Who's Afraid of Modern Art

by Sir Nicholas Serota

The lecture was presented 21 November 2000 in London.

In 1987 a Civil Service inquiry decided that the pay of the Director of the
Tate Gallery should match that of the Director of the much larger Victoria &
Albert Museum and of the National Gallery, where the pictures were regarded
as being much more important, because, and here I quote, "the Director of
the Tate has to deal with the very difficult problem of modern art".
Many would argue that in the past ten years there has been a sea change in
public appreciation of the visual arts. They would point to the local
enthusiasm for Antony Gormley's Angel of the North, commissioned by
Gateshead. The winged steel figure rises up above the A1, a symbol of
optimism and renewal. One might also cite the acclaim for Tate Modern, with
more than three million visitors in the first six months, and the arguably
even greater achievement of Walsall's uncompromising new art gallery which
has dramatically transformed the skyline, and seemingly the aspirations, of
the town.
Have we really joined those European and American cities like Cologne and
Paris, New York and Chicago where the visual arts play a significant part in
the life of the community? And, following the cool logic of the Civil
Service argument, should my salary now be reduced, should my personal
"danger money" for dealing with the problem of modern art now be withdrawn?

I would, of course, argue "no". For in spite of much greater public interest
in all aspects of visual culture, including design and architecture, the
challenge posed by contemporary art has not evaporated. We have only to
recall the headlines for last year's Turner Prize. "Eminence without merit"
(The Sunday Telegraph). "Tate trendies blow a raspberry" (Eastern Daily
Press), and my favourite, "For 1,000 years art has been one of our great
civilising forces. Today, pickled sheep and soiled bed threaten to make
barbarians of us all" (The Daily Mail).
Are these papers speaking the minds of their readers? I have no delusions.
People may be attracted by the spectacle of new buildings, they may enjoy
the social experience of visiting a museum, taking in the view, an espresso
or glass of wine, purchasing a book or an artist designed t-shirt. Many are
delighted to praise the museum, but remain deeply suspicious of the
contents.
Why should this be the so? Why is modern art apparently so intractable? Are
the artists simply emperors parading in their new clothes? What lies at the

root of a fear that we are being deceived or tricked? Is this art which can
have meaning for the many or is it simply for the few, those critics,
curators and collectors who form an inner circle? To try to give some
answers I shall have to examine my own experience.

My Experience
In 1964 I was at school, planning to study economics and sociology, when
curiosity took me to the Tate Gallery to see an international survey
exhibition of contemporary art. It brought together the painting and
sculpture of the previous decade, beginning with the late works of the
modern masters, Matisse and Picasso, and concluding with the twenty-seven
year olds Allen Jones and David Hockney. I was bowled over. Suddenly, art
was not just Turner and Constable, or Leonardo and Michelangelo, but objects
of considerable size and brilliant colour, dealing with the sensations,
subjects and issues of the Sixties.
The following year as a student at Cambridge, I found my way to Kettle's
Yard, now a museum, but then the home of Jim and Helen Ede. In the Thirties
Jim had been a junior curator at the Tate and a close friend of artists like
Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and the critic Herbert Read. I discovered a
small house filled with works of modern art placed in a way which drew out
their qualities and showed the relationships between them. For the first
time I began to appreciate that works of art were not only objects of beauty
and contemplation, but also had a physical presence which could charge the
space around them. And furthermore, Jim lent out works from his collection
to students to hang in their rooms. Who could resist? For a term I had a
Gaudier-Brzeska drawing on my wall.
I was hooked and decided that the visual arts should be my field. Not that
my earlier study of economics has been without value at the Tate as I have
ploughed my way through those challenges which face all arts organisations
in the late twentieth century: cashflow, retail, marketing initiatives and
performance indicators.
A painting or sculpture may be a window on the visible world; it may
heighten the sense of your place in that world or engender reflection on the
nature of being. It may also provoke joy, laughter, anger or pain. Many of
us would associate these attributes with the art of the past: the experience
of space, light and colour in Chartres Cathedral, the muscular beauty of a
young male torso in a Michelangelo drawing, the poise of Vermeer's Girl
reading a letter, the radiance of nature in a Constable oil sketch. But for
many people it remains hard to see how similar qualities can be found in the
art of our own time.
Much modern art is, at first sight, unnerving. Personally, I rather welcome

this. In the contemporary world we have come to expect instant response and
immediate understanding. The very fact that a painting or sculpture can be
taken in at a glance encourages the belief that everything should be
immediately comprehended. However, new art, like old repays prolonged
attention as layers of meaning slowing disclose themselves.

Damien Hirst
Damien Hirst's Mother and Child Divided 1993 is a work which can at first
glance be read as nothing more than two brutally severed carcasses. "A freak
show" was how the art critic of the Sunday Telegraph responded to its
presentation in the Turner Prize in 1995. For me, the undoubted shock, even
disgust provoked by the work is part of its appeal. Art should be
transgressive. Life is not all sweet. Walking between the two halves and
seeing the isolation of the calf from the cow encourages deeper readings of
the work. Perhaps this is an essay on birth and death and on the
psychological and physical separation between a mother and her child,
especially given that the work was first made for an exhibition in Venice, a
city filled with images of the Madonna and Christ child. For me Mother and
Child Divided is an unforgettable image, at once raw and tender, brazen and
subtle.

Fear of modern art

Hirst's work raises difficult questions about modern art with which I've
become familiar over the years. Any defence of his work, or that of his
contemporaries, will probably rely on one or more arguments that have been
used to explain modernism to sceptical - or cynical - critics for more than
a century.
One common line of defence may be paraphrased as "it may look strange, but
you will soon get used to it". It argues that the transformation of a work
of art from offensive novelty into an accepted part of the culture simply a
growing pain. Shock and dismay are transmuted through recognition and
familiarity.
Essentially, this account is a plea for patience. It says that your
scepticism will gradually diminish and your fear will turn to love. It
points to the hostile critical response to Turner in the 1840s, or Ruskin's
adverse reaction to Whistler in the 1870s, and compares these with the
esteem and affection in which the artists are now held. For the late
twentieth-century museum director there is no more certain prospect for
audience acclaim and sponsor success than those Impressionist and
Post-impressionist artists who were so reviled a century earlier. And the
same transformation has now apparently occured for many early twentieth

century artists such as Matisse and Picasso or Henry Moore and Barbara
Hepworth.

As an account of the process by which new thoughts first subvert and then
infuse and shape the culture this argument has a certain plausibility. Art
does break new ground and reveal new truths and such lessons are not
confined to the art of the twentieth or twenty-first century. All art was
modern once. The new realistic space created by the young Masaccio in the
Trinity fresco in Santa Maria Novella in Florence in the third decade of the
fifteenth century was just as challenging to Florentine conventions of
depiction as was Picasso's development of Cubism in the first decade of the
twentieth century. Just look at the depth of space in the Masaccio and think
about how shocking it must have seemed to people who were used only to
figures being presented on a flat gold background We can all learn to see
the world differently.
After thirty years of looking at new work in galleries and even newer work
in studios, I am very familiar with the experience of being completely at a
loss when confronting a new idea or image. How do I respond to a work which
has emerged as a result of intense concentration, probably long reflection
and possibly many false starts? A visit to a studio never fails to test my
resources. It constantly reminds me of the condition in which most people
first confront contemporary art. This is a state of "not knowing", of "not
understanding", of being disorientated or challenged by the unfamiliar. One
of my responsibilities as a curator is therefore to remember that a visitor
encountering an unfamiliar work of art in the museum is likely to be as
unprepared as I was in the studio.
But I've come to realise that it's precisely when I am most challenged in my
own reactions that the deepest insights emerge. Frequently, the greatest
rewards come from the most unyielding. For many years, and like many British
people, I had little feeling for the most expressive and roughest form of
early twentieth century European painting, the expressionism of German
artists around the First World War like Kirchner. In the late Seventies I
was confronted by contemporary German painting of an expressive kind. My
initial reaction was to dismiss the rough hewn sculptures and aggressively
painted figures of an artist like Georg Baselitz. And, of course, Baselitz
made it even more difficult by inverting his figures in order to encourage a
reading of the painting as a composition of shape and colour rather than
primarily as a likeness. Gradually, however, I found myself attracted to
this language of raw anguish and emotion. Later I was able to connect the
work of Baselitz with the carved figures of German Renaissance limewood
sculptors and painters like Grnewald, whose Isenheim altarpiece showing the
removal of Christ's body from the cross is one of the most harrowing images
in art. Recently, I came across Nigredo one of Anselm Kiefer's expansive
landscapes from the Eighties in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I was

surprised that this huge painting of the burning stubble of a razed

cornfield which had appeared so rough and incoherent only fifteen years ago,
now had an elegaic quality.

Is it "good" art?
The argument that new vision becomes the reference point for the future, is
a line that I have been driven to use on many occasions. It has its merits,
but I have to confess that I've found it inadequate in the face of two
insistent questions which always surface in discussion. These are the
questions which go to the heart of a fear of modern art. "But is it art?"
and "How do we decide which art is "good"?
The first of these "But is it art?" leads, of course, to further questions
about the absence of skill (defined as draughtmanship), the use of
unconventional materials, (anything which isn't oil, watercolour, bronze or
stone), want of beauty, inappropriate subject or even the lack of a subject
altogether.
Each of these doubts is founded on a belief that art deals only with visible
appearance, that the conventions of realism are the only appropriate form of
depiction, that everyone worthy of the name "artist" should be able to draw
like Michelangelo or Raphael, that everyday materials or subjects cannot be
used to make elevated art, or that art should be first for the home, and
only later for the museum. Craft, I would argue, is not an essential part of
art, though skill is. That skill may indeed find its expression in
draughtsmanship or carving, realised through the hand of the artist, but it
may also be directed towards the selection of material or the choice of an
expert fabricator. Art can be made by instruction, even ordered on the
telephone as was much of the American artist Donald Judd's immaculately
machined sculpture. Though the sumptuous copper and the glowing red floor of
this sculpture make it clear that Judd was not just interested in cold
perfection.

In the same way art does not depend on its materials alone and there is no
intrinsic reason why art cannot be made from new materials, including 'low'
materials such as brick, plastic rubbish or even elephant dung. When Carl
Andre chose brick as the material for a group of 8 sculptures in 1966 his
choice was deliberate. But he was not simply trying to be provocative.
Following a canoeing trip on a New Hampshire lake he wanted to make a
sculpture that was as level as water. He chose an everyday material, but
carefully selected an ochre fire brick used to line ovens rather than a
conventional building brick. He wanted to show that when a given number of
elements was arranged in different combinations they would create very

different sculptures, even though the volume of each was identical. The 120
bricks were therefore stacked in 2 layers and arranged in 8 combinations of
3 x 20, 4 x 15, 5 x 12 and 6 x 10 making shapes ranging from an elongated
rectangle to a near square, according to whether they were abutted on their
long or short sides. Andre called these sculptures Equivalents, to draw
attention to the visual paradox between the different shapes and equal
volumes.
And there is also the objection to works of art whose size seems to make
them fit only for a museum rather than for a domestic space. I have never
really understood the objection to art which is specifically made for a
gallery or museum, and so cannot be collected by an individual or taken
home. It is rather like saying that all music should be confined to the
chamber work or novels to the short story. Must we dismiss the excesses of
opera or the three-act play? In the early nineteenth century artists
frequently made works for a broad audience rather than a private patron in
mind. Constable's Hay-Wain, which had such a profound influence on Delacroix
when it was first shown in the Paris salon in 1824, was conceived as a
public demonstration of a new commitment to nature as directly observed.
Gericault's Raft of the Medusa was a courageous, political statement about
human suffering following a scandalous shipwreck which caused uproar in
Paris and was almost immediately transported for exhibition in London and
Dublin.

Is it "good" art? (contd.)

For many people, however, it is abstraction which creates the impassable
barrier to accepting modern art. Narrative helps to propel the viewer
forward. Naturalistic space is comfortable. We may now just be able to cope
with non-narrative structures and non-naturalistic space. We all recognise
that profile and full face represent different facets of appearance and
Picasso's invention of Cubism allows for the simultaneous presentation of
both. But when the artist abandons visible appearance, as in Mondrian's
black grids on white grounds filled with balancing rectangles of colour,
many people feel left behind. And yet the rhythms of Mondrian are those of
nature. The harmonies are those which guided proportion in classical
buildings and Renaissance churches. Rothko's glowing maroon Seagram Murals
at the Tate may, like Turner's late canvases, appear to be "of nothing" but
in their brooding depth Rothko suggests another world. As one four year old
child said of the Rothko room at the Tate "it makes me think of God".
Even Mondrian and Rothko aspire to a form of harmony or order which may be
unconventional, but which may nevertheless be perceived as "beauty". Art
that does not directly treat with aesthetic considerations presents an
altogether different set of hurdles. And this is where the going gets really
tough. Duchamp's Fountain, an ordinary urinal presented as a "readymade", or

found object, in an art gallery challenges some of our conventions about

craft, subject and material as components of art. Its shapely form is a play
on male and female sexuality, but the urinal also raises questions about
what art itself constitutes.
Michael Craig-Martin's An Oak Tree, a glass of tap water placed on a glass
bathroom shelf, is a similar case. In an interrogation placed alongside the
work the artist asserted "It's not a symbol. I have changed the physical
substance of the glass of water into that of an oak tree .... I didn't
change its appearance .... The actual oak tree is physically present, but in
the form of a glass of water." We may not "like" Craig-Martin's work, but it
certainly reminds us that the appreciation of all art, including painting,
involves an act of faith comparable to the belief that, through
transubstantiation, the bread and wine of holy communion become the body and
blood of Christ.
However, even if we can accept that new art may break old conventions in its
materials, size, form and subject or lack of aesthetic interest, the second
of my two major questions about contemporary art remains a challenge. "How
do we decide which art is good?".
An honest curator will admit that judgement is fallible, especially for art
made yesterday. Art endures if it has meaning for subsequent generations, as
well as for the present. Part of the value and importance of the work of
Michelangelo or Turner derives from the way in which it inspired or
challenged later minds. We cannot yet know what use later artists and
audiences will make of the artefacts and objects which we create today. In
the present we can only ask that contemporary art offers compelling insights
into our own condition or raises compelling questions as, I believe,
Craig-Martin does. But even if art acquires respectability and affection
over time, it can remain raw for many years. I therefore want to show how,
for me at least, contemporary art can inspire engagement and identification.
And there is also the objection to works of art whose size seems to make
them fit only for a museum rather than for a domestic space. I have never
really understood the objection to art which is specifically made for a
gallery or museum, and so cannot be collected by an individual or taken
home. It is rather like saying that all music should be confined to the
chamber work or novels to the short story. Must we dismiss the excesses of
opera or the three-act play? In the early nineteenth century artists
frequently made works for a broad audience rather than a private patron in
mind. Constable's Hay-Wain, which had such a profound influence on Delacroix
when it was first shown in the Paris salon in 1824, was conceived as a
public demonstration of a new commitment to nature as directly observed.
Gericault's Raft of the Medusa was a courageous, political statement about
human suffering following a scandalous shipwreck which caused uproar in
Paris and was almost immediately transported for exhibition in London and

Dublin.

Rachel Whiteread
In the autumn of 1993 Rachel Whiteread's House became the focus of intense
debate about the purpose and value of contemporary art. All of Whiteread's
works are casts of objects taken from everyday life: the sinks and baths of
our daily ablution, the beds in which we sleep, make love and die, the
libraries which contain the wisdom or the trivialities of an age. Each of
her objects is the product of craft, a loving death mask carefully taken
from a discarded, worn out or exhausted item. House was such a cast on a
monumental scale. Part mausoleum, part springboard for the imagination, this
concrete cast of the inside of a Victorian house stood alone, the last
building in a terrace on the Bow Road, like the final tooth in an ageing
mouth It was also an object of wonder in its size, and in the way that
changing daylight illuminated the unexpected beauty of the concrete. There
was also the strange experience of half recognising the forms, the
peculiarities and the details of a late Victorian terrace house, which is
the place in which so many of us have lived out our lives. For me House was
not the "folly" described by a respected Times columnist, but a work of art
of great vulnerability and of haunting beauty, which encapsulated a personal
and a shared experience.

Gillian Wearing
In her fifteen minute video 10-16, Gillian Wearing presents seven adults
mouthing the words recorded in interviews with seven boys and girls aged ten
to sixteen. The words are confessions about rites of passage, the pressures
of growing up. Transposed incongruously onto the body of an adult, these
confessions are in turn amusing, wry and deeply disturbing. Although I have
seen this work perhaps ten times in the past five years, I find myself still
unprepared for what it tells me about the hopes and fears of young people
growing up in London in the 1990s. It is an essay on the way in which we are
all constrained in our experience of the world by class, gender, social and
cultural background. Wearing achieves this in 10-16 with directness,
sympathy and a sense of identification. Extraordinarily, she allows you to
observe and to understand without becoming a voyeur.

Anish Kapoor
Finally, Anish Kapoor's Untitled 1990 is two deep blue bowls. There is no
narrative, only a pure sensation of colour, form, texture and space.
Kapoor's art deals with the physical and the emotional. His mature work
began twenty years ago with a recollection of mounds of pure pigment in his

native India. He was attracted by the density of colour combined with

impermanence. His sculptures are works in which to lose contact with daily
incident and to be pulled inwards into a deep void, to be submerged in
colour. For me, his sculptures are modern objects of contemplation, inducing
an exploration of self and of the world of feeling and intuition.

The value of new art

I believe that contemporary art can provide insights which are no less
profound than those gained from the experience of earlier art.I would argue
that such insights are sufficient in themselves. However, in recent years
there has been an increasing tendency to justify the arts, for instance the
funding of museums, by reference to the contribution which they make to
economic or social regeneration rather than by reference to their cultural
importance. This is what we recognise now as 'the Bilbao effect', following
the success of the Guggenheim Museum which has transformed a declining
industrial city into a destination for cultural tourism.
But museums are not simply engines of economic and social change; they are
the places in which we examine our social and cultural histories, where
values are challenged, or where we look for an experience which is different
from that of daily life. Like schools, theatres and places of worship they
are an essential part of a civic existence, contributing to a sense of a
shared community.

The Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao

Similar arguments can be made in the field of education. Under successive
governments there has been an insistence on measurable outputs and an
increasingly narrow interpretation of learning. As a result the visual arts
and design have been gradually excluded from the secondary national
curriculum except for those students who are dedicated to art. Where the
visual does feature in general education, it is often justified by the
contribution that it makes towards improving literacy or numeracy. It has an
undeniable value in those causes, especially in engaging children who may
have encountered difficulties in pursuing more conventional paths to
developing language skills. But visual awareness is not incidental. It will
play a part in all our lives, it will affect the quality of our urban
environment, it will determine the appearance of the homes in which we live
and it will lead to an understanding of the way in which the media
manipulates meaning through its use of images. The visual is no less
important than the three 'r's'.

Two years ago the Prime Minister promised that "the arts are to be written
into the core script of government". I have to say that in the visual arts
we are still waiting for many of the words of that script. Chris Smith has
taken the courageous decision to use most of his available resources to
defend and extend the principle of free admission to our national museums,
but otherwise there is little to cheer, especially for those who live
outside London.

The value of new art (contd.)

As a recent study has shown, central government in France spends on the arts
twice as much as in Britain, even allowing for the Lottery, which is not
properly government money anyway, while regional expenditure in France is
four times that of British local authorities.
Across the country great museums like the city art galleries in Leeds and
Glasgow are withering, not for want of imagination, but for want of
resources which can unlock new opportunities. In England, beyond the
capital, only one museum receives significant funding from central
government, the National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside. Elsewhere
museums are almost entirely funded for revenue purposes by local authorities
or universities. This contrasts markedly with the network of regional
theatres, many of which received central government funding through the Arts
Council, even if this is too little. Furthermore, unlike libraries, museums
do not benefit from the protection of being a statutory service and pressure
on local authority funding has made them easy targets for spending cuts.
Resources are required for all our galleries and museums, in order to renew
buildings, attract and retain skilled staff and develop the confidence that
results in innovative exhibitions and well used collections.

The Lowry, Salford

Nowhere are resources more urgently needed than in collecting and presenting
the art of our own time where failure to act now will result in permanent
loss. I believe that the contemporary visual arts can offer meaning,
enjoyment and challenge to those who have the opportunity to encounter them
on a regular basis. But you cannot expect people to understand or be
enriched by something which they encounter only rarely. In a small country
like The Netherlands a population of fourteen million is served by modern
art collections of international standing in Amsterdam, Rotterdam,
Eindhoven, Tilburg, Otterlo and the Hague. In the UK we have two collections
of equivalent quality, the Tate and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern
Art in Edinburgh. Elsewhere, as in Manchester and Newcastle, collections of

modern art are almost dormant. For many years the principal source of new
acquisitions has been the Contemporary Arts Society, an independent charity
which buys contemporary works for distribution to regional museums,. But
they are only able to give each museum one work every four years. The
tabloid, even broadsheet, view will prevail until it is challenged by a
wider experience of exhibitions, acquisitions and commissions of
contemporary art, as well as many more of the very successful
artist-in-residence schemes in schools and hospitals.
My task, and that of other curators, is to build the confidence that will
allow visitors to accept that an understanding of contemporary values and
ideas will often be provoked by new forms of art. The most radical art has
always been disturbing and for this reason has been attacked by
conservatives. Art should overturn as well as confirm values. We need to
welcome and to be able to live with uncertainties in our lives. We are not
going to return to an era in which 'art comes to its senses'. To argue that
art can 'get back on track' is a delusion. There will not always be an
answer to every question. Art obliges us to answer questions for ourselves.

Conclusion

Last year, a slight and vulnerable white figure - a depiction of Christ appeared on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. A piece of contemporary
British sculpture in the arena of a world famous British visual icon. (One
critic was quoted as saying that "It is about as appropriate as a sculpture
of Dame Edna Everidge in Westminster Abbey.") The stage was set for another
round of criticism of today's art and artists. But public reaction to Mark
Wallinger's Ecce Homo did not follow the expected script: there was debate
and speculation, but also sympathy and identification.
I called this lecture 'Who's Afraid of Modern Art?', and my answer is: not
nearly as many people as the sceptics would have us believe. While modern
art may not be for everyone, it should be for anyone. That is anyone who has
the curiosity to explore how their own view of the world and of themselves
can be enriched and challenged by the vision of others. There is no need to
be afraid of living in the present.