Art and soullessness
This weekend just past, a group of us attended a residential training session on how to become better keepers of blogs. The architecture of the conference venue on the outskirts of Milton Keynes, echoed the peculiar – and somewhat soulless – boxy configuration of this completely planned 1960s’ town. It was a strangely labyrinthine building. To get to the second floor conference rooms, we had to press the lift button for the third floor, which brought us out into a non-descript intermediate level, halfway between floors, unsure of where to turn next.
As I tried to find our allocated room, I imagined it to be the kind of place that witnesses daily the furrowed brows of sales executives on company team-building ‘away days’, tasked with transferring tennis balls across the room from a bucket to a wastepaper bin using only a toothpick and a bathroom plunger. Blindfolded.
What struck me as most peculiar, though, was that everywhere you turned in each of its corridors, you were met with large glossy framed prints of the works of Mark Rothko.
Yes, Rothko – the highly sensitive, deeply spiritual painter, who created those elusively simple symmetrical rectangular blocks of two to three opposing or contrasting colours; who wanted his monumental paintings to be experienced on a very human scale; who stressed that the viewer position himself exactly 46 centimeters away from one of his pictures so that he might experience a “sense of intimacy as well as awe, a transcendence of the individual, a sense of the unknown.”
Yes, that same Rothko who drank and smoked heavily and maintained an unhealthy diet, separated from his wife and was found lying dead in his studio, having overdosed on anti-depressants and opened his own veins with a razor.
And there they all are, all the timeless, transcendent outpourings of his soul, glossed over, devoid of their scale and context and spiritual power, decorating the walls of a conference venue in south-east England, chosen no doubt for the pretty arrangement of colours which go so very nicely with the rest of the décor. A close-up photograph of a cross-section of layered sponge cake with vanilla cream and lemon icing could have done the job just as well.
Rothko is the subject of Tate Modern’s major retrospective exhibition this Autumn. If you enjoy the show, how about, for £45, purchasing a Rothko-inspired luxury 100% felted lambswool scarf in multiform colours “with a strong sense of brown, grey and caramel”. Feel great this winter – banish S.A.D. with the Rothko scarf.
Across the river at Tate Britain, where the disturbing, existential anxieties of Francis Bacon are packing out the galleries and grossing out the mild-mannered, you can take the mood home with a special Francis Bacon studio mug – “suitable for use in the dishwasher and microwave”. After his death in 1992, Bacon’s studio was found to be filled with an array of slashed canvases, paint splattered doors and objects, magazine cuttings and photographs. The chaos of the artist’s working space has inspired “a colourful range of merchandise to accompany the exhibition.” I can’t think of anything that would be more likely to put me off my hot chocolate.
And as you go to the refrigerator to get the milk for your late-night beverage, uplift your spirit with the National Gallery’s colourful fridge magnet of Van Gogh’s Wheatfield with Cypresses. That’ll be the severely depressed Van Gogh who shot himself out in a field.
“I rejoice to hear that thou takest pains with thine art, for in this wonderful new age, art is worship,” wrote ‘Abdu’l-Bahá to an artist. “The more thou strivest to perfect it, the closer wilt thou come to God. What bestowal could be greater than this, that one’s art should be even as the act of worshipping the Lord? That is to say, when thy fingers grasp the paint brush, it is as if thou wert at prayer in the Temple.”
I wonder what these great artists would think if they knew that their prayers have now been extracted, skinned from their meaning to embellish fridges, and knitwear and hotel walls. ‘Prostitution’ is defined in my dictionary as “the unworthy or corrupt use of one’s talents for the sake of personal or financial gain”. Who, then, is responsible for the ‘prostitution of the arts’? The artist, or those who turn their life’s work into a soulless commodity?
Filed under: Art, Thoughts | 2 Comments
Tags: Art, Bacon, Bahai, Rothko
Yes, the commercializers are responsible for much of the prostitution of the arts that goes on in gift shops and card shops and tea rooms. But some artists actively encourage this kind of prostitution – witness the recent auction by Damien Hearst (whose surname is an anagram of “hearts”) of large amounts of his work, some of which could only be described as “decorative”.
There was an unhealthy collusion in this auction between the artist and the buyers – who were undoubtedly buying celebrity or making “investments” in Hearst’s work.
My other beef is about the prostitution of music – Vivaldi’s Four Seasons has been ruined by being used in lifts, restaurants and as “on hold” music on telephones.
Brilliant quip.