大象传媒

Good morning. Some people will have bought shares in Royal Mail because they judge it a safe, sensible investment. Others, even the small investors who were the only ones allowed to buy the shares, will have bought them in the expectation of a speedy sale and quick profit. That, I suppose, is the world of money. But it would be sad if that approach came to dominate the world of art. Next week London will be full of art fairs and open galleries. There will be sellers and buyers there genuinely concerned about good art. However, the arts writer Charlotte Higgins also finds some of it 鈥渁 fantasy world, a parallel universe鈥� full of the jetset, hedge funders and so on. She says some artists joke about making a work before lunch so they can buy a designer suit in the afternoon, and talk wryly about 鈥減ainting money鈥�.
All that is very different from the artists I know, who can struggle over a work for years, and who put their very being into it.
For most people art is first of all about what gives pleasure. We just like it. And though public taste tends to be somewhat conservative, it did not go far wrong in voting Turner鈥檚 鈥淭he Fighting Temeraire鈥� the greatest painting in Britain.
Personally, however, I look for something more than simple pleasure in a work of art. I find that some artists can change the way I see, or feel, about things. And I am quite clear that great art cannot be produced without a fierce artistic integrity. Matisse鈥檚 dealer once told the artist he could easily sell a conventional still life painting of his, indeed lots of them, but as Matisse wrote:
I knew that if I yielded it would be my artistic death. Looking back I realise that it required courage to destroy the picture, particularly as the hands of the butcher and the baker were outstretched waiting for the money. But I did destroy it. I count my emancipation from that day.*
There will always be genuine artists, like Matisse, who sometimes at great personal cost, break the artistic mould, and it is not easy for the rest of us to distinguish these from the charlatans. The modernist poet and painter David Jones, a devout Catholic, wrote 鈥淚 have been on my guard not to condemn the unfamiliar (and, referring to Christ)鈥�for it is easy to miss him at the turn of a civilisation鈥�. If, from a Christian perspective, Christ has been raised to a universal contemporaneity, then he is there at the cutting edge of modern art, in the unfamiliar. But recognition of genuine art, like its creation, requires integrity.

* Hilary Spurling, The Unknown Matisse, Penguin, 2000, p.278