I watched ‘The Art on your wall’ on BBC2 last night and it raised some interesting points. Sue Perkins approached the subject as a typical home-owner who wants to decorate her house with pictures.
She made a distinction between artists who make art to decorate walls and artists who make art for galleries. So, which category do I fall in to?
When I started making videos I thought to myself: ‘now I’m a real artist, nobody can buy my work!’. However, I still paint and people do still buy my work even though the subject is the Holocaust – this does surprise me, but the inspiration and origin of the work is not that obvious to everybody. On the surface, my work is about texture, colour and repetitive forms; on one level one of my blue paintings could easily adorn somebody’s lounge wall because it matches their sofa. Does this demean the work?
Sue Perkins interviewed members of the public in Ikea buying Klimt prints, their reasons? They liked the colours. The content of the work was not important to them – it became merely decoration.
Clearly there are many different art worlds – even Jack Vettriano admitted he could not be compared to Bacon and Freud. What did strike me as odd though was that he believed that his work was so popular because it demonstrated great skill (maybe at A’Level in my opinion), he continued to say that skill is not evident in recent graduates work which, in his opinion, is only concerned with how to shock Britain.
Where does this leave me? Do I make work for the gallery elite? That doesn’t please me either. So, I’ve decided that the best thing to do is to make work for myself, hopefully no integrity will be lost.
Let’s open a can of worms – comments invited.
