The American artist Lawrence Weiner once wrote, “all art comes from anger,” or in other words, from discontent, from the need to point out what doesn’t work and what should be rethought. This is a line that has run through art for centuries: from Honoré Daumier’s caricatures in which he exposed all those situations that he disliked in the society in which he lived, to Joseph Beuys’ performances-classes-lectures, passing through the provocations of the Dadaists.
These days, we find in the newspapers the news that in Sweden, an art student, Ana Odell wanted to focus her graduation project on the harshness of the Swedish health system in relation to suicides and, to do so, pretended to be about to jump off a bridge. She was arrested, sedated and taken to a psychiatric hospital. The controversy broke out when it was discovered that it was all part of an artistic project. The artist and the faculty are being held accountable, and the (media) debate is taking place in a different place than the artist had anticipated and hoped for. There is talk of wasting taxpayers’ money and distracting the police and emergency services.
AUTONOMY OF ART. And that is the problem: art enjoys an autonomy that allows it to enter multiple fields and artists to use a multitude of expressive resources, but perhaps the price of this versatility is the mistrust it generates in society. Ana Odell achieved a debate that was different from what she expected, but what kind of public presence do artists and their projects have in the media? When and how do news related to contemporary art appear in the press? We remember the media attention of Sam Taylor Wood’s video, “David sleeping” (David was David Beckham, of course), Jeff Koons’ photographs and sculptures with his wife, the former porn actress and politician, Cicciolina, the sensationalism that accompanies the Turner Prizes (the artist dressed as a girl, the bed and the list of the artist’s lovers, works starring Bin Laden and George Bush, etc.), gold sculptures representing the controversial model Kate Moss, premature deaths as a consequence of marginal lives (the most recent case, the young artist from the East Village, Dash Snow, nephew of the actress Uma Thurman), as well as statistics, exorbitant prices (in this section we usually find Damian Hirst), auction records or long queues of people to attend macro-exhibitions. In short, sensationalism or banality seem to be the two arguments for talking about contemporary art in non-specialized media. There is no trace of interest in the debate that can be generated by contemporary art.
CENSORSHIP. George Orwell said that in democracies censorship is no longer necessary, because the most effective veto consists of denying visibility, in letting things remain hidden. We live in a society that tends to be reactionary, that prefers us to be consumers rather than citizens. Given this panorama, what space for criticism and real projection in society is left for art? What possibilities exist for opening a real debate? Or perhaps the question should be much more pessimistic: is there room for critical thinking?
[Article published in Bonart, 2009]
