On art, fame, and the mistaken belief that quality must eventually be discovered
Recently, I came across an article about people who apparently are not content with being successful in just one art form. Johnny Depp paints, Sharon Stone paints, Lucy Liu paints, Joni Mitchell paints and takes photographs, and Ed Sheeran drips paint onto large canvases. In Sheeran’s case, the name Jackson Pollock springs to mind about as quickly as Warhol does when confronted with a soup can. The obvious reaction is simple enough: now the celebrities have taken up painting as well. And since their names are already famous enough, galleries, buyers and media attention seem to follow almost automatically.
That, however, is a little too easy. More importantly, it reveals a rather peculiar idea of what an artist is supposed to be. As though a person had to decide at some point whether to be a singer, actor, painter, photographer or writer and then politely remain inside the drawer assigned to them. Artists search for forms of expression. And sometimes one form is not enough. A musician may discover that there are things he can say with colour that music cannot express for him. An actor may paint, a painter may write, a photographer may work with handwriting. Why not? Art history would be considerably poorer if artists had always been politely reminded to stick to whatever they started with.
Of course, there is another possibility. A famous actor may discover that his name can be sold not only on cinema tickets, perfume bottles and autographs, but rather successfully on canvas as well. The picture may then be less an act of expression than an extension of the product range. That happens too. But the question cannot be answered simply by pointing out that someone is famous. A celebrity can be a dilettante. A celebrity can equally well be an excellent visual artist. And an unknown person can produce appalling paintings despite having done nothing else for thirty years. Fame is not a measure of quality. Neither, incidentally, is the absence of fame.
Things become interesting only when art meets public attention. Because the famous beginner and the unknown artist do not start at the same point. Ed Sheeran can paint a picture today, show it tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow it may be discussed in international media. An unknown artist can work for twenty years, discard things, start again, change his visual language, study art history, develop techniques and eventually arrive at an unmistakable artistic position – and in the end his work may be seen by a few hundred people. If he is lucky.
This is not an accusation against Ed Sheeran. What exactly is he supposed to do about it? Put on a false beard, submit his paintings to a small artist-run gallery under the name Edward Miller and wait five years for someone to reply? His fame exists. It can no more be removed from the reception of his paintings than his musical career can. What is far more interesting is what this difference tells us about our belief in the workings of the art world.
Somewhere in the background persists the romantic notion that quality will ultimately prevail. If someone is truly good, we like to believe, he will eventually be discovered. Perhaps late, perhaps only after a few difficult years, but good art will somehow find its way. It is a comforting thought. Unfortunately, there is little reason to believe that it is true.
Artistic quality and public visibility are two different things. They can coincide, and fortunately they sometimes do. But there is no mechanism ensuring that they will. Visibility emerges from a complicated mixture of opportunity, relationships, institutions, money, geographical location, social interest, zeitgeist, persistence, marketing and a considerable amount of chance. Quality may help. It guarantees nothing whatsoever.
Conversely, fame can almost bypass this process. When Johnny Depp exhibits paintings, nobody first has to be persuaded that Johnny Depp is interesting. Several decades of film history have already done that work for him. The unknown painter, on the other hand, must first persuade someone simply to stop and look. Before the quality of the work can even be discussed, the artist has to solve the considerably more mundane problem that nobody knows the work exists.
The name therefore inevitably changes the picture. Imagine two completely identical abstract paintings. Beneath one is the name of an internationally celebrated artist; beneath the other, a name we have never heard before. It would be remarkably optimistic to assume that we would look at both without prejudice. With the famous name, we search for significance. We give the picture time. Perhaps at first we think we do not understand it, and for precisely that reason we look again. With the unknown name, our judgement may be made within seconds. One work receives an advance of trust; the other first has to earn it.
The image accompanying this essay offers a rather charming example. It was made by the young Queen Victoria, who drew and painted watercolours for decades. That does not make her engagement with art any less genuine. But one may nevertheless ask the slightly malicious question: would we still be looking at, cataloguing and preserving this perfectly charming watercolour today if its thirteen-year-old creator had not been the future Queen Victoria, but an entirely unknown girl in 1832?
That is not even particularly reprehensible. Perception simply works through context. We know what an artist created before, we know something of his development, his period and perhaps his intentions. A Picasso does not become meaningless when the name is removed, but we lose part of the context in which the work came into being. Trying to judge art entirely without biography and context would therefore be just as foolish as doing the opposite.
This is why the appealing question, “Would anyone buy this picture if Johnny Depp’s name were not underneath it?” does not quite reach the heart of the matter. Far fewer people would probably ever see it in the first place. And the problem begins long before anyone considers buying it.
With Ed Sheeran there is an additional aspect. His brightly coloured, paint-dripped canvases unmistakably recall Jackson Pollock. That does not automatically make them bad art. Art has been emerging from other art for thousands of years. Artists borrow, quote, contradict, vary, destroy and reconstruct. Nobody wakes up one morning as a completely unconditioned being before a virginal canvas. The more interesting question is therefore not whether Sheeran is copying Pollock. It is what, after Pollock, Sheeran adds.
At some point, influence has to become a language of one’s own. Perhaps that will happen. Perhaps it will not. Artistic development takes time, and therein lies another irony of celebrity art: the unknown artist often has to develop before anyone pays attention. The famous artist may receive attention while still developing. Every experiment, every dead end and every idea that has not yet quite succeeded can suddenly become a matter of public discussion.
Perhaps, then, celebrity is not the strangest part of these stories at all. Perhaps the stranger thing is the way we deal with obscurity. We readily ask whether a famous musician can sell his paintings only because of his name. Much less often do we ask how many remarkable works we will never see because the name beneath them means nothing to us.
There must be countless artists who have spent decades developing an individual language and who will nevertheless never hang in a museum, never be represented by an important gallery and never become the subject of an arts-page article. Some of them will simply not be good enough. Others very possibly are. We will just never know.
And perhaps this is one of the more uncomfortable truths about the art world: success can be an indication of quality, but it is not proof of it. Failure, on the other hand, proves surprisingly little. Between a significant work and its public significance lies a wide territory populated by gallery owners, curators, critics, collectors, algorithms, relationships, coincidences and, occasionally, simply the right person stopping in front of the right picture at the right moment.
Perhaps we should therefore spend less time mocking actors who suddenly begin to paint. We should look more closely. If the pictures are bad, we are perfectly entitled to find them bad. If they are good, we should be able to cope with that as well. And if we discover that we have spent twenty minutes looking at a mediocre picture simply because a famous name appears beneath it, while walking past the unknown artist in the next room after five seconds, then at least we have learned something.
Not necessarily about the two artists.
But quite a lot about ourselves.