A narcissistic bore — portrait of the artist today

Two ambitious volumes of interviews with artists have just been published. They are similar, but different. The first is by Richard Cork, a veteran with a Cambridge education who enjoyed a distinguished stint as art critic at the Times. He is nicely old school: chatty and avuncular. The second is by Hans Ulrich Obrist of London’s Serpentine Gallery, ageing Swiss boy wonder of the art fair circuit with a head like a pink dome-nut. I have heard Obrist speak and could not detect any meaning in what he said, although he certainly said a lot. In classic Q&A template, Cork and Obrist tell us what it is to be an artist today.

Artists once served, in turn, the religions of God, of beauty, of sex and political or social subversion. In all of these categories very great masterpieces were realised. A dead Christ, a Venetian hooker, a Dutch townscape, a cathedral in a meadow, and a gas station, all became things of thrilling beauty. But at some point in the last 50 years, art ceased, on the whole, to be either beautiful or interesting. Rem Koolhaas, a Dutch architect who, black-clad in Prada, bestrides the ‘art world’, enjoys discussing EU administration in his interview with Obrist.

Who can say why artists are now so boring? Maybe in a global culture European painting and sculpture seem provincial. Certainly, Obrist’s manic dealings with artists depend very much on the easy availability of international flights. Or perhaps when consumers receive aesthetic gratification from so many sources, ‘fine’ art becomes redundant. Today, art has long since left the studio or atelier and is out on the street, yet there are still ‘artists’, many of whom are forced up dead ends of performance and conceptualism. Accordingly, there’s often more a sense of caution or fatigue than exhilaration in these interviews.