For those of my gentle readers of a connoiseurial bent, you’ll without prompting recognize my blog title derives from Outsider II, the last instalment of the memoir of the late critic Brian Sewell. Mind, I am not so much afflicted with inflation of ego to think myself a latter-day Sewell. Well, not so much, but if I’m honest, more than a smidgen.
A question Sewell never asks but that occurred to me, drawing a parallel between his late in life confessional- not apologia- and mine is when does an enfant terrible, one possessed of strong opinions, controversial, perhaps, but well-reasoned, turn into a curmudgeon? Of course the immediate difference is the advance of age, but the one less obvious, except to the former enfant is that the curmudgeon’s opinions, while remaining well and often better reasoned, are no longer given much if any regard. ‘An old man’s ramblings…’ as Sewell would put it, and with this I take exception. If anyone were to be considered a connoisseur, it was Sewell, and had he thought about, which I am sure he did but didn’t put it succinctly into print, connoisseurship is not the province of the young. It can’t be. The honing of one’s eye, the development of one’s intellect, and the mingling of the two in proper measure to yield a confluence wherein aesthetic appreciation is wedded to intellectual understanding takes years, and a very many of them.
Of course, any one who has written an essay for which they received as little as a second-class mark can write a review of an art exhibit, regardless of the attendant subject upon which they’d written. And in this age of the tweet, a thoroughgoing consideration of anything gives over first place to brevity. Tweets aside, one has to attend very many galleries and see very many artworks before one can truly deliver a considered opinion. And when I say ‘considered’ I mean more than a popular response to something that passes for artwork that’s at best an objectification of contemporary zeitgeist.
In this, Sewell in his reviews, indeed in all his writings, is pointedly free of the presentism that pervades contemporary artwork and the presentist blather criticism that seeks make some sense of it. ‘Presentism’- were Brian Sewell to read this, I’d get a proper dressing down for using this modern-day neologism. ‘Fashionable nostrums’ would be and archly synonymous- and directly quoted from the late critic.
Over the course of this last week, I twice visited a popup gallery that’s housing work from living artists, the sale of which will benefit a not-for-profit contemporary art gallery. And based on what prices that were asked, I hope the artists will also be compensated. They should be, of course- ‘starving artist’ is a trope that works well in opera but is not very comfortable in the living when one receives a notice to quit or pay rent from the landlord. One chap, perhaps the canniest of the group, was offering a pricey NFT. I doubt he’s starving.
While the work on show, to an artist, depicted not unsurprising themes of the despair wrought from the unfair rigours of modern life- all legitimate concerns, I’ll grant- not a single object was anything I actually felt an affinity for- a dearth, as Berenson would have it, of tactile values. The second trip I’d made in the company of my partner Keith McCullar, who queried ‘Should a person have to talk themselves into making a purchase?’ And for me the answer must be no. Mind, a few, indeed many, of the works were good examples of craft in a variety of media. For those figurative works, and again, there were many, the narrative content could be understood prima facie. Nothing occult or with abstruse iconography.
But also nothing that my own eye, which is not entirely without practice, could conceive of ever entering the canon. I cannot help but then consider again the fellow trying to flog the NFT. As he was visiting from the major art market city where his studio is located, he was something of an outlier, but in a good way, if one considers ‘good’ as being lionized by the local community and being given an hour’s long public platform in which to discuss his work and the NFT associated with it. Glibly possessed of what one would call artspeak- you’ll excuse this term as it is a neologism Sewell actually employed- he could indeed talk a good game.
But his art did not speak for itself. In this regard, I am not talking about an ostensible, apprehendable narrative content. What I mean is an absence of immanence, an animating principle that, in the viewing, stirs both soul and intellect. As Brian Sewell the critic and connoisseur would have it, nothing to see here.