Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 247

Is Damien Hirst the right person to mentor Britain's young?

The artist has been made a mentor for the Future Generation art prize – but is this overpaid shark-pickler a wise choice?

• Damien Hirst is a national disgrace
• Damien Hirst: 'I felt the power of art from a very young age'

Damien Hirst is offering his services as a mentor for young artists. He is an official mentor for the Future Generation art prize, which he is helping to launch this week at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery.

As if he has not done enough already to corrupt the young.

A devastating set of figures released last week by the OECD revealed that Britain is falling behind much of the developed world in basic literacy and numeracy. In England and Ireland, 16- to 24-year-olds come 19th in literacy and 21st in numeracy in this global comparison. It's a pretty rancid performance for the nation of Shakespeare and Newton.

Of course it would be unfair to blame Damien Hirst personally for this decline (older Britons did better in the tests). But he and the revolution he unleashed in British art have helped to define the cultural landscape in which 16- to 24-year-olds emerged from childhood. Alongside overpaid football players and reality television shows, modern British art has relentlessly pumped out a dispiriting message to the young: education is worthless. Books and sums are for losers. You can earn more money and respect by pickling a shark than by swotting.

Once, Hirst had real wit, imagination and originality. But that has been eclipsed by his incredible financial career, which has turned him into something genuinely dangerous. Britain has writers and scientists of world standing, but art has become our contemporary cultural signature and Hirst our most renowned creative figure. As such, he sends out a very clear message that art is about making money from nothing.

It may be coincidence that British education has toppled over an abyss in the age of Britart. But if you wanted to encourage the young to despise knowledge, the tireless Hirstian message that empty images mean more than words, and money means more than either, would be quite an effective virus to release in some hideous act of anti-intellectual warfare.

• Don't lose your head over Hirst, says Jonathan Jones
• Damien Hirst has brought public art to a new low

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British Museum strikes gold with El Dorado show

Gold wasn't a crude symbol of wealth for the peoples of ancient Colombia but a reflection of divine power, holy and alive – as this superb exhibition shows

When Spanish conquistadors heard religious lore from what is now Colombia at the northern extreme of the Andes mountains, they concocted a legend of "the golden one", El Dorado, who leapt into a lake with his body covered in gold dust. They reasoned that the land of El Dorado must be a place of fabulous mineral wealth, where pure gold leaked out of the rocks.

This arresting exhibition reveals the truth behind that myth. The peoples of ancient Colombia really did use gold extravagantly and beautifully in their sculptures, body ornaments, rituals and grave goods. When their priests or shamans ingested coca to help them commune with the spirit world, they released its narcotic properties by mixing it with lime which they carried in gorgeous gold pots and sampled with a golden dipper.

All of which might seem to disconcertingly validate vulgar fantasies of a land of gold and cocaine. But the reason the Tairona, Muisca and other peoples of the northern Andes made such copious use of gold in everyday life was that it was not, for them, a crude symbol of wealth. It was holy and alive. Gold glitters. The way it caught the light mirrored the divine power of the sun: if you wore a gold headdress and gold breastplate it brought you nearer to the sun's magic.

Lovely golden models and masks of jaguars and frogs and bats bring to life the natural world that surrounded Colombia's ancient peoples. This was not an urban empire like the realm of the Aztecs. It was a world of carved megaliths and ritually scarred bodies. Its culture is brought powerfully to life by the exquisitely cast votive statuettes called tunjos that are the show's most evocative artefacts. These gold figures depict characters such as warriors holding severed heads and religious leaders with their coca-chewing gear. They are extremely potent artworks.

Behind the greedy European fable of El Dorado lay a human richness. A way of life that fitted into the natural world and saw gold as just one way to evoke the magic of the cosmos was reduced, in European eyes, to a yellow blaze of materialism. This exhibition challenges the poverty of our imaginations.

Rating: 5/5

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Why no Nobel prize for art? It's as eloquent as literature | Jonathan Jones

Much has changed since Alfred Nobel decided to honour 'ideal' literature. So why hasn't the Nobel prize moved with the times?

Science, literature and peace are recognised – but why is there not a Nobel prize for art?

This may not be a totally daft question. It probably reveals something about cultural history. Since the Nobel prize was first awarded in 1901, it has always included literature in its mainly scientific and political mission.

This reflects the hierarchy of the arts at the beginning of the 20th century. Literature has been seen since ancient times as the most gentlemanly of cultural pursuits, and in the Romantic era it became the most moral. Poets are "the unacknowledged legislators of the world", claimed Shelley in 1821. By the end of the 19th century, that Romantic belief in literature's moral and political authority was a cliched idée reçue of middle-class culture.

It is also explicit in Alfred Nobel's will. Among the prizes to be funded by his fortune, he stipulates one for "the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction".

"In an ideal direction": this Romantic, and Victorian, decree explains so much about the Nobel prize for literature. It's no use asking why a comic writer like Philip Roth never gets a Nobel prize. It's explicitly intended to award "ideal" writing or, to put it more bluntly, worthy writing.

This puts the Nobel prize at odds with a lot of the greatest writing of the past 112 years. Modern fiction was transformed after Nobel's death by Joyce and Borges and Nabokov – writers who were all in their different ways highly irresponsible.

They never got Nobel prizes.

Which brings us to art. The same transformations that have made literature fit very awkwardly into that notion of the ideal have also obliterated the distinction between word and image. Art is as eloquent as literature today. While the Nobel awards a myth of literary worthiness that has little to do with modern writing, it is, paradoxically, among artists that it might look for today's unacknowledged legislators.

From China, there's Ai Weiwei. From Nigeria, there's El Anatsui. From Britain, there are several artists who claim the kind of moral purpose the Nobel admires. What about a Nobel prize for Jeremy Deller?

So how about it, Nobel prize? Why not recognise visual art alongside literature? There are plenty of artists whose work tends "in an ideal direction".

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Frieze, Dumbo, and the man who photographs his mum having sex – the week in art

The art fair flings open its doors and Banksy fires a rocket at Disney's beloved elephant. Plus Leigh Ledare, Paul Klee and Jeff Koons's Gaga cover – in your art dispatch

Exhibition of the week

Paul Klee
One of the greatest artists of the 20th century, a modernist answer to William Blake in the poetic intensity of his vision: a man at once rational and romantic, abstract and imagistic … this survey of the inimitable Klee ought to be unmissable.
• Tate Modern, London SE1 from 16 October until 9 March

Other exhibitions this week

The Young Dürer
The intense art of Albrecht Dürer mixes the beauty of the Renaissance with the awkwardness and fear of a medieval mind on the edge of a new world.
• Courtauld Gallery, London WC2R from 17 October until 12 January

Frieze and Frieze Masters
The art world congregates in all its majesty. But there's some good stuff at Frieze Masters.
• Regents Park, London NW1 from 17-20 October

Whistler
The most original and brilliant artist in late Victorian Britain was, this exhibition stresses, an American.
• Dulwich Picture Gallery, London SE21 from 16 October until 12 January

Beyond El Dorado
The fabulous gold of the ancient Americas gives life to the dreams of the Conquistadors.
• British Museum, London WC1B from 17 October until 23 March

Masterpiece of the week

The Queen of the Night relief, Old Babylonian, 1800-1750 BC
The mythology of the ancient near east is given startling form in this relief of a powerful female goddess.
• British Museum, London WC1B

Image of the week

What we learned this week

Why Leigh Ledare photographs his mum having sex

That the master of Blu-Tack and broccoli art is back with a vengeance

The hidden depths of Jeff Koons's Lady Gaga album cover

That David Hockney's earliest artworks sold for £12

That Banksy's released shocking footage of Dumbo being blasted

Why Kara Walker makes artworks about sex, slavery and shadow-puppets – and wants to make us feel queasy

And finally …

Follow us on Twitter

Share your artworks on the theme of chairs now

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The Show Is Over: has painting really had its day?

A nihilistic new exhibition called The Show Is Over seems to contradict its own premise – by showing the fearless, living glory of painters such as Ed Ruscha and Richard Wright

Painting has a future – if it walks a thin blue line. That is the lesson of an exhibition at London's Gagosian Gallery that explores the deaths and strange rebirths of painting in our time.

Death is here as image as well as phenomenon. A painting of an hourglass by the Californian modern master Ed Ruscha sends a gothic chill down the spine. It's a big horizontal picture with a black hourglass marking the approach of death. If this exhibition dares to question the survival of that old stuff, paint, in an age of installation and video – hence the nihilistic title – Ruscha offers one rather timeless answer. This deeply troubling picture is a very old-fashioned painting, of the sort that might have intrigued Hans Holbein.

The idea that painting must inevitably die out because it has been succeeded by other, more "modern" art forms is nonsense. Art does not evolve upwards towards some prescribed goal. There is no such thing as artistic "progress"; just change. And change can take all kinds of twists. Marcel Duchamp's urinal, Fountain, was exhibited in 1917. The decades that followed did not see painting shrivel in the face of this readymade. Instead, the abstract art of Mondrian, the twisted figurative paintings of the surrealists, and Jackson Pollock's Lavender Mist all revealed a new freedom for the medium.

Today, that freedom lives in the painter Richard Wright. He's the one walking the thin blue line. Or rather, he's taking some blue lines for a walk. Wright has created a huge blue watercolour on the uneven white ceiling of the Gagosian Gallery. It's a temporary installation for this show, a passing moment in paint. Zigzag lines dance in parallel across the ceiling. They lead into the exhibition or out into the street, depending on your direction. This is painting as movement, as time's arrow, as ephemeral beauty.

Wright also shows intense, fascinating drawings for a mural he's made at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Here is a painter who seems to be in love with his medium and what it can be, now.

Painting has not died. Instead, it has been set free. No longer responsible to any preconceived notion of art or reality, it has claimed absolute experimental freedom. That freedom abounds here in paintings made with bubblegum and mirrors and words and shadows. The show is not over. It has just begun.

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Grayson Perry: a master of rabble-rousing and little else

The critic of today's art is ironically its biggest benefactor: Perry has taken a fifth-rate talent and made himself an old master

In the great game of contemporary art, Grayson Perry is a master. He has perfected the move that trumps all others: denouncing the art world from within. His Reith lectures, to be broadcast on Radio 4 later this month, reportedly lay bare the cynical workings of 21st-century art. He's in the papers today mocking his bete noire, Damien Hirst, and claiming that the avant garde art is no longer subversive because the entire bourgeoisie love it.

The joke, of course, is obvious. The favourite contemporary artist of that same bourgeoisie is … Grayson Perry. He is loved by Today-listening folk for his wit and perceptive comments and has done more than anyone else to make art a mainstream part of issue-debating, educated, middle-class British culture, Guardian or Telegraph reading. He's the toast of book festivals, the darling of museums.

The blunt fact, however, is that Perry owes his success entirely to a sloppy contemporary confusion about what art is. Art can be anything. Artists don't need to be skilled. Cultural impact matters more than innate creativity. All these glib ideas that were thrown like bombs by Damien Hirst 25 years ago and popularised by the Turner prize have made it possible for Perry to turn an incredibly slight talent into national stardom.

As a potter he's fifth-rate and as a graphic artist he's got a forced and repetitive line. But above all, there is a stale rationality to his art that irks me. He is always satirising, always making a point.

Where is the madness and strangeness and imagination that takes art beyond the obvious?

Perry is a mediocre muddle of an artist – yet mediocre muddle is apparently what modern Britain admires. No one could look at his work and dream of applying the word "genius" to it. Surely we can agree on that? You might call his tapestries "clever", "hilarious", "perceptive" – but you would not say "genius".

You might say that's irrelevant, that good art does not have to be "genius" art. But if art cannnot make you wonder, at least for a moment, if it is a work of genius, then it is not worth bothering with. Such waffling art will suddenly look like crap in 10, 20 or 100 years. Only fashion is disguising its futility.

Grayson Perry truly is a phenomenon of our times – a pundit whose punditry is underwritten by a spurious claim to be a serious artist. He's succeeded in becoming the anti-Hirst, the voice of everyone who loathes Hirst's emptiness. But two wrongs don't make a right, and two bad artists don't make a good one.

Perry says art can't shock us any more. Of course it can – if it is truly original and creative. But Grayson Perry is never going to produce that kind of art. He never has. He inhabits a bizarre British realm of art as conversation piece, as intellectual decoration: no magic, no mystery, just a lot of banter.

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Allen Jones: master or misogynist?

Don't be put off by the skin-tight trousers and women acting as furniture – this star of British pop art was deeply skeptical about the swinging 60s

Allen Jones is an easy artist to dismiss. In 2013 his images of women look regressive, to put it mildly. His 1969 work Chair is currently on view in the Tate exhibtion Art Under Attack, and plenty of visitors will sympathise with the feminist who once attacked this sculpture of a woman in high-heeled boots offering herself as a seat.

Yet, in his day, Jones was an artistic radical with a cool intellectual agenda. He's one of the stars of When Britain Went Pop!, a survey of the birth of British pop art at Christies' new gallery in Mayfair. His painting, First Step, in this show is, like Chair, so blatantly fetishistic that to say it objectifies women is a tautology: that is clearly what it sets out to do. Why?

The answer may come as a surprise to those who think the British discovered Marcel Duchamp in 1988 when a young Damien Hirst got lost in the Tate Gallery, wondered why the loo he was using was in a public place, and after a nasty scene learned he'd chanced on the art of the readymade.

Allen Jones was a Duchampian before the Hirst generation were even born. His art is an icy joke about the power of desire: it pays homage to Duchamp's ironic view of human culture as a masturbatory machine in his most ambitious work, The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even.

In the early 1960s, Duchamp was the inspiration for a British artistic revolution. The leader of this movement and arguably the man who invented "pop" was Richard Hamilton – teacher, writer, painter and printmaker. Hamilton was an expert on Duchamp. He studied and "typotranslated" the Frenchman's complex notes, and created a replica of The Bride Stripped Bare so accurate Duchamp signed it as his work. This is the version the Tate owns.

Nowadays, it is Duchamp's urinal that's held up as an artistic inspiration for its bold statement that anything can be art. In 1960s Britain, however, it was the more complex allegory of The Bride Stripped Bare that struck artists as a brilliantly ironic portrait of modern life. It imagines the modern world as a consumerist cat-and-mouse game of endlessly frustrated desire.

As the consumer revolution got underway in Britain, and a new world of longing was opened up by TV and pop music, pop art portrayed the new age as a tantalising Duchampian comedy. Richard Hamilton's Hommage a Chrysler Corp slyly satirises the seduction of machines, while Jones gives the new sexual freedoms of the age a cynical absurdity.

British pop art is intelligent and ironic, and deeply skeptical about all it seems to celebrate. Its anthem, after all, is I can't get no satisfaction.

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Jeff Koons' Lady Gaga Artpop album cover deconstructed by our art critic

Jonathan Jones: Jeff Koons is a baroque artist whose newly released Artpop album cover for Lady Gaga is a masterpiece of mad hilarity

Jonathan Jones

David Hockney's gay art made a splash when it mattered

Peter Getting Out of Nick's Pool, the painter's masterpiece of audacious desire, won the John Moores prize in the year homosexuality was decriminalised

David Hockney takes the making of art extremely seriously. He thinks and writes deeply about painting and photography. He has advanced a theory about the secret use of the camera in pre-modern art. Today, his own art is as much an argument about visual truth as a search for pictorial pleasure: relying on what he defines as drawing's essential elements of hand, eye and heart, he makes accurate Yorkshire landscapes.

He wasn't always so worthy.

A new exhibition of Hockney's early work has just opened at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, which happens to own one of my all-time favourite Hockneys.

This 1966 painting is called Peter Getting Out of Nick's Pool. Why do I love it? I admire its courage and clarity. Hockney watches Peter's nude back and bottom as his tanned form emerges from crystalline blue water. The image of a beautiful human body rising out of water is one of the great fantasies of European art: this painting is a male version of theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Andrew Marr: my stroke made me a better artist

The broadcaster has had a lifelong love of drawing and once toyed with art college. As he publishes a book of his work, he explains how art sustained him in his recovery

Drawing, believes Andrew Marr, is much too important to be left to artists. Everyone should do it. The simple act of setting pencil to paper can change your life, maybe even help save it.

"After my stroke," he says, sitting in his modest but stylishly done-up suburban house in London, "I was lying in bed and just drawing pictures of the covers and the end of the bed: in a sense, nothing. But it starts you thinking, 'Oh yes, my mind's still there, I'm still engaging in the same way that I was.' I might not have the same skill because I can't move my arm properly, but the desire to do it is still there."

The morning is so pallid that the only colour seems to come from his collection of rollicking abstract paintings by Gillian Ayres. Marr is nursing his left hand as he explains how his illness, and slow recovery this year, affects his ability to make pictures.

"I can draw again all right, but because I still can't use this hand very well and it's not strong, holding the bit of paper or the notebook in one hand and drawing with the other is something I can't do. So I'll be drawing and the notebook will slip off my knees and I have to pick it up again. Sharpening pencils takes for ever. I drop things all the time, so I sit on a bench surrounded by pencils I've dropped, bits of rubber. It's a messier and slower business, but I can do it – which is great."

Then, in a bold thought that says a lot about him, he muses that having a stroke has actually made him a better artist. We talk about late Picasso, late Titian and late Cézanne, how they all got greater in old age; how his friend David Hockney says painting is an old man's game. He's not old – he's 54 – but just as age made his heroes paint more wildly, his temporary loss of function has forced him to be more daring.

"I think that, since the stroke, I've loosened up a bit because, to be honest, putting one line on a bit of paper takes me a little bit more effort than it did, so you don't want to waste the effort. And my big problem as a drawer has always been to be finickity, too dibbity-dabbity as they used to say."

Marr calls himself a "drawer", not an artist. In fact, the whole point of his new work, A Short Book About Drawing, is that he is no artist – even though every illustration in it is drawn, painted or sketched on an iPad by him. Once, he argues, drawing was the basis of fine art. Today, it's barely taught by art schools, but that's a liberation for the rest of us: we can draw without having to judge the results as art.

Why should we spend our free time doing that instead of eating crisps and watching TV? Because, Marr believes, drawing – or any kind of skilled manual effort – frees you from the exhausting emptiness of modern life. He's amused when I say the book has "moral fervour". But it does. He tells me how western society with its obsessive consumerism and endless distractions totally misunderstands the nature of happiness. A truly happy life, he thinks, does not come from vacant chilling out: "It's not going and lying on a fucking beach, you know? It's not just lolling about. I think it comes from making things and being connected to the rest of the world."

He cites the American political philosopher Matthew Crawford who now works as a motorcycle mechanic and whose book The Case for Working With Your Hands argues that to be whole people, we have to make things. Yet Marr's belief that drawing is a life-enhancing discipline (he jokes about "the zen of drawing") would equally have delighted the Victorian socialist art critics John Ruskin and William Morris, who shared his belief that modern society has lost touch with what matters.

"When you are doing something that you've got some inclination or talent towards, but which is not easy, and you're therefore completely concentrating on making something – that is, I think, when most people are happiest." For a farmer in touch with nature or a drawer sketching a tree, "there's a dignity and a purpose to life, which you don't get from working in a call centre or being on television."

He laughs. Marr is not being vain in publishing his drawings: he makes no grand claims for them even though he has drawn seriously all his life and even considered going to art school, instead of Cambridge. "I still wonder if I might have been better off going to art college," he says.

In terms of happiness? "Yes."

A Short Book About Drawing, by Andrew Marr, is published by Quadrille

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