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From: art reviews
Date: 25 Jun 2010
Time: 06:19:07 -0500
This is definitely the way art is now: total eclecticism. Saatchi has given up bucking or trying to create any trends. This is what art schools produce. A million voices, all the history of art in fragments, cancelling each other out in the din of juxtapostions and style in quotation marks. Usually well executed, figurative with a drip and a wash, Hurvin Anderson, realistic with a twist, Ged Quinn, angry with a cartoon and a dash of punk, Cluney Reid, sculpture with a soupcon of neon or junk, Steve Claydon, gauguin with fluorescents, Sigrid Holmwood... the production line of our Masters of Arts keeps pushing them out. ...................................Many of these artists are talented and genuine, not cynical, not Saatchi (who himself is not really anything but an egotistical enthusiast).. .Yes because they have been given the world and told make something at some time in a little studio in an art school at 19, and had to work out what to do, they can, like it or not, only deal in what art looks like, not through any major fault of their own, find a way of saying anything of their own. All the art speaks the same message, the same, the same, the same, the same words, that meaning is style, and when style is not organic, we can speak of languages not use language to speak...... Art is only able to talk about art, and there it must be stuck, insist these works, representative of our total situation now................................................................................................................................ If any one work said here is an artist who think this about that, then surely it would be drowned and strangled by the screaming voices around it saying, look at this look at that, here is something pretty, here is an ugly bit, look I can do it in green or upside down, art is just style, different decoration, and nothing but that.......................................... The closest analogy is going to the Louvre and seeing the brilliant 19th Century Salon painters, virtuosos whose works are absolutely and totally dead dead dead.