As one of the few Australian artists who makes a living as a sculptor, Todd Stuart has a better grasp than most on how art should, and shouldn’t, work.
Todd has lent an extensive voice to a host of issues surrounding contemporary art, not only in Australia, but universally. From its history, to its relevance, quality, value, and significance, art and sculpture naturally occupy front and centre awareness in Todd’s life.
Two and a half decade’s into his career as a sculptor, designer and project manager, Todd sees much in modern art to admire…and despise. He reflected on his lessons in life and art recently, after re-watching the 2017 U.S. television documentary Blurred Lines, a broad-spanned cinematic examination of the forces that shape contemporary art.
The documentary is a broad-spanned cinematic examination of the forces that shape contemporary art. It features some of America’s and Europe’s well-known artists, commentators, collectors, gallerists, critics, and academics. It captures scores of short interviews on the key issues that inform, unite, and divide contemporary art. And it delivers them as cameo performances, declining to take an editorial position, and leaving viewers to form their own judgements.
True artists are rare
Todd concedes that true artists—practitioners dedicated to their discipline to the exclusion of everyone and everything else—are rare. As rare are hermit-like artists with a universally recognised talent and a humanised appeal. The combination is so exotic because nearly all of us, talented or not, stumble at the first hurdle—ego.
His 25 years on the design and sculpture stage have taught him one major lesson. He believes that reaching an understanding of the value of art, especially sculpture, requires a long personal struggle. And that personal struggle is, paradoxically, not to discover the meaning and value of art in oneself, but its benefits and value to others.
Todd displays a richly personal and honest reaction to Blurred Lines. He reveals aspects of his character and career that are distinctly at odds with some of the components the film deals with.
Smoke and mirrors in the art industry
To begin with, he believes the film presents, if not represents ‘a confused understanding of the value of art because of all the smoke and mirrors in the industry.’ He says the art market has set up rules, beliefs, theories, and myths to create trading structures that maximise returns to the market and its tiny cohort of extreme wealth. It creates another tiny clique of galactic artists only too willing to share a bed with their ego-driven patrons. In the process, it isolates, alienates, and dismisses the vast majority of artists who produce equally and often more important work.
Fictions of the art market
Among the fictions the art market constantly promotes to underpin its own survival and prosperity are:
• Myth: Artists can achieve worth, recognition, and sales only through the most prestigious auction houses and galleries. Truth: These are a minute ‘boys’ club’ of outlets whose success relies on a minute coterie of the super-rich. In the 21st century, artists can access alternative marketing and sales outlets, if they only knew how.
• Myth: Artists are free-spirited romantics whose genius lies in their intense individualism. Truth: Artistic arrogance is a turn-off to the many buyers who inhabit the real world outside art’s affluence ghetto. Ignoring the real market—ordinary patrons and collectors looking for personal meaning and fulfilment in the art they surround themselves with—is a formula for failure.
• Myth: Shock value is vital to gaining and maintaining attention. Truth: Shock value is hardly new. Abraham Lincoln nailed it in September 1858 when he said: ‘you can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.’
In Blurred Lines, Laurence Graff says something similar. Graff is the English founder and owner of Graff Diamonds International. An avid art collector, Forbes magazine estimates Graff’s personal wealth at US$5.5 billion(1).
He has a forceful view: ‘A lot of contemporary art will be in the dustbin in ten years time, I think. It’s too much…’
• Myth: Well-off sculpture patrons only acquire through up-market dealers. Truth: Again, aside from the mega-wealthy whose art purchases represent unrestrained excesses of ego, even the well heeled who care about personal principles increasingly look to other means of acquisition to bypass parasitic middlemen.
Todd’s reaction to Blurred Lines today is simple and honest. He urges those interested in art and sculpture as expressions of personal values and historical principles to watch it for themselves. He believes it will expose the crassness, hypocrisy, and greed of the art market, while reinforcing the purity of genuine art itself.
Click here to read part two of Todd’s more extensive analysis of Blurred Lines as an interpretation of the forces at play in contemporary art, or speak to him direct on +61 3 451 518 865.
(1) https://www.forbes.com/profile/laurence-graff/#699befd4382a
