Perhaps you need to find a set of objective standards that everyone can agree on. Some people like tall people, some people like short people, some people like blonde people, et cetera — but perhaps we come closest to agreement in the following statement: there is beauty in symmetry.

From art and architecture to the human face, people feel more “comfortable” with symmetrical designs. It’s partly instinctive: we’re hard-wired to find people with good genetic material attractive, and symmetry is the most obvious sign of good, strong, healthy DNA. (Consider the reverse stereotype: the slack-jawed yokel of redneck myth is patently depicted as unsymmetrical and considered universally unattractive). But is it a true judge of beauty? I think not.

Anaface is a computer program which claims to do just this – judge your attractiveness by the symmetry of your face. It is of course wrong. You can’t judge beauty on symmetry. I happen to have a very symmetrical face. However, I’m fairly average. I scored almost twice as high on Anaface’s test as a friend of mine who’s a professional model. Symmetry, it seems, is no great judge.

In fact, perfectly symmetrical features are bland and characterless – I’d never cut it as a model because my face doesn’t have “character”. So what do you do? Do you reprogram the computer to understand that some asymmetrical faces are beautiful (because they have character) while others aren’t?

Computers can’t handle variance without record to mathematical equations. Computers are essentially binary – on or off, yes or no, all or nothing. Computers seek veracity — they’re problem solvers, literally. You could plug an equation for “variance based on asymmetry” into a computer but in doing so you have introduced an element of subjectivity rather than objectivity (based on one person’s personal perception, or on crowdsourcing, etc) into the formula, and computers alone will never be able to do this. A computer, in short, cannot make judgements about beauty.

And that is why computers will never be able to make meaningful art.

There is no objective truth in beauty. Charles Bronson, for example, was considered handsome – despite his unconventional, weatherbeaten looks. What do we tell the computer? Well, we can only tell it that some people find weatherbeaten faces attractive some of the time. The computer is confused. You feed it a picture of Charles Bronson and tell it that sort of face is attractive to some people, therefore the computer gives it a score of “above average”. Then you feed the computer a similar picture of someone, say, an old fisherman who’s been exposed to the open seas for two or three decades. Is he attractive? Based on the new information you’ve fed the computer, yes. The computer is incapable of making the same “judgment call” we as humans are.

It’s not simply a matter of updating the formula, either. Adding further exceptions, refining the formula to include fishermen, all other types of weatherbeaten / asymmetrical faces etc — the most the computer will ever be able to reply is that there is variance. ie, some people find this sort of face attractive, others don’t. And as for why some types of weatherbeaten / asymmetrical faces are attractive and others aren’t… how can the computer tell? A scar on one side of the face might be considered attractive by some people because it makes the person look dangerous. But others might be repulsed. Again, the most the computer can say is that there is variance. There is no “objective truth in beauty”.

Mathematics and art don’t match.

If you ask the computer what it thinks, it doesn’t have an answer except recourse to mathematics, ie “I have been shown a photo of a weatherbeaten face a little like Charles Bronson and there is a 50% chance that this face is attractive” — in order for the computer to say yes or no, you would have to program it to either like or dislike asymmetrical / weatherbeaten faces. A computer cannot simply decide if it likes a symmetrical face or a weatherbeaten one until you tell it.

Consider Shakespeare’s famous love sonnet, ‘my mistress eyes are nothing like the sun’ — in which he goes on to explain that the object of his affections is unappealing by conventional standards, but he loves her and finds her attractive. By objective standards he is wrong. But art, like beauty, is not held to objective standards.

This is why computers cannot be good artists. They have no perception of beauty. If you fed a computer every Rembrandt, Picasso, Poussin and Pollock, and told it to extrapolate from that what’s beautiful and create art based on that, you’d come up with a nightmare splattering of nothing.

If you tell an “art producing” computer to imitate one of those styles, it is merely a very clever photocopier. A computer decides on mathematical formula what is or isn’t beautiful. It can either say yes or no based on preprogrammed criteria, or it can tell you what the variance is, what the likelihood that certain types of people will find certain types of art appealing. This is not an adequate.

The creation of new art cannot be based on formulaic analysis of what people have found attractive in the past.

We cannot simply deconstruct what has gone before, evaluate its attractiveness, and create new art based on that.

This method might be a good way of creating, say, Ikea prints, but it’s not art. Art, like beauty, requires a subjective element. Let us say that a vandal throws a tin of black paint over the Mona Lisa. Let us then say that vandal is a currently respected but controversial artist, someone like Banksy or Damien Hirst. The art community is divided. 90% say it’s a travesty and our artist / vandal should be locked up. But 10% say that it’s a powerful statement about the nature of art, that it’s an act of iconoclasm and should be praised. Those 10% may have radical political ideas, for example — that make them differ from the other 90%. Of those 10%, 5% would leave Mona Lisa as she is, covered in black paint, hanging for all to see. The other 5% believe that, point having been made, the painting should be restored.

Feed this information into our computer busily churning out brilliantly made (from a technical perspective) oil paintings to sell at Ikea. It will continue to make 90% of its output as it was. But from now on, it has a difficult decision. Should it make 10% of its new canvases with a big black splodge of paint in the middle? Or should it make 5%? Or should it make none, because 10% of people only consider a black splodge on a painting to be art if that painting happens to be the Mona Lisa?

The answer is probably the latter. It’s very unlikely that anyone will find black splodges attractive except by reference to famous artworks. But some might. It may become a counter-cultural symbol for people with radical political ideas. The black splodge could be imbued with meaning. Having a black splodge on your paintings may become iconic as a Marxist symbol. It’s unlikely, but possible. And a computer cannot adjust to this new fact until it has again been programmed, until the formula for artwork has been updated. Again, a computer cannot lead, cannot make new ideas. It can only copy what people do, what the general consensus becomes, and follow.

Computers are problem solvers, not artists. Computers do not create, they copy. Computers cannot account for subjective beauty.

My example of the Mona Lisa was there for a reason. As was the mention of Banksy. One of Banksy’s oldest works, the “Mild West” mural in Bristol, was vandalised in just this way, with a tin of red paint streaked from side to side. It was done as a political statement, not as an act of vandalism, by a group that disagrees with graffiti as it is an inappropriate use of public space. The council restored the “artwork” — why? If it was an ordinary graffiti artist, the council would be painting over the mural itself. The “is it graffiti / is it art?” debate is entirely subjective. You cannot ask a computer what it thinks, because it cannot tell you until you have first told it. The most it can tell you is that there is variance.

So the computer churns out lots of different types of artwork based on this variance formula, based on what it thinks certain people will like. It doesn’t produce art, it is a photocopier. It is a thousand monkeys on a thousand typewriters, and it may eventually churn out something that some people find beautiful. But it isn’t an artist. It doesn’t have an artistic vision. It doesn’t imbue its artworks with meaning. The same is exactly true of a computer that generates poetry, novels or music. Art is imbued with meaning when an artist makes a subjective decision and applies that to his work. A computer cannot do that because it cannot be subjective, it either accounts for variance or makes a decision based on what is random, based on a flip of a coin.

Computers only follow, they never lead, and they never create anything that is new. For these reasons, computers will never replace the role of the artist / creative in anything but a technical sense. They can create a fine copy, but they can’t create fine art.

It’s easy to see that the technology that is most salient in our age is the internet, as made possible by consumer electronics. Have our philosophers stepped forward to engage with the latest technological crop? Perhaps Wikipedia is proof of a consensus theory of truth? I’m sure many  theses are addressing concerns in this vein as you read.

But what of our artists? Will Gompertz recently posted to share an apparently widely held view that no piece of art has yet spoken eloquently from or about the internet. He cites Turner prize winning Jeremy Deller describing our era as “post-warholian”, presumably indicating that Warhol was last person to adequately reference technological change – meaning, in this instance, mass production and consumerism. I wonder if the more recent Saatchi-fueled crop of artists has  captured something of marketing landscape we currently inhabit, but whatever the last sufficient reflection on cultural change afforded by art was, I think we may be on safe ground in stating that the first widely acclaimed artistic portrait of the digital era is still to come.

Which is some surprise when you consider how engaged the news agenda is with technology: I was amazed to see that Google’s Wave technology (still barely incipient) got substantial coverage in the news, while a certain Cupertino based company recently received more than a sprinkling of press when it announced its tablet based computer….

Earning a living from the internet, as I happen to,  I’ve been curious about the Gompertz question for some time, and the  Kinetica Art Fair seemed like a good place to satisfy my pretensions at cultural engagement.   Kinetica is a museum which aims to ‘encourage convergence of art and technology’. The fair certainly captured one aspect of contemporary mood – a very reasonably priced bar was a welcome response to our collective (and my personal) financial deficit.

Standout pieces included a cleverly designed mechanical system for tracing the contours of plaster bust onto a piece of paper and a strangely terrifying triangular mirror with mechanically operated metal rods [Unfortunately I can't find the artists names in the catalog]. The mirror and rods looked like a Buck Rogers inspired torture device designed to inflict pain by a method so awful that you’d have to see it in operation before its evil would be comprehensible. The other works varied from the malfunctioning to a urinal which provided an opportunity for punters to simulate pan-global urination (sadly not with real urine) via Google maps [by Ric Carvalho]. I would defy anyone not to be entertained while wondering round the the fair, its certainly not boring art.

However, Will Gompertz’s challenge was not answered at Kinetica – the essence of the technological modernity was not distilled into any single work, or indeed represented collectively.

I’ve been mulling over various possible reasons for the difficulty of the problem, and quite a few suggestions spring to mind. Do computers naturally alienate artists? Is information technology to visually banal to be characterised succinctly?

My favorite theory is that the transitory nature of our electronic lives that makes them so hard to pin down. Mobile phones, web sites, computers and operating systems from a decade ago all look ludicrously dated – it’s almost impossible to capture the platonic form of these items because they have so little essential similarity between incarnations. Moreover, their form is almost an accident, and not connected with their more profound meaning in any way. The square riggers of the mercantile age and the smoke stacks of the industrial era seem to denote something broader -  how, for example, can communism be separated from its tractors? Yet the form factor of my computer is trivial. Form and functional significance are of necessity separated by digital goods, their flexibility is the source of their power.

In some way I think films give us tacit acknowledgment of the contingent nature of the digital environment that we spend much of our lives in: characters  are never seen using Windows on their computer, in films computer interfaces are always generic. And when we see a Mac in a movie it’s impossible to see it as anything other than product placement.

So, the Kinetica Art Fair may not have been able to help society understand its relationship with technology, but in fairness that might be a misunderstanding on my part. Really the fair was about works facilitated by technology, rather than about it.

I may have picked a straw man in Kinetica. However, the V&As ongoing exhibition Decode really does no better, though its failures and successes are another topic. In this case I think we can say that Decode exhibition does addresses itself to the Gompertz challenge, and it too fails.

As if to illustrate the perversity of the digital landscape the Gompertz post has become a de facto collection of net art, which is well worth checking out. In a still  keener illustration of the era of mass participation, despite the author’s instance that he is questioning the “eminence not of existence” of net art, commenters continue to post links in the belief that enough evidence of the existence of net art will somehow make it eminent.

Jimmy Tidey (Follow me on Twitter)

Worse, the release of this year’s ArtReview power list has seen him plummet from being Top Dog to being a tick-ridden no. 48 which is, I’m sure, the metaphorical equivalent to Mr Hirst of a royal crack to the knackers with a Doctor Marten boot — delivered while he’s already reeling on the ground. To the rest of us, it’s just a reminder that all glory is fleeting. A star is extinguished, not with a bang, but a very anguished whimper.

My point is that as some stars fall, other rise. That’s why I was tempted into going to the opening night of Lucas Price’s exhibition at the Black Rat Press, Rivington St, Shoreditch. I rolled my eyes when I saw the press release — another graffiti artist — but Price is proof that not every “urban” artist should be tarred with the same can of primer.

I’m going to use the B word. Sorry. But whenever graffiti is mentioned, his spectre looms larger than Banquo at Macbeth’s banquet. Banksy is the street art world’s Vettriano. Sure he does alright and he’s popular, but his work isn’t exactly challenging. Let’s face it, the only provocative statement that’s had Banksy’s name underneath it in at least a decade comes from the anonymous collective that wrecked his Stokes Croft mural by throwing red paint all over it.

I’m an old fashioned kind of guy. I like my art to say something. So it’s truly wonderful when you find art that not only says something, but says it from the heart. Lucas Price manages to do both.

He’s nervous. It’s his first big show and he’s worried about how people are going to react. But unlike a certain D Hirst, he’s not worried about his reputation in as much as it fattens his wallet. No, he’s got the same nervous need for acceptance that all recovering addicts do — a need that drives his entire body of work.

He needn’t be worried. Jesus Help Me find my Proper Place is a deeply personal collection that not only draws deep from Price’s years as a homeless drug addict, but also one that says volumes about his recovery. You feel as if he’s put his heart and his soul into his work and when an artist does that, something magical happens — art becomes more than mere technique and becomes imbued with meaning.

There’s a real sense of Price’s former disconnection and his struggle to reconnect with the world — in short, to find his place. A collage of photos of the Earth taken from the moon, shrouded in telling white space and bearing the legend ‘when you’re high it’s so warm… it’s like a blow job’ seemed to sum it up for me. As did his statement ‘I’ve decided to study real hard this year and become rich and famous.’ You get a real sense of an artist struggling to express himself in his work.

He’s definitely obsessed with death. Skulls abound, and there’s an open coffin placed in the centre of the room — the body in it is undoubtedly the corpse of his former self, the unlucky Lucas Price who never sobered up and discovered meaning. But it isn’t a morbid obsession. It’s a celebration of a deserved escape from the jaws of death.

Lucas Price’s work is warm and genuine. You might not think these are high accolades for pieces that can command up to 14k a throw. But they are. In fact, I can’t think of praise any higher.

For what it’s worth, I’d happily have one of Damien Hirst’s new paintings hanging on my wall. But that’s the point. Hirst’s new work is art-school stuff that ought to be hanging up in someone’s bedroom. You really get the feeling that the work of Lucas Price belongs in a gallery.

In short, I think he’s found his place.

Richard Allday

Lucas Price: Jesus help me find my proper place
Black Rat Press, Rivington St, Shoreditch
October 15th – November 13th 2009

Click here for details

A much deeper problem is that it’s hard to genuinely slate a piece of art without opening a can of worms. Are you really going to claim that you have the objective standard by which art can be judged? You can say you don’t like it, or that there are better examples, but would you really be prepared to say that any given piece was totally fucking meaningless? Well, my visit to the Turner Prize Exhibition left me inclined to give it a go… . Ok not really, but criticism seems to be in order.

Going to the Tate Britain at the weekend blessed me with the opportunity to observe plenty of visitors (screaming children expressed an understandable viewpoint), and as a result I was privy to much conversation. Not once did I hear anyone articulate anything that approached understanding, delight, emotional displacement or pleasure.

A notice board at the end of the exhibition which solicited the punters views confirmed a failure to engage with the works. People were mainly moved to draw cocks with the drawing pins or relate bawdy versions of nursery rhymes. You might think of that as creative reaction to the psychological whirlwind of the previous hour, but I think it’s more likely to be indicative of people bored out of their minds, with nothing about the exhibition to say.

If the works of the Turner Prize had emotion to impart, pearls of wisdom to espouse, or polemic to orate then they roundly failed to deliver their payload to the three-wheeled pram-pushing masses. But what of the experts, who are judge, jury and short-lister of the Turner Prize? Perhaps they are able to fathom some deep and complex meaning in these works, which eludes us mere mortals.

Certainly Goshka Macuga’s piece might lead us to believe we needed a higher expertise in art. Her work is about the relationship of the wives of artists Paul Nash and architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, famous in their field perhaps, but not names that come up around the dinner table. Not in my house anyway. Fortunately the blurb tells you what the installation is about, because if it didn’t it’s pretty clear we’d need a large team of forensic art experts to find it out. I didn’t hear anyone saying “Oh look, isn’t that Paul Nash’s wife? Do you know, I’ve always pondered her relationship with Ludwig Mies van der Roche’s other half.”

Anyway, it’s my strong suspicion is that whatever degree of prior knowledge you had her sculptures constructed form the steel and glass fittings normally used as banisters in public spaces never quite aspired to the sublime, or even the awful. They might perhaps teeter on the insipid.

Cathy Wilkes’ arrangement of female mannequins, supermarket checkouts and dirty bowls of baby food do come together to indicate some kind of meaning. I don’t think I deserve a prize for guessing that her thrust (although she probably doesn’t approve of the inherently male gesture of thrusting) may have something to do with feminity. For this reason this work stands out as the winner for me – not because it’s great, just because it has some kind of meaning that I was able to discern. And for that reason I’d like to exclude it from the criticism that follows.

All of the works, excepting the mannequins, fail a test that I thought up during the extreme boredom of being subjected to Mark Leckey’s video. The idea of this test came to me by way of the post-modernist essay generator. It’s a website that automatically generates essays by stringing together randomly ordered catch phrases and buzz words from post-modernist thought. The results are convincing in the sense that they are very hard to tell apart from some genuine academic papers. I think it’s fair to say that if an essay cannot be told apart from a randomly generated one it can only be of any value by coincidence, and a very unlikely coincidence at that.

So, the Turner Prize equivalent: as a thought experiment imagine having a computer spit out a random plot for video art – or a random selection of ‘found objects’ randomly arranged for a sculpture, and see if you can tell the difference between what you imagined work and the work you are evaluating. What I’m trying to get at is the idea that you might expect a piece of art to convey some more meaning than any random arrangement of matter.

I think it’s fair to say that it would be hard to pick out a video of tuk-tuk drivers doing nothing (Runa Islam’s submission) from “coal miners learning French” or “oranges rolling down the stairs” (my random inventions). The tuk-tuk drivers may have significance and meaning, but even when I try really hard, I can’t see very much. Actually this piece may have been slightly less than random – think back to the 1997 Turner Prize winner “Frozen Policemen”. An hour long video of, you guessed it, policemen doing nothing.

Take another piece of Islam’s – a single continuous shot (I think) of some kind of workshop space. Whatever, frankly.

Perhaps a soporific and interminable video of man making inscrutable points about cartoon cats (Mark Leckey)? What about a black and white epic about the growth cycle of sorghum in China, with subtitles in binary (plot randomly generated by me)? Whatever.

What about a video of someone smashing porcelain cups? What about someone chasing a fictional greased weasel round a fetid bathroom? Can you guess which one is a real submission?

So I don’t quite want to say that these (putative) works are totally fucking meaningless. I want to say that they are about as meaningful as any other randomly chosen arrangement of matter.

Who cares? – well, it’s not the holocaust obviously – but I can’t imagine that art history will give the Turner Prize the prominence it currently enjoys.

Jimmy Tidey (Follow me on Twitter)

I began to trace the figure-of-eight shaped infinity symbol that is the Kinetica logo back to its origins as an early piece of research for this article. It’s been suggested that the symbol, also known as the lemniscate, or ‘lazy eight’, is a representation of an hourglass on its side. Obviously, this action would cause the hourglass to take infinite time to empty thus presenting a tangible example of infinity.1

Kinetica is a museum dedicated to the display of kinetic, technological and electronic artwork, an area of creativity which is sometimes categorised under the more generic term of ‘Time-Based Art’. Since occupying a large commercial space in Spitalfields Market between 2006 and 2007, the museum now operates as a touring programme of exhibitions, events and workshops.

The Director of Kinetica, Dianne Harris, had suggested in her last email that we meet somewhere in the West End for this interview, so that we could head to Canada House in Trafalgar Square afterwards for the opening of Schematic; the first of a two-part exhibition of New Media Art from Canada, beginning with Montreal-based artist Eric Raymond. After devoting some serious thought to whereabouts would be the most appropriate interview territory, I had suggested The Café in the Crypt, below Saint Martin-in-the-Fields Church, a timeless setting with plenty of space.

When I get there, I see that the church is undergoing quite a makeover, but the café is open as usual. I’m early. I hover for a while, take two painkillers I just bought to hide my hangover and head downstairs. At the bottom I’m forced to walk on headstones. The cool, dusty smell of the old building adds to my dehydrated shakiness. I’m both excited and nervous about the interview. Cappuccino at the buffet. Pay, sit down. Frothy, hot, strong coffee. I get shakier as I play with my laptop, sifting through the carefully prepared questions which seem suddenly rather obvious and unoriginal. ‘She must get asked that all the time,’ I think to myself.

Then I spot her. Dianne Harris, Director of Kinetica, in the red hat that her email said she would probably be wearing. The first thing she tells me is that she has been meditating in The National Gallery, or at least trying to meditate amongst the end-of-the-day hordes. She tells me how she thought it might be a good place to find some peace and quiet. I respond with my own story about The National Gallery: It was my first visit to London, and I’d been staying with a friend who lived way out in zone six. I’d been out all night and needed sleep, but couldn’t get back to my friends place, so I went into The National Gallery in the morning, and had the great idea of sitting on one of the nice leather sofas and dozing off in front of Whistlejacket, a large painting of a horse by George Stubbs. Then, after vivid dreams of strangely serpentine horses doing looping figures in an ice arena, I woke up next to a tramp who’d had the same great idea. I’m not sure if our mutual unorthodox use of public gallery space is the best subject to start on, so to break the ice I offer her a drink.

Setting Up

Dianne begins by telling me how the Kinetica team first started conceiving of the museum:

‘There’d been a few [exhibitions of kinetic artwork] in the Sixties, but not so much recently.’ She goes on to describe seminal shows at venues like the ICA, such as Cybernetic Serendipity (in 1968), but that there had never been a permanent platform for that kind of work.

The curator of Cybernetic Serendipity was a woman named Jasia Reichardt who became an important influence on Dianne when they were introduced early on in her career. Dianne describes Reichardt as a ‘realist and mentor’ who helped her to focus on technological art as a valid creative medium; and ‘asked so many questions and re-evaluated everything’ for her.

When I ask Dianne how she and the Kinetica team funded such an ambitious project in such a huge commercial space as the one in Spitalfields Market, she explains how the Irish Construction company, Ballymore, owned and built the building and were looking for a cutting-edge arts organization to move in temporarily. Kinetica were then approached by Future City Arts, who brokered a deal between Ballymore and Kinetica, and the museum was up and running within 6 months. Kinetica was subsequently supported by the Arts Council, amongst other funding bodies, which covered expenses for a whole year, and the museum experienced huge volumes of visitors from the very beginning, following substantial press coverage of the first exhibition, Life Forms, including a feature on The Channel Four News.2

Open As Usual

I ask Dianne about the reasons for leaving such a unique exhibition space behind, and the decision to exhibit Kinetica’s artists as a touring museum instead. She explains what a wonderful launch-pad the building was, but that it was only a temporary space to house something that is perhaps better suited to transience anyway:

‘I feel like Kinetica could turn up anywhere, rather than necessarily being governed by one building. In this way, the museum has gone truly kinetic.’

She goes on to tell me that having permanent space has opened up so many more doors than she first expected and the museum finds itself spoilt for choice in terms of where to go next: Kinetica is currently in discussions about a collaboration with The Cambridge Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology, where new commissions are to be developed with Kinetica’s artists, who are represented in a similar way to that of a commercial art gallery. The museum has developed an amazing online shop of small-scale Artist Multiples 3 and also an ever-expanding permanent collection.

Dianne tells me about the many artist-led workshops that Kinetica organises with schools and community groups, with projects exploring important contemporary issues such as recycling and alternative energy sources, where participants are shown how to build kinetic structures such as energy-generating wind sculptures.

The museum has also organised a series of forthcoming talks across various venues, including the Science Museum’s Dana Centre, The Bishopsgate Institute, and Sudely Castle. They’re also taking part in The Concrete and Glass Festival in Shoreditch in October this year, and, perhaps the museum’s most ambitious project of all, The Kinetica Art Fair, which is due to open in February 2009.

While Kinetica is committed to running events in the UK, it is also developing an increasingly global reputation, and receives proposals from all over the world:

‘People hear about the museum largely online, especially now that it no longer inhabits a permanent space, (it usually comes first in search listings of its related subjects), but also from surprisingly widespread sources.’ One example Dianne gives is that of a recent request to exhibit Soundwaves (a Kinetica show from May 2007), from a gallerist who read about it in a small, local Brazilian newspaper. This kind of international presence seems particularly impressive for such a young museum.

Having answered all of my obvious questions, and many more unobvious ones that I only thought of when she had answered them, we walk up the stairs of the Crypt and back out into the daylight. As we wander across Trafalgar square to Canada House, we pass The National Gallery, and the conversation turns to meditation again. Dianne explains that the method of meditation she has been using involves a particular type of internal visualisation, and how during this mediation, her mind’s eye began to trace the figure-of-eight shaped infinity symbol that is the Kinetica logo.

Endnotes:

1. Wikipedia: HYPERLINK “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinity_symbol”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinity_symbol

2. Channel 4 News HYPERLINK “http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUPH-w_a0H4″ (05-10-2006) – Coverage of Kinetica’s inaugural exhibition Life Forms, featuring interviews with artists Elias Crespin, Daniel Chadwick and Chico MacMurtrie.

3. See http://www.kinetica-museum.org

Patrick Coyle is a London-based artist and writer.

Schematic: Eric Raymond continues until 6th June 2008 at Canada House, Trafalgar Square, London SW1Y 5BJ
Exhibition Opening Times: Monday – Friday 10am-6pm

The quayside has been — in the parlance of our times — regenerated, and the jewel in the crown is the Baltic centre for contemporary art. I remember seeing the Baltic’s very first installation – a giant heartbeat red canvas — stretched across the gutted interior of the derelict mill. It was a powerful statement that said that soon this old warehouse would be filled with modern art. But by the time it was, I had long since left. When I returned a few years later it was to catch up with an old friend. We had lunch in the rooftop restaurant and drunkenly tumbled out into the gallery.

Even under the soak of wine I remember thinking that most of the stuff we saw was shit. Wire mesh, balsa wood and cardboard boxes – it was the kind of art being made in sixth forms up and down the land. Five years and several creative directors later the Baltic has supposedly sorted itself out. I stepped off my train and was immediately blasted by a howl of freezing rain. Some things, I supposed, would never change.

The Baltic wasn’t exactly deserted, but I think most of the people I met in there were just glad to be out of the rain. This is a classic example of a state funded monstrosity: find a derelict area, throw money at it, ask a Primrose Hill focus group what a run down regional area needs, end up with an enormous, over-funded art gallery. A conceptual art gallery, at that. It doesn’t exactly seem like power to the people.

But I couldn’t be cynical for long. The shocking thing is that most of the art, well, it was actually rather good. Yes, at first, I couldn’t understand what this weirdly insular exhibition space was doing in the heart of the North East, but then I realised how much the Baltic changed its character. This place, suddenly, was on the map.

On the ground floor was Bartholemy Toguo’s Heart Beat, an exhibit that, like the rest of the gallery, focused on the classic postmodernist topic of ‘the use and overload of information in an era of global exchange’. But this was more than a 101 in basic Baudrillard: frightening ink blot painitings of the Virginia Tech shootings and the Darfur Crisis were horribly contemporary. You didn’t need a Roarscack Test to know what was on this artist’s mind.

Similarly, Mona Marzouk’s site specific installation in black and gold was quietly understated, the vast empty space of the second floor feeling lightly suggestive of a transnational melancholy: the industrialized world’s reliance upon oil. I stood for a few moments watching the video that accompanied the yellowing walls and felt haunted by the room’s emptiness.

I thought back to the previous week when I had made the journey to the ‘Love’ exhibition, part of the National Gallery on tour in Bristol’s City museum. Crammed into a room half the size of Marzouk’s two paintings was a retrospective starting with the renaissance and ending with one of the figureheads of contemporary British art: Marc Quinn’s ‘Kiss’ statues. Whereas the Egyptian born Marzouk deals with a dramatic subject intimately, Quinn’s sculpture takes an intimate subject and adds a dash of hyperbole: two imperfect figures kiss. Great. His cock’s freakishly small, her breasts sag and she’s half his size. Sounds like real life to me. Then you walk round to the other side and, surprise surprise, he’s got a thalidomide arm and she hasn’t got one at all – about as representative of real life as a bearded lady at a circus.

Why is there an unwritten rule that states a British artist can’t be understated? Or funny, for that matter? Another one of Quinn’s thalidomide arms statues, the pregnant disabled one on the plinth in Trafalgar Square, won out over the much more amusing car-being-shat-on-by-pigeons design. I can only blame the YBA clique for the present rash of po-faced, hyperbolic art being churned out by our supposed talents.

Which brings me neatly back to the Baltic, where Mark Titchner’s installation — the finest example of hyperbole masquerading as transgressionism I can think of — held pride of place above these two excellent exhibits by foreign artists. If you’ve ever seen Mac’s famous “1984” commercial (Titchner quite obviously has) then you’ve pretty much got the idea. Fill a hall with communist style slogans chanting ‘seek imagine create delight’ and ‘leverage collective genius,’ stick a giant obelisk (in this case, a video installation of an obelisk, how daring) at a pulpit in the front, turn the lights down and crank out a lot of pamphlets explaining how the use of ‘black, white and red’ – the corporate colours of a certain unpopular transnational soft drink manufacturer – ‘comments on the blind faith and obedience to authority which is unconscious in much of society.’

The whole spiel was a big yawn. Clearly, someone in Primrose Hill had declared that this was the sort of art the provinces needed. But if it hadn’t been for the murmuringly insistent robotic voice that filled the hall, this exhibit would have been a good place to catch forty winks.

Downstairs in the gift shop were t-shirt prints of Titchner’s slogans prominently displayed beside a handful of those Agyness Deyn sponsored House of Holland prints that were cool about a year ago. It was so self-knowingly ironic I felt like raising my skinny fists in despair, or at least running to the rooftop restaurant for a quick bottle of red.

‘The t-shirt is the message!’ screamed the Titchner print. Baudrillard 101? Check. Got it. Well, actually, I suppose this one’s a Marshall McLuhan parody. But who’s to know? Not, I suspect, the tired, rain-soaked Geordies milling about in the downstairs café.

Needing a break, I walked back across the footbridge to check out the newly opened Lazarides North gallery, currently exhibiting the work of US graffiti artist David Choe. He’s a natural choice: Choe’s known for his hyperbole. As is Steve Lazarides: 25k plus VAT for a 4×4 board might be pushing it a bit far in a Northern town where your main competitor’s centerpiece is a £900 Jack Vettriano print. Predictably, apart from the beautiful, black dressed, black Mac wielding receptionist, I had Lazarides to myself. Tucked away in a room at the back, behind his grotesque graffiti caricatures hid Choe’s watercolours. They were heartbreakingly beautiful. If I had three and a half grand (plus VAT) I might have bought one.

As it was, I headed back over the Baltic to see some material by Barry McGee –- another graffer from over the pond. Even the vivid acid-casualty colours and the burned out truck slapped into the middle of the room didn’t seem hyperbolic after the 25k pricetag on the 4×4s.

I retired to the café for a soup-like mug of black coffee. I gave up the boozing and the plastic fumes some time ago. On the train platform on the way home I got chatting to a teenage girl heading into town for a night out. She said she liked my clothes. Then she offered to suck me off. It’s one of those stories you couldn’t make up.

I boarded my train, a smile on my face. Some things, I supposed, would never change.

Richard Allday

The art was unexpectedly exciting too. I’ve really only ever experienced two kinds of art: very good and very bad. As has been noted so often before they sometimes bear an uncanny similarity. Somehow the show joined the dots between these two extremes. Previously the idea of buying art was opaque for me. Where was art bought and sold? What sort of person ‘bought’ art? I’ve see art in trendy pubs and bars, and its frequently less than impressive, especially when the price tag is in the hundreds. I can imagine the artist, but I can’t imagine the buyer of ‘pub’ art.

At the other end there is the art you see in museums and big galleries, and, of course, I have no idea how the dizzying values of the paintings contained therein are arrived at either. Sometimes I can see the art’s merit, sometimes I can’t — I sure as hell can’t imagine it over the mantel piece.

That’s where the Fair illuminated me. Here was a mass of paintings with a clear purpose: to be bought. Not by me, but some of the works were ‘affordable’. You could pick up a 1 of 10 print for £600. Not only that, but the paintings often appeared, even to my inexpert eye, fantastically well executed. One of my slightly-arty-friends-who-often-makes-their-own-Christmas-cards couldn’t hold a candle to the paintings on display.

Even more importantly, if you had one of these in your living room you can bet that everyone who came by would ask you about it. There were many, many paintings on display that I would be delighted to see every morning. Here’s a test that I’ve thought of to decide if art is any good or not: Imagine burglars break in and see your painting, it’s big, and it’s a bit of hassle to steal. If the art is really outstanding then I reckon that uncouth burglars ought to be going “shit, what’s that?”, even if they don’t know anything about it. If it’s good, they’ll nick it. Ok, it’s probably not a test they’re going to be using at Sotheby’s any time soon, but applying this test to the paintings on show I think buyers would be wise to get some insurance.

It sounds ridiculous, but as I continued to explore the fair, the concept that art is made to be purchased and enjoyed occurred to me for the first time. That’s not so obvious when you go round some international museum. Purchase there is off the cards, and by the very nature of being the ‘best’ it’s often the least accessible. It’s a rubbish introduction to art. I don’t want to sound mercenary about the purchase of art, it’s just that I could suddenly see it as a practical item, not an intellectual exercise.

Another thing that surprised me is how much collecting the stuff appealed, even though that’s clearly not much of an option. Obviously collecting something that costs thousands of pounds per item is off the cards for a lot of people, on the other hand how many people do (or did before the era of the download) spend thousands on music each year?

Sadly there was more than a little evidence that some people with a poor money/sense ratio were getting their wallets out. Ten people had already purchased a picture of Amy Winehouse at £2,500, (there were 100 prints of this image available). Maybe I misunderstood, maybe it was a great picture, but I just wince to imagine some early 20s city types trying offload some of their cash on culture and then finding a picture of Amy Winehouse. Fair enough if one person wants one, who wants to be the 10th guy on the list? The show had only been open about 2 hours.

I’m sure it’s not only rich idiots making purchases though, if only I could spend all my nights out at openings with free booze I could probably save enough for a painting myself…

Jimmy Tidey
Illustration by Thomas Doran

Contemporary art and large price tags continue to make close bedfellows in a month that saw the sale of £1m worth of Banksy’s art, and heralded the arrival of the fifth annual Frieze Art Fair to the capital. Good times for the elusive Bristol-born graphic artist and graffiti legend Banksy, whose art was snapped-up by Hollywood power-couple Angelina Jolie-Pitt and Brad Pitt at an auction run by Soho gallery Lazarides, and hosted at the Shadow Lounge bar on the 11th October. His art graces not only the walls of the rich and famous but also on buildings and landmarks throughout London and other cities around the world. Notorious for concealing his identity and anonymously hanging his own work in the Tate, perhaps this self-designed aura of mystery and myth-making that is ‘Banksy’ has proven the perfect springboard for financial success and recognition in the contemporary art scene, itself a bastion of spectacle and provocation, of boundary-pushing and big spenders.

Art has become a commodity of sorts to a wide section of upwardly mobile individuals, including city workers, wealthy non-doms and another more recognisable, though probably no less obscure bunch of people: celebrities. Steve Lazarides, Banksy’s agent, feels the boom in contemporary art purchase is down to its relevance to younger generations of society matched to their disposable incomes.

Charles Saatchi and his penchant for buying-up everything in sight to add to his extensive art collection, that started with the YBA’s in the early 90’s, the huge sponsorship of shows and exhibitions by corporate giants (deutsche Bank and Unilever anyone?) and the out-pricing of art by the old masters, creates a climate in which there’s a race to the auction room finish line for the latest ‘next best thing’ and also enough demand for the supply of art seen at fairs like Frieze.

Of course the cultural (and financial) currency of art is no new thing, but perhaps the real difficulty is found in the criticisms about the actual quality of much of it, or the over-reliance, by some, of a provocative message over technical and artistic competency. Whatever, Banksy is to be congratulated for such success, and equally for creating art that is accessible at the most basic level; whilst simply walking down the street. We can all enjoy his work, without paying a penny.

by Hayley Thatcher
Illustration by Eduard Castells

They are famous for their demonstrations outside the Turner Prize ceremony and their actions have prompted an investigation by Charities Commission which led to an official rebuke of the Tate Modern. In another example of Charles’ tireless assault on the art establishment he ran for election against Chris Smith, who was at the time Culture Secretary. We spoke to him about the Stuckists as a movement.

Tracy Emin, Charles Thomson and Billy Childish in 1987,
all of whom were members of the Medway Poets.

TTI: In this issue of the magazine we’re trying to understand why some people start creative movements. Presumably most artists will have some guiding philosophy, but more often than not they’re happy letting that philosophy take a back seat to their work. Other artists, like yourself, feel the need to define their philosophy and invite others to subscribe to it. Was it simply your passion to show the errors of the mainstream art world that drove you to found Stuckism? Did you feel that the public couldn’t view your work without the context of Stuckism, or was there another reason that you founded the movement?

CT: It started for the same reason most art movements in the modern era have started, namely that a bunch of artists with a common ethos and practice thought they had something better to offer than the establishment and set about trying to promote their work and ideas. The dominant mode in the art world now is based on Marcel Duchamp’s idea that anything can be art if the artist says it is. If you subscribe to that, you will be able to fit in with the mainstream network of galleries, dealers, collectors, museums and critics. If you don’t, you will be marginalised. We reject Duchamp’s philosophy of anti-art, which has not invigorated but enervated art; instead we posit values of art.

The career-minded automatically walk the walk and talk the talk, which is transgression for the sake of it, i.e. adolescence. They work within the art code, as Matthew Collings has termed it. He wrote in Art Review in December 2004:
“The drift in the art world for years has been to come up with pseudo-popular forms for formerly (that is, in the 1970s) genuinely elitist or obscure conceptual art contents. But you can’t get it wrong – wrong popular is punished with sneers. (Grayson) Perry is right popular like Tracey Emin; both are victims of abuse, use text, do multi-styles and are willing to be embarrassing in a controlled context where the codes of the conceptual academy are confirmed. (The Stuckists are of course wrong popular: they do the fourth thing but only the first half of it.)”

It’s quite a skilled job to get the nuance just right, but people know when you have and when you haven’t. Matthew seems to think the Stuckists are trying to get it right, but are incompetently getting it wrong, which is remarkably unperceptive of him. In fact we know full well how to get it right, but we don’t want to. We deliberately get it wrong by using the art world as the butt of the joke, instead of letting it in on the joke. This requires a lot more finesse than actually getting it right.

Stuckists demonstrating at the Turner Prize in 2003.

It would not be very difficult to fit into the art world. Billy Childish, the co-founder of Stuckism with me in 1999 (he left in 2001), was offered shows in the Britart arena, but he wasn’t interested. Richard Cork, fomer art critic of The Times and staunch advocate of the current establishment, told me he thought I was something of a conceptualist. In fact I was given a conceptual art award by the Birmingham-based proto-Mu group for the Stuckist demos against the Turner Prize outside Tate Britain, which we’ve now done for seven years. Billy and I used to joke that we should announce the whole of Stuckism was a piece of conceptual art. Then Stuckism would be accepted.

If you look at individual Stuckist artists’ work, a lot of it could sit quite happily in the Sensation exhibition alongside Britart. However, that would bring out a particular aspect of the work which is not the most important aspect. When the work is exhibited alongside other Stuckist work, then it is read in a different, more appropriate and more meaningful, way. So the bottom line is that I found it necessary to set up the right context for my work and for the work of artists I had collaborated with over the years. It was just a question of presentation and the name Stuckism fitted the bill nicely. The most important thing is the work we’re doing, which existed a decade before Britart. Attacking the mainstream art world just happens by default, but is not of itself particularly important, apart from the fact it has brought a lot of attention to bear on Stuckism.

Charles Thomson’s Studio.

TTI: You have a twin role as an artist and a campaigner. Do you see yourself more as one or the other?

CT: I have many roles. Those are two of them. The main one is as a human being. But if you ask me to choose between artist and campaigner, then I would see myself as the former, even though a lot of the time I am doing more of the latter, mainly because there’s no one else to do it otherwise.

TTI: In a way your expert promotional skills and ability to garner attention for the Stuckists are the same skills that made the YBAs so prominent. Is that a tension, or an unfortunate necessity?

You’re right: they are the same skills, and I would rather it didn’t have to be that way, but I didn’t make the rules, although I have familiarised myself with them. I give full credit to Charles Saatchi and Damien Hirst, who changed the rules into what they are now. Before them, there was a more natural progression for an artist and a greater generosity from more established figures genuinely helping younger talent. This is evidenced, for example, by Peter Blake and Alan Jones, both of whom came along to the opening of the Stuckism International Gallery in Shoreditch in 2002. Peter asked me to sign the Stuckists book I gave him, though I said I felt it should be the other way round! Vision shifted with Britart into the competitive and exclusive marketing of a commercial product. Of course there’s always been that element in art, but a balance between that and art for its own sake was broken. You can no longer rely on the worth of your work to see you through. It is the worth of your PR, which can equally well promote a genius or a baked potato. Personally, I don’t want to promote baked potatoes.

There is one major difference in the exposure achieved by the Stuckists and the YBAs (apart from the fact we only get a fraction of what they do), because they were promoted by an advertising multi-millionaire with worldwide connections, and we have had to do the job ourselves with minimal resources. If Stuckism had the same backing, then it would already have easily achieved the aim of replacing Britart in this country and changing art worldwide. Even so, there are now Stuckist groups all round the globe and we are studied in many colleges in this country and abroad. When Saatchi adopted our ideas and paraphrased our manifesto to promote painting – thereby turning into a Stuckist – I wrote to him and suggested a partnership, but I didn’t get a reply, which is a grave loss for him, as it would have ensured the historical recognition he desires. Britart certainly won’t, as he has realised himself now by divesting himself of it, as we recommended some years previously.

The Stuckist Book.

TTI: You make some bold statements about the future of Stuckism, notably that it is as important as the renaissance. One obvious difference between previous phases in art and Stuckism is that no one ever sat down and thought “I should start something called the renaissance”. Is Stuckism going to be the first major cultural shift to be orchestrated?

CT: A lot of people throughout history have been very conscious in their intent to launch a new impetus into the world. The history of modern art is one of people doing exactly that time after time, and it is the same in other fields with figures like Karl Marx, who at one time was a loner in the British Library with an idea or two – and look what happened as a result. Ideas form – and a change in them can therefore transform – our reality.

The Mediaeval period was world-denying in favour of an unseen theological existence, shown in its flat iconic images with no interest in simulating material reality. The Renaissance reacted the other way until it reached a scientic materialism that believed only in material reality. Stuckism, and its projection of a cultural period of Remodernism, proposes a holistic synthesis of these, so material and spiritual achieve integration. That is the big idea. It is one drawn from Kabbalah, amongst other sources, such as Jungian psychology with the notion of conscious and unconscious in a dialogue towards self-knowledge, which Jung termed individuation. New movements are brought about by a cumulation of historic forces, but certain individuals or groups are in a position to understand and articulate them publicly, which probably gives those people a bit more kudos than they really merit.

TTI: Do you think you romanticise the role of art? Money and religious imperatives have been motivations in much art that is considered great. The common thread of your manifestos seems to be art as honesty of expression. Has this ever been prevalent in art?

CT: Romanticism is the polarity of the equal delusion of classicism: it is only when they are brought together that you get resolution. Motivation is different to achievement and not necessarily relevant to it. Great art exists despite the mercenary aspects and religious dogma, not because of it, and has qualities that transcend the purported purpose. That element of honesty is at the core of any art worth having. If it’s not there, you can only have fantasy (aka fashion), which over time fails to engage or fulfil. In addition to financial and religious imperatives, you could list mythological imperatives, vanity, novelty etc., and again great art asserts itself despite all of this. The best model in Western art for today is the Post-Impressionist period. It was a point where certain limitations were removed (e.g. the camera replaced the need for art to depict the outer world realistically) and conflicting forces came into balance, since vision and communication had not yet degenerated into randomness and titillation. An integrity was achieved, to a certain extent by accident. Stuckism takes that on with a conscience intent, having seen, in the subsequent development of Modernism, how disasterous it can be if you don’t. That development has been a kaleidoscope of blind alleys, and the amount of people who have piled into them doesn’t change that reality.

Sir Nicholas Serota Makes an Acquisitions Decision,
2000, painting by Charles Thomson.

TTI: Stuckists are not fans of the “postmodern”. Leaving aside the bullshit that’s written about it, one seemingly undeniable aspect of postmodernism is the death of mass culture. Isn’t this just a technological fact? Can Stuckism turn the clock back on postmodern communication methods such as the internet? Or are you primarily concerned with other aspects of postmodernism?

CT: Postmodernism is the inevitable consequence of the way Modernism developed, which was a series of idealistic extremes. Extremes contain their own inbuilt destruction, while idealism always leads to disillusionment and cynicism, the core of Postmodernism, which has seen too many visionary beliefs fail to be able to have one any more. All that is left is the instantly attainable, which is celebrity and commercial success, with a desperate need to neurotically and ironically recycle the ruins of the past as the only apparent recourse to avert futility. Remodernism sees what can be used positively from history, which Postmodernism doesn’t because it sees only the surface.

Ella Guru.

There is mass culture today in a way that has never existed in the world before. You can find Coca Cola and MacDonald’s everywhere, not to mention satellite TV and the World Cup. However, I don’t see this as Postmodernism. It is Popularism, which is the entertainment of the masses (I don’t intend this derogatively) as it has always existed throughout history. Postmodernism, like Modernist culture, has cut itself off from mainstream society and exists for an elite group. It has bypassed most people because it doesn’t relate to them and they don’t relate to it, except as an oddity and a joke. Their defence mechanisms are firmly and sensibly in place against assessing a rectangle of bricks as anything more significant than bricks in a rectangle, or a shark in a tank as anything other than a tank with a shark in it.

The internet has made the esotericism of Postmodernism even more irrelevant than it was already. Postmodernism’s brief unsavoury moment of minor importance has been outmoded by the democratisation of the popular voice on the world wide web. The internet is part of the Stuckist proposal of Remodernism with its honesty, communication and openness. Stuckism has no interest in turning any clock anywhere, backward or forwards. It has an interest in being now. The first Stuckist activity in 1999 was to set up a web site, thanks to the abilities of Ella Guru. Stuckism has spread, primarily through the web to over 160 groups in 40 countries, and Edward Lucie-Smith has deemed it the first art movement to spread via the internet. Saatchi’s use of the web marks a radical departure from his previous history of showing the backwater of the so-called “cutting edge”. His opening up the Saatchi Gallery web site to all who wish to display their work again follows the example of Stuckism, which has allowed any interested artists to form their own independent group. This is Remodernism, not Postmodernism. That doesn’t mean, by the way, that there can’t be a qualitative assessment of art. Everyone can be an artist, just as everyone can be a brain surgeon, but some people happen to do it better than others.

Punk Victorian Exhibition, Walker Art Gallery, for the 2004 Liverpool Biennial.

TTI: It seems to me that the kind of activity you are engaged in – having a manifesto as a context for your art – will be increasingly important when there is no “mainstream” culture (if you think that’s an important trend). Do you think artists will feel an increasing need to articulate their philosophy?

CT: Our real manifesto is the work. Unfortunately the art establishment has a very limited capacity to see things for what they are any more, having spent so long convincing themselves that things are something which they’re not, so we had to write a manifesto to make it plain to them they we do not agree with what they’re saying. There is no need for such a manifesto for the general public, who are quite capable of seeing things for what they are. We had a major show, The Stuckists Punk Victorian, at the Walker Art Gallery during the 2004 Liverpool Biennial. It was extended from two to five months and described by the museum as “a really, really popular show and very successful”. Good art speaks for itself, addresses human concerns shared by others, and communicates in a way that people can relate to. It also works on different levels, and I’m not saying everyone gets everything about it, although there is an intuitive connection nevertheless. Nor am I saying that everyone will like it or that such popularity is the only thing that counts, as there have been times in history when this has not happened. But I am saying it is a relevant consideration now.

interview by Jimmy Tidey