The good, the bad, the overpriced

Have the ideas run out? And are all the best artists now designing iPhones?

There have been mutterings and rumblings in the art world, and now there is some shouting. Two prominent critics have said they will no longer sully their keyboards with words about art. In the US Dave Hickey says, “What can I tell you? It’s nasty and it’s stupid.” In the UK Sarah Thornton, the author of Seven Days in the Artworld, gives “10 reasons not to write about the art market”, which include, “You end up writing about paintings by white American men more than is warranted,” and, “The most interesting stories are libelous.”

At Frieze Art Fair in London last month it seemed as if everyone was looking for a trend, but none emerged. And, to cap it all, Camille Paglia, the deliberately controversial and contrarian US writer, upset everyone, except perhaps collectors of early-1970s art, by announcing in the Wall Street Journal that “no major figure of profound influence has emerged in painting or sculpture since the waning of Pop Art and the birth of Minimalism in the early 1970s”.

So if the world is full of overpriced, stupid and bad art, only you can’t say it because you’ll be sued, why does anyone bother? Have the ideas run out, and are all the best artists, as Paglia suggests, now designing iPhones? One answer is that we can’t know yet. With the exceptions of Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol, who made game-changing gestures – Duchamp’s infamous urinal, Fountain, from 1917, and Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans, from 1962 – influence can take longer to emerge into the popular consciousness, and even consensus. Lucian Freud was relatively unrecognised in the 1970s but is now agreed to be one of the most important painters of the 20th century. It takes time for a reputation to settle.

In the late 1980s and 1990s the Young British Artists, led by Damien Hirst and including Tracey Emin, Sarah Lucas, Liam Gillick and Michael Landy, were seen as defining presences, yet now, despite the subsequent careers of some of them, it’s clearer that the “movement” was more of a marketing gimmick. Ten or even, at a pinch, five years ago Hirst and Jeff Koons would have been considered hugely significant; now their glossy productions and assistant-created multiples are more of a footnote, or a relatively pointless cul-de-sac, in the story of contemporary art.

Tate Liverpool’s head of exhibitions, Gavin Delahunty, who previously worked at Project Arts Centre in Dublin, agrees that time is key. “To become a ‘major’ figure requires a degree of retrospective reflection, by which I mean I’m sure the artists Paglia signposts were not considered in this way at the time. It’s not so much the artist but their public and critical reception that invariably comes into play.”

Manufactured fame

There is also a difference between celebrity and influence that gets increasingly lost in a world of reality TV and manufactured fame. Born in Roscommon but based since the 1950s in the US, Brian O’Doherty is one of the generation of artists Paglia lauds as the last to have influence. “The stars,” he says, are Gerhard “Richter, Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Matthew Barney (maybe). But they are not influences. The last influential generation was my lot (Sol [le Witt], Dan [Flavin], and Co). The 90s mined our ideas. We were part of the great paradigm shift that ended the idea of influence and the artist-hero.”

What are influential now, says O’Doherty, are ideas. And what has changed about ideas is they ways they are spread and shared.

Barbara Dawson, director of the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, agrees that “the day of the genius hero and signature style are long over. Postmodernism put the nail in that coffin long ago . . . Art has moved beyond the one profound anything, movement or ‘ism’,” she says, citing artists such as Richard Tuttle, who have contributed to a new way of thinking. “Small in scale, quiet in its insistence and curious and complex in execution, Tuttle has championed a new approach, which has liberated art from the totalities and accepted canons that prevailed into the 70s.”

In that sense what is important about much of today’s art is its fragile counterbalance to the superaesthetics of blockbuster events, X Factor-style shows, Identikit celebrities and homogenous yet all-pervasive branding. And you can see why some people are uncomfortable with such a binary opposition. Where are the big shiny things to look at? Where is the razzmatazz?

It can be a struggle, as the artist Katherine Beug points out. “Introverts aren’t allowed any more. And where you have no introverts you have no major ideas. And where you have no introverts ready to absorb big ideas produced by other introverts you have a dance – a pretty bad dance.”

The head of Limerick School of Art and Design, Mike Fitzpatrick, agrees. “The most influential artists working right now are fittingly discrete, underground or in the virtual cloud – unknowable, unrecognisable,” he says. “Artists describe the world we live in, and when they get it right and when we recognise it, we go, ‘Wow, that is amazing,’ because we are faced with the new ‘truth’.” Fitzpatrick also makes the point that the way we use language changes how we feel about things. “The terms ‘influential’ and ‘recognisable’ are now better known as marketing and branding.”

Returning to the idea of more profound influence taking time to emerge, he tells the story of the 1970s Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader, whose work embraced pathetic failure. “He is becoming more and more popular as his work is discovered by contemporary artists and film-makers. Ader was lost at sea as part of an art performance, relating to a search for the miraculous; the boat was found off the west coast of Ireland. His body was never found. I like to think he survived and is working secretly, in Inis Meáin, on an economic solution for our woes.”

So what do other people in the art world think? Declan Long, a lecturer at the National College of Art and Design, is also one of the judges for the 2013 Turner Prize, so he is spending the year seeing more art than most. Long makes the point that the nature of influence has changed, and that, with a global perspective, influence evolves and becomes evident in different places. “Think of the relation of German to American painting after the 1980s: when abstract expressionism gets boring, the alternative European tradition gets interesting – everything from Gerhard Richter to Luc Tuymans.”

At the Lewis Glucksman Gallery, in Cork, its director, Fiona Kearney, adds, “Perhaps the most influential artists of our time will prove to be those who were part of the shift away from traditional art-form practices to more collaborative, interdisciplinary ways of working. For instance, Jeff Wall, Tacita Dean, Sophie Calle, Marina Abramovic, Olafur Eliasson – it is hard to imagine a degree show today that would not reflect their influence. I very much doubt that some of the more famous names, such as Damien Hirst or Gerhard Richter, will be as influential, as they seem to extend the influence of modernism rather than alter it and suggest new paths.”

Who’s significant?

Who, then, do artists cite as significant? The Sligo-based painter Cléa van der Grijnn looks to a diverse group, including film-makers and friends, as well as the artists Dorothy Cross, Alice Maher, Rebecca Horn, Louise Bourgeois, Maurice O’Connell and Antoni Tàpies.

Lisa Marie Johnson, a performance artist based in Dublin, suggests that we are moving away from art as spectacle, as it is “not of interest within crisis, as that is a showing of privilege and of capitalism”, and that tracing influences is about more than simply reeling off a list of big names. “Although Marina Abramovic is a great history marker and a celebrity, so too are Pussy Riot.”

She also cites the German performance artist, theorist and sculptor Joseph Beuys, who came to Ireland in the 1970s. “It is works such as Beuys’s Organisation for Direct Democracy, and his striving towards worldwide co-operation, that we could now begin and achieve,” she says. “However, as we speak there is already something else on the way.”

Of course influence itself operates in different spheres. There is the influence of one artist on another and of art itself on the wider world. But the final word should go to O’Doherty. “Paglia is right but for the wrong reasons. She sees lack of master influence as negative. The reason is evolution; the whole game has changed. Paglia is an artefact detained in a past model and in its assumptions.”

Spheres of influence Who do artists look up to?

“Is anyone influential any more?” asks Declan Long. “Marina Abramovic has had a profound influence in pushing the limits of art as performance. Bruce Nauman made pioneering moves with video. Martin Kippenberger expanded painting beyond the canvas in wild ways. Cindy Sherman made photography daringly theatrical. Félix Gonzáles-Torres allowed sculpture to become open and participatory. If some of these artists aren’t big art-market presences – major figures in terms of auction-house influence – they are nevertheless major presences for recent generations of artists who have sought to extend the remit of art or to consider the limits of art.”