Who's Afraid of Modern Artby 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 theTate Gallery should match that of the Director of the much larger Victoria &Albert Museum and of the National Gallery, where the pictures were regardedas being much more important, because, and here I quote, "the Director ofthe 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 inpublic appreciation of the visual arts. They would point to the localenthusiasm for Antony Gormley's Angel of the North, commissioned byGateshead. The winged steel figure rises up above the A1, a symbol ofoptimism and renewal. One might also cite the acclaim for Tate Modern, withmore than three million visitors in the first six months, and the arguablyeven greater achievement of Walsall's uncompromising new art gallery whichhas dramatically transformed the skyline, and seemingly the aspirations, ofthe town.

Have we really joined those European and American cities like Cologne andParis, New York and Chicago where the visual arts play a significant part inthe life of the community? And, following the cool logic of the CivilService 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should my salary now be reduced, should my personal"danger money" for dealing with the problem of modern art now be withdrawn?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 interestin all aspects of visual culture, including design and architecture, thechallenge posed by contemporary art has not evaporated. We have only torecall the headlines for last year's Turner Prize. "Eminence without merit"(The Sunday Telegraph). "Tate trendies blow a raspberry" (Eastern DailyPress), and my favourite, "For 1,000 years art has been one of our greatcivilising forces. Today, pickled sheep and soiled bed threaten to makebarbarians 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 enjoythe social experience of visiting a museum, taking in the view, an espressoor glass of wine, purchasing a book or an artist designed t-shirt. Many aredelighted to praise the museum, but remain deeply suspicious of thecontents.

Why should this be the so? Why is modern art apparently so intractable? Arethe artists simply emperors parading in their new clothes? What lies at theroot of a fear that we are being deceived or tricked? Is this art which canhave 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 someanswers I shall have to examine my own experience.

My Experience

In 1964 I was at school, planning to study economics and sociology, whencuriosity took me to the Tate Gallery to see an international surveyexhibition of contemporary art. It brought together the painting andsculpture of the previous decade, beginning with the late works of themodern masters, Matisse and Picasso, and concluding with the twenty-sevenyear olds Allen Jones and David Hockney. I was bowled over. Suddenly, artwas not just Turner and Constable, or Leonardo and Michelangelo, but objectsof 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'sYard, now a museum, but then the home of Jim and Helen Ede. In the ThirtiesJim had been a junior curator at the Tate and a close friend of artists likeBen Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and the critic Herbert Read. I discovered asmall house filled with works of modern art placed in a way which drew outtheir qualities and showed the relationships between them. For the firsttime I began to appreciate that works of art were not only objects of beautyand contemplation, but also had a physical presence which could charge thespace around them. And furthermore, Jim lent out works from his collectionto students to hang in their rooms. Who could resist? For a term I had aGaudier-Brzeska drawing on my wall.

I was hooked and decided that the visual arts should be my field. Not thatmy earlier study of economics has been without value at the Tate as I haveploughed my way through those challenges which face all arts organisationsin the late twentieth century: cashflow, retail, marketing initiatives andperformance indicators.

A painting or sculpture may be a window on the visible world; it mayheighten the sense of your place in that world or engender reflection on thenature of being. It may also provoke joy, laughter, anger or pain. Many ofus would associate these attributes with the art of the past: the experienceof space, light and colour in Chartres Cathedral, the muscular beauty of ayoung male torso in a Michelangelo drawing, the poise of Vermeer's Girlreading 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 theart of our own time.

Much modern art is, at first sight, unnerving. Personally, I rather welcomethis. In the contemporary world we have come to expect instant response andimmediate understanding. The very fact that a painting or sculpture can betaken in at a glance encourages the belief that everything should beimmediately comprehended. However, new art, like old repays prolongedattention as layers of meaning slowing disclose themselves.

Damien Hirst

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

Fear of modern art

Hirst's work raises difficult questions about modern art with which I'vebecome familiar over the years. Any defence of his work, or that of hiscontemporaries, will probably rely on one or more arguments that have beenused to explain modernism to sceptical - or cynical - critics for more thana century.

One common line of defence may be paraphrased as "it may look strange, butyou will soon get used to it". It argues that the transformation of a workof art from offensive novelty into an accepted part of the culture simply agrowing pain. Shock and dismay are transmuted through recognition andfamiliarity.

Essentially, this account is a plea for patience. It says that yourscepticism will gradually diminish and your fear will turn to love. Itpoints to the hostile critical response to Turner in the 1840s, or Ruskin's

adverse reaction to Whistler in the 1870s, and compares these with theesteem and affection in which the artists are now held. For the latetwentieth-century museum director there is no more certain prospect foraudience acclaim and sponsor success than those Impressionist andPost-impressionist artists who were so reviled a century earlier. And thesame transformation has now apparently occured for many early twentiethcentury artists such as Matisse and Picasso or Henry Moore and BarbaraHepworth.

As an account of the process by which new thoughts first subvert and theninfuse and shape the culture this argument has a certain plausibility. Artdoes break new ground and reveal new truths and such lessons are notconfined to the art of the twentieth or twenty-first century. All art wasmodern once. The new realistic space created by the young Masaccio in theTrinity fresco in Santa Maria Novella in Florence in the third decade of thefifteenth century was just as challenging to Florentine conventions ofdepiction as was Picasso's development of Cubism in the first decade of thetwentieth century. Just look at the depth of space in the Masaccio and thinkabout how shocking it must have seemed to people who were used only tofigures being presented on a flat gold background We can all learn to seethe world differently.

After thirty years of looking at new work in galleries and even newer workin studios, I am very familiar with the experience of being completely at aloss when confronting a new idea or image. How do I respond to a work whichhas emerged as a result of intense concentration, probably long reflectionand possibly many false starts? A visit to a studio never fails to test myresources. It constantly reminds me of the condition in which most peoplefirst confront contemporary art. This is a state of "not knowing", of "notunderstanding", of being disorientated or challenged by the unfamiliar. Oneof my responsibilities as a curator is therefore to remember that a visitorencountering an unfamiliar work of art in the museum is likely to be asunprepared as I was in the studio.

But I've come to realise that it's precisely when I am most challenged in myown reactions that the deepest insights emerge. Frequently, the greatestrewards come from the most unyielding. For many years, and like many Britishpeople, I had little feeling for the most expressive and roughest form ofearly twentieth century European painting, the expressionism of Germanartists around the First World War like Kirchner. In the late Seventies Iwas confronted by contemporary German painting of an expressive kind. Myinitial reaction was to dismiss the rough hewn sculptures and aggressivelypainted figures of an artist like Georg Baselitz. And, of course, Baselitzmade 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 thanprimarily as a likeness. Gradually, however, I found myself attracted tothis language of raw anguish and emotion. Later I was able to connect thework of Baselitz with the carved figures of German Renaissance limewoodsculptors and painters like Grünewald, whose Isenheim altarpiece showing theremoval of Christ's body from the cross is one of the most harrowing imagesin art. Recently, I came across Nigredo one of Anselm Kiefer's expansivelandscapes from the Eighties in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I wassurprised that this huge painting of the burning stubble of a razedcornfield 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, isa 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 twoinsistent questions which always surface in discussion. These are thequestions 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 questionsabout the absence of skill (defined as draughtmanship), the use ofunconventional materials, (anything which isn't oil, watercolour, bronze orstone), want of beauty, inappropriate subject or even the lack of a subjectaltogether.

Each of these doubts is founded on a belief that art deals only with visibleappearance, that the conventions of realism are the only appropriate form ofdepiction, that everyone worthy of the name "artist" should be able to drawlike Michelangelo or Raphael, that everyday materials or subjects cannot beused to make elevated art, or that art should be first for the home, andonly later for the museum. Craft, I would argue, is not an essential part ofart, though skill is. That skill may indeed find its expression indraughtsmanship or carving, realised through the hand of the artist, but itmay also be directed towards the selection of material or the choice of anexpert fabricator. Art can be made by instruction, even ordered on thetelephone as was much of the American artist Donald Judd's immaculatelymachined sculpture. Though the sumptuous copper and the glowing red floor ofthis sculpture make it clear that Judd was not just interested in coldperfection.

In the same way art does not depend on its materials alone and there is nointrinsic reason why art cannot be made from new materials, including 'low'materials such as brick, plastic rubbish or even elephant dung. When CarlAndre chose brick as the material for a group of 8 sculptures in 1966 hischoice was deliberate. But he was not simply trying to be provocative.Following a canoeing trip on a New Hampshire lake he wanted to make asculpture that was as level as water. He chose an everyday material, butcarefully selected an ochre fire brick used to line ovens rather than aconventional building brick. He wanted to show that when a given number ofelements was arranged in different combinations they would create verydifferent sculptures, even though the volume of each was identical. The 120bricks were therefore stacked in 2 layers and arranged in 8 combinations of3 x 20, 4 x 15, 5 x 12 and 6 x 10 making shapes ranging from an elongatedrectangle to a near square, according to whether they were abutted on theirlong or short sides. Andre called these sculptures Equivalents, to drawattention to the visual paradox between the different shapes and equalvolumes.

And there is also the objection to works of art whose size seems to makethem fit only for a museum rather than for a domestic space. I have neverreally understood the objection to art which is specifically made for agallery or museum, and so cannot be collected by an individual or takenhome. It is rather like saying that all music should be confined to thechamber work or novels to the short story. Must we dismiss the excesses ofopera or the three-act play? In the early nineteenth century artistsfrequently made works for a broad audience rather than a private patron inmind. Constable's Hay-Wain, which had such a profound influence on Delacroixwhen it was first shown in the Paris salon in 1824, was conceived as apublic demonstration of a new commitment to nature as directly observed.Gericault's Raft of the Medusa was a courageous, political statement abouthuman suffering following a scandalous shipwreck which caused uproar inParis and was almost immediately transported for exhibition in London andDublin.

Is it "good" art? (contd.)

For many people, however, it is abstraction which creates the impassablebarrier to accepting modern art. Narrative helps to propel the viewerforward. Naturalistic space is comfortable. We may now just be able to copewith non-narrative structures and non-naturalistic space. We all recognisethat profile and full face represent different facets of appearance andPicasso's invention of Cubism allows for the simultaneous presentation ofboth. But when the artist abandons visible appearance, as in Mondrian'sblack grids on white grounds filled with balancing rectangles of colour,

many people feel left behind. And yet the rhythms of Mondrian are those ofnature. The harmonies are those which guided proportion in classicalbuildings and Renaissance churches. Rothko's glowing maroon Seagram Muralsat the Tate may, like Turner's late canvases, appear to be "of nothing" butin their brooding depth Rothko suggests another world. As one four year oldchild 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 beunconventional, but which may nevertheless be perceived as "beauty". Artthat does not directly treat with aesthetic considerations presents analtogether different set of hurdles. And this is where the going gets reallytough. Duchamp's Fountain, an ordinary urinal presented as a "readymade", orfound object, in an art gallery challenges some of our conventions aboutcraft, subject and material as components of art. Its shapely form is a playon male and female sexuality, but the urinal also raises questions aboutwhat art itself constitutes.

Michael Craig-Martin's An Oak Tree, a glass of tap water placed on a glassbathroom shelf, is a similar case. In an interrogation placed alongside thework the artist asserted "It's not a symbol. I have changed the physicalsubstance of the glass of water into that of an oak tree .... I didn'tchange its appearance .... The actual oak tree is physically present, but inthe form of a glass of water." We may not "like" Craig-Martin's work, but itcertainly reminds us that the appreciation of all art, including painting,involves an act of faith comparable to the belief that, throughtransubstantiation, the bread and wine of holy communion become the body andblood of Christ.

However, even if we can accept that new art may break old conventions in itsmaterials, size, form and subject or lack of aesthetic interest, the secondof my two major questions about contemporary art remains a challenge. "Howdo we decide which art is good?".

An honest curator will admit that judgement is fallible, especially for artmade yesterday. Art endures if it has meaning for subsequent generations, aswell as for the present. Part of the value and importance of the work ofMichelangelo or Turner derives from the way in which it inspired orchallenged later minds. We cannot yet know what use later artists andaudiences will make of the artefacts and objects which we create today. Inthe present we can only ask that contemporary art offers compelling insightsinto our own condition or raises compelling questions as, I believe,Craig-Martin does. But even if art acquires respectability and affectionover 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 makethem fit only for a museum rather than for a domestic space. I have neverreally understood the objection to art which is specifically made for agallery or museum, and so cannot be collected by an individual or takenhome. It is rather like saying that all music should be confined to thechamber work or novels to the short story. Must we dismiss the excesses ofopera or the three-act play? In the early nineteenth century artistsfrequently made works for a broad audience rather than a private patron inmind. Constable's Hay-Wain, which had such a profound influence on Delacroixwhen it was first shown in the Paris salon in 1824, was conceived as apublic demonstration of a new commitment to nature as directly observed.Gericault's Raft of the Medusa was a courageous, political statement abouthuman suffering following a scandalous shipwreck which caused uproar inParis and was almost immediately transported for exhibition in London andDublin.

Rachel Whiteread

In the autumn of 1993 Rachel Whiteread's House became the focus of intensedebate about the purpose and value of contemporary art. All of Whiteread'sworks are casts of objects taken from everyday life: the sinks and baths ofour daily ablution, the beds in which we sleep, make love and die, thelibraries which contain the wisdom or the trivialities of an age. Each ofher objects is the product of craft, a loving death mask carefully takenfrom a discarded, worn out or exhausted item. House was such a cast on amonumental scale. Part mausoleum, part springboard for the imagination, thisconcrete cast of the inside of a Victorian house stood alone, the lastbuilding in a terrace on the Bow Road, like the final tooth in an ageingmouth It was also an object of wonder in its size, and in the way thatchanging daylight illuminated the unexpected beauty of the concrete. Therewas also the strange experience of half recognising the forms, thepeculiarities and the details of a late Victorian terrace house, which isthe place in which so many of us have lived out our lives. For me House wasnot the "folly" described by a respected Times columnist, but a work of artof great vulnerability and of haunting beauty, which encapsulated a personaland a shared experience.

Gillian Wearing

In her fifteen minute video 10-16, Gillian Wearing presents seven adultsmouthing the words recorded in interviews with seven boys and girls aged tento sixteen. The words are confessions about rites of passage, the pressuresof growing up. Transposed incongruously onto the body of an adult, these

confessions are in turn amusing, wry and deeply disturbing. Although I haveseen this work perhaps ten times in the past five years, I find myself stillunprepared for what it tells me about the hopes and fears of young peoplegrowing up in London in the 1990s. It is an essay on the way in which we areall constrained in our experience of the world by class, gender, social andcultural background. Wearing achieves this in 10-16 with directness,sympathy and a sense of identification. Extraordinarily, she allows you toobserve and to understand without becoming a voyeur.

Anish Kapoor

Finally, Anish Kapoor's Untitled 1990 is two deep blue bowls. There is nonarrative, only a pure sensation of colour, form, texture and space.Kapoor's art deals with the physical and the emotional. His mature workbegan twenty years ago with a recollection of mounds of pure pigment in hisnative India. He was attracted by the density of colour combined withimpermanence. His sculptures are works in which to lose contact with dailyincident and to be pulled inwards into a deep void, to be submerged incolour. For me, his sculptures are modern objects of contemplation, inducingan 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 lessprofound than those gained from the experience of earlier art.I would arguethat such insights are sufficient in themselves. However, in recent yearsthere has been an increasing tendency to justify the arts, for instance thefunding of museums, by reference to the contribution which they make toeconomic or social regeneration rather than by reference to their culturalimportance. This is what we recognise now as 'the Bilbao effect', followingthe success of the Guggenheim Museum which has transformed a decliningindustrial city into a destination for cultural tourism.

But museums are not simply engines of economic and social change; they arethe places in which we examine our social and cultural histories, wherevalues are challenged, or where we look for an experience which is differentfrom that of daily life. Like schools, theatres and places of worship theyare an essential part of a civic existence, contributing to a sense of ashared community.

The Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao

Similar arguments can be made in the field of education. Under successivegovernments there has been an insistence on measurable outputs and anincreasingly narrow interpretation of learning. As a result the visual artsand design have been gradually excluded from the secondary nationalcurriculum except for those students who are dedicated to art. Where thevisual does feature in general education, it is often justified by thecontribution that it makes towards improving literacy or numeracy. It has anundeniable value in those causes, especially in engaging children who mayhave encountered difficulties in pursuing more conventional paths todeveloping language skills. But visual awareness is not incidental. It willplay a part in all our lives, it will affect the quality of our urbanenvironment, it will determine the appearance of the homes in which we liveand it will lead to an understanding of the way in which the mediamanipulates meaning through its use of images. The visual is no lessimportant than the three 'r's'.

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

The value of new art (contd.)

As a recent study has shown, central government in France spends on the artstwice as much as in Britain, even allowing for the Lottery, which is notproperly government money anyway, while regional expenditure in France isfour times that of British local authorities.

Across the country great museums like the city art galleries in Leeds andGlasgow are withering, not for want of imagination, but for want ofresources which can unlock new opportunities. In England, beyond thecapital, only one museum receives significant funding from centralgovernment, the National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside. Elsewheremuseums are almost entirely funded for revenue purposes by local authoritiesor universities. This contrasts markedly with the network of regionaltheatres, many of which received central government funding through the ArtsCouncil, even if this is too little. Furthermore, unlike libraries, museumsdo not benefit from the protection of being a statutory service and pressureon local authority funding has made them easy targets for spending cuts.

Resources are required for all our galleries and museums, in order to renewbuildings, attract and retain skilled staff and develop the confidence thatresults in innovative exhibitions and well used collections.

The Lowry, Salford

Nowhere are resources more urgently needed than in collecting and presentingthe art of our own time where failure to act now will result in permanentloss. I believe that the contemporary visual arts can offer meaning,enjoyment and challenge to those who have the opportunity to encounter themon a regular basis. But you cannot expect people to understand or beenriched by something which they encounter only rarely. In a small countrylike The Netherlands a population of fourteen million is served by modernart collections of international standing in Amsterdam, Rotterdam,Eindhoven, Tilburg, Otterlo and the Hague. In the UK we have two collectionsof equivalent quality, the Tate and the Scottish National Gallery of ModernArt in Edinburgh. Elsewhere, as in Manchester and Newcastle, collections ofmodern art are almost dormant. For many years the principal source of newacquisitions has been the Contemporary Arts Society, an independent charitywhich buys contemporary works for distribution to regional museums,. Butthey are only able to give each museum one work every four years. Thetabloid, even broadsheet, view will prevail until it is challenged by awider experience of exhibitions, acquisitions and commissions ofcontemporary art, as well as many more of the very successfulartist-in-residence schemes in schools and hospitals.

My task, and that of other curators, is to build the confidence that willallow visitors to accept that an understanding of contemporary values andideas will often be provoked by new forms of art. The most radical art hasalways been disturbing and for this reason has been attacked byconservatives. Art should overturn as well as confirm values. We need towelcome and to be able to live with uncertainties in our lives. We are notgoing to return to an era in which 'art comes to its senses'. To argue thatart can 'get back on track' is a delusion. There will not always be ananswer 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 contemporaryBritish sculpture in the arena of a world famous British visual icon. (Onecritic was quoted as saying that "It is about as appropriate as a sculptureof Dame Edna Everidge in Westminster Abbey.") The stage was set for anotherround of criticism of today's art and artists. But public reaction to MarkWallinger's Ecce Homo did not follow the expected script: there was debateand speculation, but also sympathy and identification.

I called this lecture 'Who's Afraid of Modern Art?', and my answer is: notnearly as many people as the sceptics would have us believe. While modernart may not be for everyone, it should be for anyone. That is anyone who hasthe curiosity to explore how their own view of the world and of themselvescan be enriched and challenged by the vision of others. There is no need tobe afraid of living in the present.