What Is Art? (European Green Capital 2015 Review)

I saw a poster recently, urging Bristol to “keep it going” in reference to that heady year when Bristol was Europe’s Green Capital, 2015.  There were so many seismic shifts caused by this public recognition, and many schemes hatched as a result, that it’s hard to pick just one.  Given my artistic pretensions, however, there was an obvious personal choice.

For a long time, I’ve been confused as to how to define art.  It’s always seemed like a subjective value judgment, like when people looked at Tracey Emin’s ‘Unmade bed’ and declared “That’s not art!”

Perhaps I’m supposed to know it when I see it.  Can I dismiss something as Not Art based on individual merit?  Is there a commission or a set of rules, or something?  Is there a Buzzfeed page I can check?

Evidently, I don’t know much about art…

Luckily, however, Philistines can rest easy.  These formerly nuanced and difficult issues were resolved last year, by an unlikely arbiter: Bristol City Council declared that while paintings on a public wall are not necessarily Art, boats in a wood definitely are.

The momentous news was delivered by The Bristol Post, declaring, with their customary regard for open-minded impartiality: “Bristol has been too tolerant of graffiti taggers”.

In a handy guide, the council advised would-be art critics that “Graffiti is usually done for self-promotion”, whereas “art is meant to communicate to everybody”.

The Post article was not an opinion piece, so we can be 100% certain that it is not only fully researched but also absolutely authoritative.

The Arts Council, too, bowed before the judgment of Bristol’s council and local newspaper, funding art installations to celebrate Bristol’s Green Capital year.  (So that's the justification for the hitherto esoteric “boats in a wood” reference above.) 

Now that the “green year” has passed, we can all go back to not even pretending to care about the environment and build more roads, removing pesky trees and community gardens (which are definitively not Art, so there’s no controversy there).  What a relief…

Presumably, we can also look forward to council employees roaming the streets looking for chalk drawings on pavements which could be “primitivist folk art”, which visitors can be charged a fee to look at.  Council staff, following extensive art history training, will have discretion to decide whether the crude daubings are actually markings for childrens’ games, which should be photographed and used in promotional literature aimed at selling the space to property developers, along with the rest of the city’s playgrounds.

Getting that European recognition for efforts to improve the environment was quite a coup for a city with huge traffic problems and the worst public transport in Europe.  You might even say there’s an art to this kind of thing.

It’s a shame no one from The Bristol Post or the city council was available to document the event when cave-dwellers first drew on walls, because they would have been able to properly distinguish between those cavemen who were communicating with everybody and those that were just marking territory for self-promotion.

The former standard model for legitimising art was: once it appears in a gallery, it’s definitely Art.  (Except all the stuff with line drawings or photographs, which anyone could do.)  Most reasonable people will surely agree that if a piece of work has Arts Council funding and no one really gets it, it must be Art.

So, local hero and former tagger Banksy, and Luke Jerram ( the fella with the boats), are communicating with everybody – using our shared environment – not like people that just write stuff on walls.  To communicate with people.  In our shared environment.