In High School, we always had to submit a “rationale” with whatever piece we were working on. I hated doing this, as I found it insulting to the viewer and awkward for me, as the artist, to have to draw out all the meaning there might possibly be. The reason, I was told by my art teacher, was to explain the more arcane aspects to some of the cloudier-minded. When you’re an artist working for a living, you have to be able to explain the piece to a non-artistic company figure. This sounds pretentious, but there are many people who simply don’t get the nuances or the emotional impact of a piece of art. When your livelihood relies on convincing people to see something in your work, sometimes you have to verbally elaborate in order to explain it to someone. This is not a case of artistic error or lack of talent, some people just can’t see any meaning in art.

Personally, when I go to an art gallery or look at a colleague’s work, I look at it first objectively, with no knowledge of the artist’s intention, and then discuss it or read the accompanying information. It’s like dissecting literature- some people see only one, obvious theme, some people see many different and unrelated or even conflicting themes, and some people see very little theme at all and just enjoy the ride.

I disagree strongly with the idea that artists often “has no idea what this is about”. It implies a thrown-together kind of half-assed trickery by the artist “I don’t know what this means but the audience doesn’t know that. Hee Hee Hee $$$” I often change or add something, not knowing consciously why I did it, only to be blown away when looking at the final product. Subconsciously, artist inject truths and images into their work. This is not to say they have no idea what they’re doing, it is just not consciously dissected prior to addition.

Additionally, emotions are what makes us human. To say that decisions should be made exclusively through logic is to deny humanity. Logically, killing the weak to better support the strong id more efficient. Why should we let silly emotions get in the way of making controversial decisions?

I’m fairly sure that the kind of strangled terminology used to present art wasn’t so common twenty years ago, it’s a phenomenon that’s spread since the 1980s, possibly as a result of the expansion of art as a hugely saleable commodity. It’s always been difficult to talk about art since its very nature is subjective but the problem today is that much of the language used by galleries and artists themselves doesn’t bear close scrutiny. A kind of “gallery-ese” has emerged which has a veneer of importance but which rarely says anything specific. A couple of hours after leaving the comment above, I was looking at another site and saw this:

“25 artists have been invited to produce a site-concerned work inspired by the short story “The Drowned Giant” by J.G. Ballard and by the labyrinthine, vernacular architecture of Shoreditch Town Hall’s basement. The result is a stunning exhibition that exploits the dialogue between space and narrative through Ballard’s concerns. Decay, fragility and relativity of human morality, as well as representation of body through architecture, violence and sanity are some of the conceptual directions taken by the artists.”

What these people have been asked to do is illustrate a story, or at least use the story as a springboard for their imaginations. Yet no one dare state that using those words, it doesn’t sound important enough. So we get phrases like “exploits the dialogue between space and narrative” and “representation of body through architecture”. George Orwell criticised this kind of vague and inflated use of words in Politics and the English Language in 1946 and little has improved since then, if anything it’s got worse.

“Cerberus’s biting, barking heads are designed to frighten us. The artist is challenging our complacency and lethargy.

“She wants us to think about (and act against) the hellishness of now, the purgatories and punishments of the contemporary world.”

as they do on the Wooster Collective page.

For what it’s worth, I like Doris’s crack (if that doesn’t sound too vulgar); the size of the Tate Turbine Hall is a fascinating challenge and it’s always interesting to see what each new artist does with it. But I’d challenge anyone to get “addressing a long legacy of racism and colonialism that underlies the modern world” from simply looking at a crack in the floor. It’s this kind of vague justification I object to, something that the art world gets away with far too easily.

Your critique of the show is sound.

John’s comment is generally accurate, though I would argue that it’s also a bit disingenuous to simplify the contemporary Art World mode that much. It’s not so neat. For those of us who are happy to stare at a bit of trash for long minutes, the Tate crack might well captivate. The reproductions I’ve seen do make it look interesting. My problem is with the Art World’s insistence on attaching a specific interpretation, rather than assuming viewers will want to draw their own conclusions.

Oscar Wilde famously said that all art is quite useless but today it’s no longer allowed to be regarded that way. It’s pressured about its irrelevance by popular culture and forced to justify its existence to the people who want to buy it in a vastly over-inflated market, so it has to make claims for itself that are often invisible in the work unless that work is accompanied by reams of explanation. Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth at Tate Modern is a good example of this syndrome, described as “addressing a long legacy of racism and colonialism that underlies the modern world”, a justification which can’t possibly be drawn from looking at a crack in a mass of concrete.

Many artists would be far more honest if they admitted that they didn’t know what they were doing at the time, that they were pursuing some juxtaposition of imagery that they find interesting for reasons they couldn’t explain (as Francis Bacon often did) or were simply trying to make something beautiful or interesting to look at. But they daren’t do this (or galleries and dealers won’t let them) because no one wants to pay a lot of money for a work of art and then have to say “the artist has no idea what this is about”.