Should we re-moralise art? There’s no soul in galleries

Would you pay thousands for a portfolio of toddler paintings? A cash-strapped Australian kindergarten recently prompted parental outrage when management proposed raising funds by selling the children’s portfolios of “art” back to their parents for AU$2,200 (about £1,000). 

The episode reminded me that while toddler art is probably not worth that much money, it was the original impetus for my accidental second career as a writer. When my daughter was in preschool, I used to swap photos of her latest finger-paintings and collages with an art-world friend, accompanied by titles, dates, and solemn thematic commentary in the style of a contemporary gallery. Then I posted a few of these online, and was surprised when the blog went modestly viral. Another friend saw it, encouraged me to write more, and now here we are.  

But what even is “art”? What is it for? How can anyone tell when something is “art”? The whole bit for that toddler-art blog was the fact that sometimes it’s genuinely hard to tell whether a painting was done by a graduate from Central St Martins or by a sticky preschooler in a bib. Nothing, that is, except where it’s displayed, and the price tag. Sometimes not even that: German child artist Laurent Schwarz, now four years old, regularly sells paintings for thousands and recently landed a marketing deal with paint manufacturer Relius. 

We might be forgiven for wondering whether the definition of “art” isn’t as elusive as the one given in 1946 by US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, to define “obscenity”: “I know it when I see it”. But there is surely more to the question than just personal judgement, not least because not even “art” is immune to today’s omnivorous, omnipresent culture war. 

Nowhere is this more painfully obvious than in the public art installed on plinths and in high-traffic areas, where new works routinely attract Right-wing complaints of “wokeness”, or of ideologically monolithic elites imposing weird, mutant iconography de haut en bas. The painter Alexander Adams, one of Britain’s more vocal conscientious objectors to this moral monoculture, writes furiously of an insular internationalist consensus that has sewn up government and philanthropy, and now operates as a closed shop. So what is this closed-shop promoting? 

If we’re to believe the Box venue in Plymouth, it’s art as a kind of therapeutic emollient for the soul. The venue recently published an independent report claiming it has made a £43-million contribution to local communities, including by reducing dementia and depression, and improving visitors’ health and productivity. In this view, an arts venue can be seen as contiguous to, and as a kind of extension of, other municipal “services” such as leisure centres and doctors’ surgeries. But this suggests nothing grander in aspiration than “art” understood just as a supplement one can take, like cod-liver oil, in order to function more effectively as a fungible work unit: as something barely distinguishable from any other kind of improving leisure activity, such as swimming or studying Spanish.

Is that all? Some might say the only thing that makes modern “art”, as per the joke of my old blog, is a context which signals to the viewer that they should perceive something as “art”. To take one famous example, a urinal is for men to pee in, until it’s signed and submitted to an art gallery, as by Marcel Duchamp in 1917. At that point it becomes “art”, or maybe a lightning-rod for debate about the nature of art, or indeed more recently a byword for the absurdity of recent efforts to “Westernise” Afghanistan at gunpoint. 

In this rarefied and highly intellectualised context, then, we might claim that it doesn’t matter if the toddler did the painting, or if the banana duct-taped to a gallery wall is the “original” banana or a replacement after another artist ate the first one. What matters is everyone playing along that this really is an “artwork”.

But if it’s all really that abstract, why the concerted efforts now afoot across the developed West to re-moralise art? No major gallery seems immune to curators hell-bent on “reimagining” and “decolonising” the archives, or public-art consortia commissioning works on leadenly pious progressive themes. Taken together, it all suggests (implicitly at least) an intuition that there’s still more to “art” than just whatever I like or find intellectually stimulating, or else (as in Plymouth) therapeutic leisure for “communities”.

When “art” is so contested, it’s difficult to see why this would be the case. For a clue, though, take a walk round the Sainsbury wing of the National Gallery, which houses medieval and Renaissance paintings. Do that in the right frame of mind, and you can sometimes catch a glimpse of what “art” used to be, before it was “art”. But it’s tricky; for unlike modern “art”, which sometimes only reads as such because of the gallery context, premodern paintings have to be considered outside the gallery context before they become legible. 

Even though, today, the National Gallery hangs these works as though they are “art” in the modern sense, many were originally painted for churches or private chapels. In their original context, these were not “art” in the sense of something nice to look at on the sitting-room wall. They were for spiritual use: devotional objects that happen to take the form of pictures. 

Artistic works with a spiritual orientation, such as paintings of scenes from the Bible, rest upon a radically different set of assumptions about their own grounding. The older stream of Christian thought within which such works were created believed these should point beyond human experience, toward what classical philosophy called the “transcendentals”: a dimension that now survives only in classical Christian pedagogy, under the heading “the good, the true, and the beautiful”.

It’s difficult to imagine a mainstream contemporary artist today talking in these terms. Why? The Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar argued that, especially since the Renaissance, the West has by degrees turned away from this transcendental approach to aesthetics, replacing it with a more human-centric approach to the creative arts. In the process, the arts came adrift from the divine. Churches were cleansed of imagery by Puritan iconoclasts; in the wake of this rupture, across the ensuing centuries, “art” flowered in its familiar secular form. 

These are the kinds of works that would, in time, occupy the “gallery” setting: artefacts that hover awkwardly between decoration and their former link to the spiritual world. This association still persists, albeit in degraded trace form, in the instrumentalist view of an art venue as a kind of spiritual cod-liver oil. But beauty gradually came to be understood as “for” only itself, then as something entirely subjective — and finally as irrelevant to the real domain of “art”, which is pure idea. In this outlook, it doesn’t matter if the banana gets eaten and replaced; there is no banana, just the idea of one. Now, though, this economy of abstraction may be approaching a terminal state — and, out the other side, showing early signs of re-moralisation. 

The most recent sale of the banana “artwork” was for a whopping $6.2 million, to a Chinese cryptocurrency entrepreneur, who vowed to eat it (again) as his contribution to the “work”. And what makes this so intriguing a development is the parallel between this kind of “art” and the cryptocurrency that paid for it. Cryptocurrency’s purely abstract, un-grounded economy and its mimetic process of assigning value bear a strong resemblance to the one in which this kind of conceptual art acquires value and is traded. 

Just as crypto has no material referent, and gains its value via the aggregate of purchasers’ belief in its value, so “art” in the banana or urinal (or toddler painting) sense floats largely free of any stable aesthetic, cultural, or even material referent. These meme-worlds in turn come together in the lively market for “artworks” in the form of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), such as the “milady” and “bored ape” genres. 

But this isn’t the only way the internet is shaking up art’s state of terminal abstraction. As well as threatening mediocre creators with a tide of AI-generated “slop” imagery, those deft enough to use it, and clear enough in their vision to build a following, are finding ways to thrive outside the state-art cartel — whether by connecting like-minded dissidents, as Adams observes, or by enabling sales directly to customers. 

And here, notwithstanding the slop-tide, there’s still demand for real work, by real artists. But the kind of art that enables an artist to build a platform in this environment is very different. The self-taught British painter Ross Baines, for example, paints portraits for MMA fighters, along with themes from pop culture and (and not very progressive) politics. Recent works in this vein include a portrait of the murdered American conservative activist Charlie Kirk, and a work based on a viral photo from the recent Unite The Kingdom rally in London, showing a man atop a stone lion on the South Bank, holding a cross and St George’s flag. There is no way on earth Baines would be able to sell prints of a painting from a Tommy Robinson rally if he relied on mainstream galleries to stock his work. 

The internet, then, is driving “art” out the other side of abstraction in search of engaged buyers. Is a painting of a Tommy Robinson rally “the good, the true, and the beautiful”? Debatable; but it’s a step in the direction of reconnecting painting with a moral vision. And the same trend is even discernible, albeit mostly negatively, in the kind of “woke” public sculpture conservatives love to hate. For unlike the kind of abstract public art that characterised the 20th century, the “woke” kind is progressive precisely in its attempt to “subvert” some variation of the good, the true, and the beautiful. And this still means tacitly acknowledging the transcendentals themselves. 

Meanwhile, outside the progressive arts-industrial complex, creators are less self-conscious about re-moralising their work. Baines isn’t my cup of tea, but he’s creating heroic iconography for an audience of (I’d guess) largely secular Right-wing men. His work seems to find buyers. Others, such as the podcaster and Greek Orthodox icon-artist Jonathan Pageau, are more frankly spiritual in their subjects — and likewise seem to find buyers. Notably, Pageau has done an end-run round the gallery ecology, selling his work exclusively via a digital portal he himself controls. But importantly, his work is not “art” in the modern gallery sense; it’s closer in intent and function to the paintings now, misleadingly, hung as “art” in the Sainsbury Wing. 

It would be a mistake to read any of this digitally enabled creativity as an “art movement”. It’s the opposite: a movement away from “art”, as such, in the anthropocentric sense we’ve grown accustomed to, toward a reunification of aesthetic and spiritual values. Whether in negative “woke” form or (however clumsy) dissident attempts at positive ones, the transcendentals are coming back. 

If there’s a struggle ahead, it won’t be over what “art” means, or which style of painting is desirable, or whether the banana is real. It’ll be over the fundamentals. What do we mean by “good”, “true”, and “beautiful”? The internet has freed a new generation of creators and visionaries to grapple with that question. We’d better hope they come up with something before the tide of AI imagery drowns us.

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