of the artist's
works' scale is that of monumental, public art yet their content and manner of
part, from the need to assert painting's identity and special qualities in the face of
surpass the achievements of Picasso, Pollock, etc; this may explain Schnabel's
extremism.
Zeitgeist
Schnabel's works have been called 'fashionable'. This implies on the one hand,
that it is 'the truth of the moment', and, on the other hand, that it is superficial
and hence fated to become rapidly outmoded. The question here is: to what extent
course, that such a spirit of the age exists.) Are we justified, for example, in
interpreting his shattered plates as metaphors for the broken hopes and
The market forces acting upon new art have already been described. In
addition there is a periodic hunger for new art caused by boredom with existing
styles. Continually the world changes, society changes. Living art, we feel, should
register these changes otherwise it will not be contemporary, it will not articulate
revival of hard line right-wing politics, does this automatically mean a neo-
here is that there is an underlying spirit of the age which art passively reflects.
But this overlooks (1) the extent to which new art constructs our sense of the
Zeitgeist, and (2), artists are capable of reflecting critically upon change as it
takes place, consequently a shift to the right could result in a more radical,
This is not the case with Schnabel but it would be simplistic to dismiss his work
politically risky nature of the results. Left-wingers, myself included, are made
uneasy by this kind of art, but extreme self-criticism and doubt so easily inhibits
creativity. Nor does having the 'correct' politics necessarily guarantee rich,
which only comfort the already converted. One of these contradictions is the very
pleasure of painting itself (to the artist, to the viewer): the luxury of playing with
pigments while others starve; the paradox of enjoying pictures of men being
Cultural necrophilia
horse, the lacerated torso of St Sebastian, the crucified bodies of Christ and the
thieves are all archaic themes. Does this make Schnabel 'a profoundly traditional
artist' as one critic claims? Surely he is a modern grave robber (some of his works
resemble archaeological sites with shards of pottery and figures embedded in the
'earth' paint) - his attitude to tradition is not respectful but iconoclastic. He can
unwilling to confront the complexity of today's reality. There is some truth in this:
he certainly disinters and re-animates the corpses of the past but their effect is
twofold: firstly to acknowledge the residual power of these ancient images even
expressions of the artist's emotions would be an error. (This is why the label 'Neo-
we to accuse him of bad faith and cynicism? His paintings do generate a sense of
trickery and fraud but this stems, it seems to me, from the way he makes visible
emotion to absurd lengths he reveals the mask-like character of all signs (we can
never be certain 'I love you' is not a lie however sincerely spoken).
A reactionary art?
'return' to painting when its practice has never ceased? (What one can say is that
the most interesting work being done in contemporary art now uses painting, that
painting has recaptured the initiative from other art media.) Is painting to be
dependent upon the past? This too seems dubious: Cézanne himself sought a
standpoint? A more general form of this question would be: are there no use-
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This article was first published in the British art magazine Aspects, no 20, Autumn
1982. The original article was illustrated but now, if one visit’s the Tate Gallery’s
website for images of the Schnabel paintings it owns, one sees this:
John A. Walker is a painter and art historian. He is the author of many books and
articles on contemporary art and mass media. With Rita Hatton he is co-author of
"http://www.artdesigncafe.com">www.artdesigncafe.com</a>