Painting a picture of the Irish art world

ART HISTORY: Movers and Shapers 3: Conversations in the Irish Art World,By Vera Ryan, Galley Head Press, 340pp. €20

EVER SINCE Arthur C Danto coined the term “the artworld”, the idea has taken root that there exists an elusive, exclusive and powerful club of artists, critics, historians, administrators, educators, collectors, scholars, curators, dealers, gallerists, politicians and auctioneers – a privileged elite who control the scene, and who get to decide what constitutes “art”.

The nature of Vera Ryan’s books is not a critique attempting to unravel a cultural cronyism. Instead she offers a conversational archive of a period in Irish art history from the 1940s to the present day. The books therefore appeal to a wide readership, from the merely curious reader, interested in getting to know the people behind the personalities, to scholars who can refer to the substantial footnotes. Numerous threads appear for future research. For instance in this third volume arts administarator Robbie McDonald, praising the fastidious collector JB Kearney whom, he recalls, made copious notes of everything he saw, says “Somebody should study his notebooks”.

With a new publisher at the helm, this is a visually more substantial book than its predecessors. In its entirety Ryan’s project has recorded a total of 35 provocative, illuminating and absorbing interviews. Strikingly apparent is the fact that only nine interviewees have been women.

The introduction here gives an eloquent account of the changes that have ensued in the visual art world – but why particular individuals were included or excluded is unclear. That aside it is testimony to Ryan’s skills as a deft interviewer that she teases out invaluable material for posterity and future analysis that is often contradictory – but never boring.

No longer, as astutely observed by Brian O'Doherty in The Irish Imagination, are the visual arts the mere gatehouse to literature's big house, yet at the inception of Ryan's research a decade ago, the transformation in Irish visual arts had just begun to seep from the fringes of the cultural consciousness to centre stage. The subsequent economic boom witnessed record prices for Irish art at auction, resulting in a situation of unprecedented behaviour where "People rushed in and bought anything in a frame", as auctioneer Ian Whyte puts it.

All the interviewees have been involved in the arts pre-millennium, which gives the book continuity with its predecessors – except Whyte who came on the art scene in 2000. “There isn’t a proper trade organisation for art and there is probably a need for one because anyone can set up an art business, advise, value and do all sorts of things they may not be qualified to do,” he says, and while agreeing with this, it’s worth pointing out that he, Suzanne Macdougald and Patricia Noone – none of whom had formal training in the arts – have made a substantial contribution and held much influence.

Macdougald, after 35 years experience, has become one of the most respected dealers and gallerists in Ireland. Her view that art colleges should include business studies in the curriculum is a contentious one. Indeed, one of the most interesting aspects of the book is the antagonistic relationship, especially contemporaneously, between art and money. “Talent isn’t enough. You need ambition and a professional attitude as well. It amazes me how some artists won’t invest in their career, even when they can afford to,” she says, a view which contrasts with Irish Times art critic Aidan Dunne, who counters, “Artists are not business people and art is not a business”, a view this reviewer endorses.

Responsible for encouraging corporate collectors during the 1960s and 1970s, the architect Ronnie Tallon also comments on the shift in the contemporary scene: “The advertisers of art sales nowadays are too fond of talking about the value and the rise in value of art in comparison with equities and property. I don’t think that is what it is about. You buy art because you like it.”

Which raises the concern that in the future artists might consign straight to auction houses and no longer remain loyal to their gallery, copying Damien Hirst’s direct-to-auction sale in 2008, of which Dunne says, “You couldn’t design a piece of symbolism as perfect as this crass materialism, this ultimate piece of consumerism, juxtaposed with the implosion of the financial system on which it was based”.

If the number of artists has also been increasing, it is sobering to read that a survey carried out by Visual Art Ireland in 2008 found that 67% of artists earn less than €10,000 a year with women artists earning less than men. Ryan cautions that creative expression is threatened if too much time is spent out of the creative environment. A lot rests on the shoulders of those distributing public funding, future movers and shapers, if good art is to survive.

As Dunne says, “I think there is a huge amount of manoeuvring that goes on . . . Artists who are quiet and modest in nature can be at a disadvantage.” The view of the director of the Crawford Art Gallery, Peter Murray, is also pertinent: “When the funding is too soft the art may also be too soft. Artists, like any professionals, need to be critiqued and challenged in an intelligent and positive way”.

If art colleges have been the training ground for that critique, the views of Geoff Steiner-Scott, retired principal of the Crawford College of Art and Design, also raises relevant and troublesome questions about the changing state of art education: “The doctorate to me is an area that should be confined to academic disciplines”. However, the general tone of the book is to raise questions – rather than proffer answers.

One of the most intriguing aspects of Ryan’s work is capturing an essence of the character of her interviewees, and Barbara Dawson’s passionate and intelligent responses make for absorbing reading. In particular the poetical reaction to her first encounter with Francis Bacon’s studio: “It was mad, squalid and beautiful, like looking into Bacon’s mind”. Equally, living artists offer fascinating accounts of another time and place in Irish art culture. Basil Blackshaw was 16 when he attended Belfast College of Art in 1948, and Cormac Mehegan was just 13 when he attended what was then The (Crawford Municipal) School of Art in 1937.

As we stand at this precarious crossroads in Irish life, this last volume in Ryan’s trilogy is a particularly poignant oral art historical document.

The concerns the interviewees raise and the anomalies a discerning reader unearths among the views of the 11 interlacing testimonies here, reveal a period in the Irish visual arts which represents the best – and the worst – of times.

Jane Humphries is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History, Trinity College. Her essay Re(Writing) the Domestic into the Everyday appeared inIrish Women Artists 1800-2009: Familiar but Unknown,edited by Eimear O'Connor (Four Courts Press, 2010)