"Taste for art in England is at bottom a fashion," wrote Henry James, "a need of luxury, a tribute... to propriety, not an outgush of productive power." Could this still be true? Some of the most imaginative work in British galleries goes into exhibition design and, often enough, the exhibits themselves are objects of design. Manolo Blahnik's stilettos, which seem on such intimate, adoring terms with women's feet, were glimpsed at the Design Museum earlier this year amid a ceiling-high tunnel of shoe boxes; Mario Testino's magnified photographs of orgiastic celebrity were crowded erotically together on the walls of the National Portrait Gallery last year, and Guy Bourdin's coolly angular fashion photographs currently hang at the V&A along claustrophobic, diagonal walls.
Given the success of such shows, it is no surprise to learn that in coming months we can look forward to an extravaganza devoted to the commercial inventions of Giorgio Armani at the Royal Academy, nor that we have just embarked on a summer of shows almost exclusively devoted to photography-the medium that, despite its capacity for raw truth-telling, does triviality best.
Is there no evidence in contemporary British art of James's "outgush of productive power"? Received wisdom has it that one outgush took place just a decade ago, when Damien Hirst and a new generation of British iconoclasts burst onto the scene under the patronage of Charles Saatchi. A visit to the new Saatchi Gallery at County Hall, however, leaves you not at all sure how much of this material was creative outgush and how much merely fashionable overspill.
The Saatchi Gallery is a fascinating place: plenty of exceptional works, not a single great artist. Almost all the art on display, even when successful, suffers from the shrieking tone of the place. Dead rats, cigarette butts, mutilated genitals-everything is theatrical and histrionic, yet blankly impersonal. There is no shortage of cleverness and striking effects; what is missing is a sense of work that complicates over time, that has kept the artist as involved and absorbed in the making as it might absorb the viewer in the looking. When people accuse Saatchi of foisting an ad-man's sensibility onto contemporary art, it is precisely this lack of complication over time they are lamenting.
Saatchi followed his nose. He hit on some genuinely exciting work. He has done more than anyone to yank art in from the periphery of cultural debate in Britain. Yet he cultivated an idea of art as showmanship, as a quick-fix, 30-second grab. In this sense, Damien Hirst, to whose artistic longevity Saatchi has pinned his hopes, is emblematic.
Unfortunately for both men, the mini-retrospective Hirst is accorded at the new gallery finally reveals him as the absolute fizzer he is-an artist of almost staggering shallowness and cynicism, whose only good idea was to suspend dead things in formaldehyde. Even this he managed to put to good use in just two works: the notorious shark (all but ruined now by the bleaching effects of time) and the spliced and shuffled segments of a cow and steer displayed in a row of vitrines. How could people be so easily taken in by such a promiscuously minor talent? Perhaps Henry James's idea of the taste for art in England as a "tribute to propriety" holds perversely true, with the indolent taste for scandal and celebrity having taken hold as a bizarre new form of etiquette.
From Britart to Baghdad
This year has also seen the financially embattled British Museum celebrating its 250th anniversary and-almost simultaneously-the Iraq Museum in Baghdad brought to its knees by pillaging. Coincidentally, the Metropolitan Museum in New York has just mounted an exhibition called "Art of the First Cities," devoted to Mesopotamian objects not unlike the ones thousands of people went out of their way to see in the near eastern galleries at the British Museum during the recent Iraq war.
In a review of the Met show, Jed Perl, the art critic of the New Republic, wrote: "Many people are afraid that they will seem embarrassingly idealistic if they dare to suggest that there is a largeness to art and a grand sweep to art history." Confronted with the cultural losses across Iraq, it is easy to get sentimental about the idea that aesthetic worth necessarily inheres in these objects simply because of their animating distance from us. But, as Perl says, it's worth risking some embarrassment to recognise in the Warka vase stolen from the Iraq Museum a mysterious unfolding, over time, of a beauty capable of endurance.
There is optimism and excitement in British art right now, despite its philosophical malaise. If a lot of the excitement is manufactured by editors, ad-men and PR personnel, it is also true that there is a hunger for art that amounts to something more than a trend. It's a hunger that persists, even as the taste for art as fashion continues to be so generously indulged. If it were somehow possible to reinvest the present with a sense of duration, a historical sweep and stretch, we might be able to enjoy the shallows less guiltily, and find ourselves more frequently lost in the depths.
