The New Art

The New Art scene, I must say, got old fast. A kind of tunnel vision soon set in whereby a painting was either New Art or Not New Art. Those works identified as Not New Art were dismissed as unimportant or somehow of lesser ambition. I admit to participating in this mindset, although for the ethically pure reason that I wanted my gallery to make money. So I would do my best to label whatever I had hanging there as “New Art,” from the most experimental mixing of media to the most hackneyed scene of houseboats floating idyllic down the River Moth.“That’s an ironic New Art statement,” I would say of the hackneyed houseboats, mentally genuflecting before the latest potential customer. “In the context of New Art, this painting serves as a condemnation of itself. In the strongest possible terms.”I have to say I loved the stupidity of it all—there is nothing more refreshing than playing an illogical game where you understand all the rules, no matter how nonsensical they might be. I became adept at selling New Art and promoting New Art and, more importantly, applying labels.But, ultimately, this sense of play around the term New Art became our downfall. You become what you pretend to be, for one thing. I could pretend I was pretending all I wanted, but eventually I began to believe it all at some subconscious level.More importantly, while everyone’s attention was on the New Art, real innovation was occurring outside of our inbred, self-congratulatory little circle. Real imagination meshed with real genius of technique was bypassing and surpassing the New Art altogether, sometimes with a chuckle and a condescending nod. This was the era during which Hail Jorgins first displayed his huge “living canvases,” complete with cages for small animals to peep out from. Sarah Frayden began to create her shadow sculptures, too. But neither of these qualified as New Art, in part because the galleries they showed in had no connection to the New Art.By the time we realized New Art was Old Art, the only one who had the option of escaping the death of the term was the only one who had never uttered the words in the first place: Martin Lake.I was left with a long line of has-beens who, squinting, had emerged from their tunnel of tunnel vision to realize that far from being on the frontier, they’d been in a backwater, as obsolete as the first generation of motored vehicles the factories had trundled out fifty years ago.