The New Artists of Nature
Turrell is interested in an art of participation, rather than just spectatorship. One joins with others in experiencing the evening light.
An artist who choreographs an entire experience.
91. James Turrell. Roden (.'rarer. Arizona. 1979-
or the waves lapping at the shore line, or the mountains ahead in the distance. At the Roden Crater, a 200-metre high cone of volcanic ash, Turrell has been working since the late 1970s on developing various inner spaces that frame and intensify celestial experiences (91). The crater promises to rival cathedrals in terms of its emotional impact and scale.
Turrell's work is pivotal. Art is turning from creating memorials to, or representations of, nature towards creating opportunities for the closer or more meaningful perception of nature. Instead of looking at a picture, we are now looking at the real thing. The role of the artist remains crucial, though: the experience is shaped and structured by the insight and imagination of a creative mind.
What part of yourself is at home here*
92. Antony Gormlcy and David Chipperfield. Observation Tower, Kivik Art Centre, Sweden. 2008
Consider Antony Gormley and David Chipperfield s observation tower in Sweden, which likewise sets up an opportunity for looking at nature (92). You will stand here alone, 18 metres up in the mist, among the wet leaves. What the artists contribute is a structure for the experience of nature. The route to the top is crucially important: one ascends via a harsh, geometrical concrete entrance chamber, an open landing and an enclosed spiral staircase. Gormley and Chipperfield are attempting to remove some of the random elements of experience. They intuit that the deeper, more intimate significance of our encounters with nature are liable to slip through our fingers because we are distracted or unprepared. The observation pavilion is devoted to putting that right. How might this concept of a choreography of experience work in relation to other good things? What might an equivalent choreography of love' look like? Might the job of the artist go beyond depicting love and evolve to taking steps to orchestrating opportunities across the globe for experiencing love more successfully? The ambition that underpins participatory art is just beginning to be understood and its consequences examined. There should be nothing strange at all about an artist helping you to relate more successfully to death, get on better with your children or manage problems with money. We need to move beyond thinking of an artist as someone at an easel.
The artist of the future might be adept with brushes and paints, or with film; but they will also have the skills of an architect, a geologist, a public speaker, a politician or a scientist. What will identify him or her as an artist is an interest in art's true, historic mission: the promotion of a sensory understanding of what matters most in life. He will create occasions, which might mean a tower, a crater, a dinner party or a kindergarten, for events that will promote the values to which art has always been devoted. We shouldn't be surprised, or see it as a loss of what art has always been about, if many of the artists of the coming decades do not produce traditional objects, and instead head directly for the underlying mission of art: changing how we experience the world.
Money
Art as a Guide to the Reform of Capitalism
The Problem of Taste
The Role of the Critic in the Education of Taste
Towards an
Enlightened
Capitalism
Enlightened Investment
Career Advice from Artists
The harshest critics of capitalism have not been able to resist the odd sideways glance at its strengths - its capacity to marshal resources, its managerial disciplines, its prodigious energies.
The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature's forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground - what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engcls, The Communist Manifesto. 1848
However, as the entire planet is now painfully aware, capitalism has a great number of shortcomings. From the point of view of the consumer, it is focussed on far too many of the wrong kinds of goods and services. To start the list, there is an astonishing array of chocolate bars for sale, but much less to help us to deal with the causes of domestic rows; there are plenty of cut-price fares from Kuala Lumpur to Manchester, but little chance of getting a house with a garden near where you work. Industrial capitalism has made many cheap trinkets, but it has not produced many beautiful cities. When it comes to production, low-paid factory workers turn out sports shoes designed to exploit adolescent status anxiety; kindergarten teachers who help shy children discover their voices are paid next to nothing compared with reckless commodities traders who strip bare the hillsides of Borneo; richly rewarded executives devote their best years to working out how to promote one brand of toothpaste over another almost identical one; the system prioritizes short-term success over long-term benefits and treats workers as means rather than as ends.
It is widely agreed that capitalism needs reforming. It is the claim of this book that there are vital clues about the nature of this reform to be identified within the field of art. Until now, this crucial source of insight has not been tapped because, at first sight, art is such an unlikely candidate for good advice about macroeconomics.
Art as a Guide to the Reform of Capitalism
Art can seem entirely distinct from money and work. We tend to position it along with luxury, holidays and special occasions. Artistically minded people may regard capitalism rather like polite people in the nineteenth century regarded sex. Like all eras, the nineteenth century was obsessed with sex, but sensitive, thoughtful types were so conscious of its dangers, and found it such a painful topic for frank discussion, that they ended up preaching sermons about purity and chastity. In return, the temptation for later commentators was to run to the opposite
extreme and glorify sexuality, imagining contentment if only they could be utterly uninhibited. The truth, of course, is that sexuality is both essential and a source of suffering and confusion. So too with capitalism, which is an equally troubling mix of the deeply impressive and the highly unsatisfactory.
At the moment we tend to have two dominant but polarized fantasies. Either, like the economic version of a Victorian social reformer, we are drawn to the idea that money is sinful and capitalism should be abolished. Or, like a free love guru of the 1960s, we glorify the market without due consideration of its abuses. What we need, as individuals and as societies, is to form a better, wiser and more honest relationship with money. We want an economy that harnesses the magnificent productive forces of capitalism to a more accurate understanding of the range and depth of our needs. Art may offer a high road to such progress.
At its heart, the economic system we call capitalism involves the pursuit of profit through the sale of goods and services in a market in which consumers can make purchases as they choose. Producers only strive to provide whatever their consumers are willing to pay for. In this sense, capitalism is only as good or as bad as the tastes of its consumers. Rather than only blame the wickedness of corporations, we should direct some criticism at ourselves. Many of the problems of capitalism boil down to failures of consumer choice, or taste.
If we lament the vulgarity of a Las Vegas casino complex, or shudder at the thought of the quality of the meat in low-cost burgers, we should refrain from simply condemning the owners and managers of the businesses that provide them (93). It is not their fault that the wrong sort of food sells in vast quantities or that so many people want to stay in mindless resorts. The producers of the most inane television programs are not ideologically committed to making poor-quality entertainment. They are our servants and will provide us with whatever we want, so long as it makes them money. The problem is that too many people arc keen on, and are willing to pay for, the wrong things.
The
Problem of Taste
What is meant by wrong! One answer focuses on externalities, on the hidden costs that certain businesses pass on to society. The casino can inspire depression, family distress and alcoholism, yet the private equity group that owns it does not have to pay for the problems it provokes. The low-grade burgers are linked to obesity and ill-health, but the hospital bills do not appear on the company's balance sheets. The scope of such discussions can be broadened to include the sufferings of the planet.
However important these issues of externalities are, they do not touch on the central question of why the original preference is wrong. There is another kind of 4vrong': a sense that these products are not in line with the highest potential of mankind, that a love of certain kinds of food or leisure resorts or television shows is an insult to what we are properly capable of as human beings. It is this nagging awareness that intensifies the hostility around externalities. We especially mind them because the sacrifice of the planet, health, tax revenues and labour have been in the name of something deeply squalid. If warming the oceans were a byproduct of our noblest endeavours, it would be sad - but fear and panic sets in when we realize that we may be ruining the future for the sake of pitiful and unrealistic distractions.
It can feel mean-spirited to hold up the preferences of decent and possibly disadvantaged people as unworthy. We fear that we will be cast
When taste and money come adrift.