It's not really Christmas until I have been able to have a good old what-is-art rant, so please humour me and pour yourself an eggnog while I begin.
In London, the annual Turner Prize, worth £20,000 (which is 1.8 billion in Canadian dollars and pays for one night and three local phone calls in a medium-chic London hotel, as long as you don't open the minibar) was just awarded to an artist called Martin Creed, for his cleverly titled installation The lights going on and off, which, as you have no doubt heard, consists of an empty room in the Tate Britain gallery with the lights programmed to switch on and off every five minutes. This caused some predictable scoffing, which is largely, it is often said, the purpose of the Turner Prize. One outraged artist (who, strangely, has not won the Turner Prize) threw eggs at the installation. Then the controversy was upstaged by Madonna, who, in the weirdest twist in this whole postmodern assemblage, was asked to present him with his award (Madonna? Why on earth? Why?) and swore on live television. To most people, this was a far more interesting scandal, and the public's attention promptly switched.
In our own backyard, a mini-scandal has just occurred at the Banff Centre, where Mexican artist Israel Mora completed, with the help of much public money, both Canadian and Mexican, a masturbation project that resulted in a cooler containing seven vials of his own semen (something about the continuum of time, the public and the private, blah blah). Had this piece been exhibited in a gallery like so much dull art of this kind (I can't tell you how many bodily-fluids-in-jars shows I've seen, nor how many this-is-how-many-days-there-are-in-a-week pieces), no one would have taken offence, because normal people don't go to galleries, but Mora insisted on wheeling it around Banff and also strung it between two trees. From what I understand, the shocking vials were not visible, but a label on the outside of the cooler described its contents. But the people of Banff were still displeased and the president of the Banff Centre has apologized to them and the predictable Canadian Alliance critic popped up on cue ("an affront to any decent citizen," blah blah blah).
It's reassuring, in a way, that such old-hat works still have the power to enrage people and to bring up the "is it art?" debate, many decades after their innovative and radical nature has become stale, and many decades after the debate has been resolved. You can hardly call something "not art" when the only reason you heard about it was that an art gallery funded and displayed it and an art critic wrote about it in the art section of a newspaper. The battle is over: It's already art, whether you like it or not. As soon as the question of its artness even occurs, it is part of a discussion that is inherently artistic; it is, henceforth, irrevocably and perpetually a part of the history of art. People said certain Impressionist works weren't art, and now even Canadian Alliance members buy posters of them for their living rooms. You can't get away from it.
Indeed, even the woman who threw eggs in the Tate is interacting with the work in a way that is part of the art, in a way that installation and conceptual artists have always encouraged: In this case, the fact of people standing in an empty room wondering what the art is or getting angry about it is itself the work of art. At a Dada "anti-art" exhibition in Paris in the early 1920s, patrons were given access to an axe and encouraged to use it to destroy the art if they felt like it. That action was then itself the work of art that was unfolding.
That also illustrates that such conceptualism is hardly the most radical or original movement today. Conceptual art began in 1913 with Marcel Duchamp's bicycle wheel and reached its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s with philosophical manifestoes by Sol LeWitt and others; dramatic performances by Chris Burden and Vito Acconci and Gina Pane; body art and performance art; and Fluxus and the Actionists. There was lots of grisly self-mutilation during this period, far more extreme than Mora's paltry masturbation. And some fun pieces, too: Fluxus guy Ben Vautier made a painting in 1971 that simply says, "L'art est inutile; rentrez chez vous." (Art is useless; go home.)
Since then, conceptualism has become established, indeed institutionalized, as the Modern Way: You can take courses in it in university (the respected Nova Scotia College of Art and Design seems to specialize in it); it's rewarded by national art prizes; and it's what any angry young art-school graduate is probably already rebelling against. Art it certainly is; exciting, not always.
Sometimes it is. Often these installations do have a physical presence, an old-fashioned aesthetic quality, that is more than the sum of their parts. The Globe's art critic, Sarah Milroy, visited Creed's piece in the Art Gallery of Hamilton (where it and other Creed works are on show until Feb. 3), and reported that the changing of the lights did provide eerie sensations, such as the impression that the room was smaller or larger. This is interesting, and shows that I shouldn't discuss a piece, even a simple idea piece such as this, without actually experiencing it.
Having said that, I acknowledge that the Mexican artist's semen opus really doesn't sound as if there's anything nearly so magical about it: It's a cooler that's wheeled around a town. What else is there to know? Like so many dreary I-did-this-one-thing-every-day-for-12-months-and-recorded-it works, it's a didactic little symbol piece, about as sophisticated as mime. It's meant to make some laborious point that really should have been written in an essay. And it's rendered even worse, through no fault of the artist, by a helpful news release from the Banff Centre that said, "Mora intends to undertake a private act and examine the ways in which it intersects with a public context." This is what PhD students say when they mean "he wants to do something private and make it public." They're taught in cultural-theory classes to say "intersect" and "context" as promiscuously as possible (we're lucky we didn't get "problematize" and "discourse" together, too).
That, as John Berger would say, is mystification. And it is, sadly, such a big part of contemporary conceptual art, which is entirely academic in tone and import. It comes out of theories that come out of universities, and it exists to illustrate points that easily could be published in academic journals instead. In fact, it often is.
It should be noted, as an interesting comparison, that Madonna's explanations of why she wanted to present the award easily topped any artspeak in sheer incoherence. She said, ". . . Not because I think that one artist is better than another, but because I want to support any artist who not only has something to say, but the balls to say it." Okey doke. She also declared that "everyone is a winner" when presenting the award (to the winner). Perhaps the stupidest person to become massively famous -- and that's a highly competitive field -- Madonna surely beats all in the emperor's new clothes stakes. Her success is far more baffling to me than Martin Creed's. Pop is far weirder than high art that way.