Art Is Dead

Respectable culture does not simply decide which art is valuable.

It decides what a respectable relationship to culture looks like.

You may appreciate.

Interpret.

Collect.

Review.

Study.

Develop taste.

Know which painter matters.

Which record matters.

Which edition matters.

Which chair matters.

Which small ceramic object indicates that you have understood the twentieth century correctly.

This is called being cultured.

What you are not particularly required to do is answer.

The ideal cultural subject is strangely passive.

They receive culture.

They understand culture.

They acquire culture.

They arrange culture around themselves.

Culture becomes evidence.

Evidence of taste.

Evidence of education.

Evidence that you know which things deserve to be taken seriously.

Good taste is partly knowing what to like.

It is also knowing how to like it.

Quietly.

Correctly.

At the appropriate distance.

Preferably without immediately going home and making a much worse version.

Participation is messier.

Participation produces amateur work, derivative work, fan art, cover versions, bootlegs, photocopied posters, three-chord bands, mods, bad drawings, bad poems and bad paintings.

Occasionally very good things made by people who were not supposed to know how.

This is administratively difficult.

There is no reliable dress code.

The complaints are remarkably consistent.

YOU DIDN’T MAKE IT.

WHERE’S THE SKILL?

ANYONE COULD DO THAT.

THAT’S NOT ART.

Nobody knows who first printed the form.

Copies have been found beside cameras, synthesizers, photocopiers, samplers, computers, spray cans and several objects nobody was able to identify.

The equipment changes.

The paperwork survives.

You didn’t make it.

Sometimes true.

Where’s the skill?

Possibly not where you were told to look for it.

Anyone could do that.

Possibly.

Most of them didn’t.

That’s not art.

There it is.

A sentence capable of turning almost any cultural disagreement into an unusually boring afternoon.

Photography heard versions of it.

Collage heard it.

Sampling heard it.

Electronic music heard it.

Digital art heard it.

People using computers heard it.

Someone else will hear it next.

The argument changes clothes.

The argument remains suspiciously familiar.

Photography allowed people to make images without first spending seven years learning how to paint a convincing horse.

Naturally, civilisation trembled.

Recorded sound allowed music to continue happening after everyone involved had gone home.

Synthesizers produced noises without requiring a corresponding wooden object, stretched animal skin or man called Dave.

Drum machines could play the same beat all evening without getting tired, speeding up during the exciting bit or disappearing outside for a cigarette.

Dave objected.

Computers introduced the deeply suspicious ability to undo mistakes.

Previously, mistakes had integrity.

They stayed where you put them and stared at you.

Digital photography removed the important artistic ritual of taking twenty-four photographs on a trip to Blackpool, paying to have them developed, waiting several days and discovering that nineteen were black, three contained your thumb and the only decent photograph had somebody walking in front of the Tower.

This loss remains culturally significant.

Photoshop then allowed photographers to alter photographs.

This was considered extremely alarming despite photographers having spent more than a century altering photographs in rooms specifically built for altering photographs.

Eventually something peculiar happens.

The vulgar new thing becomes respectable.

Nobody announces this.

There is no parade.

One morning it simply has a course.

Then a qualification.

Then specialist equipment.

Then expensive books.

Then a bloke in a waistcoat describing the workflow as traditional.

The people accused of cheating with it begin complaining that somebody else is cheating differently.

This is called continuity.

The tool changes.

The posture survives.