Is ‘protest art’ art?
I certainly do not always agree with art critic Waldemar Janusczak, or the florid manner in which he expresses his views, but he is spot on in attacking the politicisation of the Turner Prize.
On his website he writes:
“The use of the Turner as a propaganda vehicle for ultra Londony evening class lectures has become seriously off putting. The Tate doesn’t even bother to pretend any more that it isn’t using art to turn us into better people …“
“People don’t go to art to be turned into better citizens. They go to art to have their eyes pleasured and their hearts touched.“
We have considered colonial British oppression in our course on international views of art.
Last week we went to the Indian sub-continent and the final artist we studied was Pakistani Rasheed Araeen who organised the exhibition The Other Story in 1968.
He complains he could not enter the “Imperialist” institutions that control art.
Ironically – and I almost had to laugh – Caribbean artist Sonja Boyce, who also bangs the oppressed drum, had a go at him for being anti-women.
Nan Goldin made the news this week as another activist highly critical of the Sackler family.
A new book criticises them for the fortune they made in opioids.
The Sackler family have given squillions to museums, notably a whole wing of the Royal Academy.
Perhaps in the same spirit of returning so-called looted art this money should be returned and the art world left to its own devices – or more probably the taxpayers’ – to survive in the post-pandemic world.
