So who says it’s art anyway?

So, who decides it’s art anyway?

Or whether it’s good art or bad art?

Not the conundrums I expected to consider on a morning’s North Beach ramble with Bella, my seashell-crunching terrier.

And all because of a discarded chocolate bar wrapper.

Tail wagging furiously, Bella led the way down the narrow sandy path and soon I could feel my tension dissipate with every scrunching step on the familiar carapace of crushed shells and sandy grains. 

Part of the routine is finding suitable shells for Bella to chase, flick and paw at until they are positioned just right for her to crack open with her busy little canines.

Forget your scallops, conches, spirals or oyster shells, it must be a perfectly weighted limpet.

Too heavy and she can’t break it;  too light and there is no challenge.

Just right and the ritual cracking of the shell pinioned between her front paws begins.

Looking ahead for her next shell, about thirty metres away I caught a vivid gleam of the most royal blue at the top of what looked like a long concave fragment of a razor clam.

As I drew closer, the white of the clam’s ribcage seemed to provide a perfect contrast with what appeared now to be melded shades of blue that had come together to form this one fantastic hue.

What a beautiful addition this was going to be to the shell and washed up curiosities I have long been scattering over the two narrow strips of gravel either side of our front entrance.

As I got nearer again, I thought I could discern what looked like stars, in a slightly lighter shade of blue, against the greater royal blue surface. Wooohhh! How fantastic!

A few steps later the penny dropped: I was looking at part of a Milky Way bar wrapper!

The bottom part was turned inside out, hence the gleaming white, and the rest was the familiar light blue stars on royal blue one sees on either side of the main logo.

So my beautiful shell was nothing but a mass-produced chocolate bar wrapper!

Not alone that, far from being a beach find I could treasure and honour with a place in our seaside terrace, it was a discarded piece of litter which I was going to pick up and bin.

So, the context had changed my view of this object totally.

But I began to wonder: did that beautiful shade of blue lose all value and aesthetic resonance because of what it had turned out to be used for, and how it was fabricated?

Is it all about context, intent, the skill of the artist?

Maybe the original design of that wrapper, hand-painted or selected by computer programme, should be considered as art.

Or does the fact it was done explicitly for commercial gain somehow devalue it?

Maybe there was a time when the skill of the artist was the main determining factor in its worth But that didn’t seem to work out too well for Van Gogh and a million artists starved of commercial or art establishment recognition.

Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder but artistic success is more often contingent on canny curation and marketing.

Artistic merit is closely tied to patronage gained or denied.

As for intent, what about Jackson Pollock, and how his bunch of random drips and splashes of paint on a canvas can be so sought after and highly prized?

And highly-priced.

Once upon a time, figurative art ruled and artistic merit could be more or less measured: the skilled artist produced statues or paintings that were better than those produced by lesser artists.

We the public stood, stared and admired.

There was still room for debate, but when it came down to it, artistic talent was obvious, whether produced by Rembrandt, Leonardo, Michelangelo or any of the great master.

Just like the football genius of Lionel Messi is beyond opinion and politics. The merits of lesser practitioners are open to debate and marketing skill. Or a good agent.

Photography, perhaps, made the figurative artist redundant, in a way, and our discerners and purveyors of public taste eventually found their metier in the world of abstract art.

But only when it started to sell: remember the opprobrium that greeted the early impressionists?

The trick with successful marketing seems to lie in getting on a bandwagon early — or starting your own — and having the necessary swagger, smarts and financial muscle to get those big bucks buyers on board.

The artist creates but the dealer creates the market. And takes a major cut.

Nowadays, artistic merit is much more open to opinion and influence, and the best, or at least the most persistent and well-connected opinion-shapers capitalise on that.

Hence we have art as investment, as a barcoded commodity to be sold like any other product.

Maybe if I got a pristine Milky Way bar wrapper and hung it up it would be art, or maybe I could paint it, like Andy Warhol and his Campbell’s Soup cans, and it would again be of artistic merit, and maybe even valuable?

PS: Have any of you read the Sunday Times article from October 8 last year on artist pals Salvador Dali and Marcel Duchamp? Here’s the link (long form only, I’m afraid) https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/dali-duchamp-surreal-art-royal-academy-london-7r7qz0bls?t=ie.

In it the writer, Laura Freeman, talks about Duchamp, “the man who put a moustache on the Mona Lisa, who submitted a mass-produced urinal for exhibition, calling it Fountain (1917), and started the merry dance that has brought us Carl Andre’s Bricks (1966) and Tracy Emin’s My Bed (1998). It is “art,” Duchamp declared, because the artist says so”.

So, you know who to blame!

Freeman refers also to Dali’s reputation and showmanship having detracted from proper appreciation of his sublime draughtsmanship, technical elan, and attention to the tiniest detail. Yes, we’ve maybe seen too many melted watches but I’ve always loved his stuff.

For me, Emin’s bed and Damien Hirst’s half cows and diamond-beaded skulls have always epitomised this emperor’s new clothes aspect of artistic merit as sales and marketing bullshine.

Nothing to do with demonstrable talent, skill or that old-fashioned thing of doing something so fantastically well that others just gaze on it in wonder.

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