taken from a very good article "Beyond the Froth and Jargon" in the FT by their art critic Jackie Wullschlager 24/11/12.
"The expansion of the artworld in the 1960s... rightly challenged the old elites... What could not have been predicted, however, was that within a generation of critical theory hijacking academe, a revolution in humanities teaching - employing semiotics, structuralism, the idea that culture and society form a system of self-referential signs and symbols - would empower a conceptual art that depends on curators and advisers to explain it. As this became a professional business, the chatter of deconstruction -lite morphed into a self-contained deliberately obfuscating gallery-speak that Robert Hughes already noted in 1989, "extorts assent as the price of entry" and urges a critical vacuum. "If all signs are autonomous and refer only to one another, it must seem to follow that no image is truer or deeper than the next, and that the artist is absolved from his or her struggle for authenticity", the late art critic wrote. ..
But the reign of theory is not inevitable. The best response is what Cyril Connolly called "the resonance of seclusion". Hundreds of artists still battle alone in studios to make authentic work that does not need a curator to explain it (...Frank Auerbach, Howard Hodgkin...) There is a new hunger for work that engages with lived reality... Every age has to cut through its own academicism - salon pictures in the 19th century, theory and money today - to get to art that is original and matters: a challenge but also a pleasure.
"The expansion of the artworld in the 1960s... rightly challenged the old elites... What could not have been predicted, however, was that within a generation of critical theory hijacking academe, a revolution in humanities teaching - employing semiotics, structuralism, the idea that culture and society form a system of self-referential signs and symbols - would empower a conceptual art that depends on curators and advisers to explain it. As this became a professional business, the chatter of deconstruction -lite morphed into a self-contained deliberately obfuscating gallery-speak that Robert Hughes already noted in 1989, "extorts assent as the price of entry" and urges a critical vacuum. "If all signs are autonomous and refer only to one another, it must seem to follow that no image is truer or deeper than the next, and that the artist is absolved from his or her struggle for authenticity", the late art critic wrote. ..
But the reign of theory is not inevitable. The best response is what Cyril Connolly called "the resonance of seclusion". Hundreds of artists still battle alone in studios to make authentic work that does not need a curator to explain it (...Frank Auerbach, Howard Hodgkin...) There is a new hunger for work that engages with lived reality... Every age has to cut through its own academicism - salon pictures in the 19th century, theory and money today - to get to art that is original and matters: a challenge but also a pleasure.
