Contemporary art has “styled itself as resolutely anti-elitist”
Peter Aspden says it’s no surprise that contemporary art is so popular, as it’s so easily consumed, and Frieze Art Fair “pulsates with newness”, attracting thousands of curious visitors.
You may find it hard to believe but there was once a time when contemporary art barely made an impact on London’s cultural scene. When I worked at the Whitechapel Gallery in my gap year during the hot, dry summer of 1976, I was thrown into a strange and mannered world that made little sense to me. Exhibitions were sparsely attended, while private views devoted to obscure artists were stilted affairs, their dominant tone stern and introspective.
The art itself felt esoteric and self-satisfied but no one worried that only a very few people would understand what it was trying to say or do. During the day, the gallery’s most frequent visitors were local tramps seeking respite from the heat. In my six months at the gallery, I only ever saw one celebrity, the then 31-year-old Helen Mirren, who left quite an impression – for reasons entirely unrelated to art.
The art scene today could hardly be more different. Over the course of the past 15 years, the art of the moment has become the dominant cultural force in much of the western world. Institutional behemoths such as the Tate and Guggenheim museums fill their spaces with the dream demographic: young people with money to spend. Auction prices spiral into lunatic realms. Art fairs combine the brashness of the supermarket with a conceptual trickiness that used to be the sole province of leisured intellectuals with too much time on their hands.
The Young British Artists who brought glamour and notoriety to the art scene in the last decade of the last millennium have aged, prospered and become fixtures of the new century. One of them, Damien Hirst, is said to be worth £215m. Critics insisted that their prominence would fade; instead, they heralded a profound shift in the cultural life of the country. Our new-found taste for contemporary art is the bubble that refuses to pop.
You may find it hard to believe but there was once a time when contemporary art barely made an impact on London’s cultural scene. When I worked at the Whitechapel Gallery in my gap year during the hot, dry summer of 1976, I was thrown into a strange and mannered world that made little sense to me. Exhibitions were sparsely attended, while private views devoted to obscure artists were stilted affairs, their dominant tone stern and introspective.
The art itself felt esoteric and self-satisfied but no one worried that only a very few people would understand what it was trying to say or do. During the day, the gallery’s most frequent visitors were local tramps seeking respite from the heat. In my six months at the gallery, I only ever saw one celebrity, the then 31-year-old Helen Mirren, who left quite an impression – for reasons entirely unrelated to art.
The art scene today could hardly be more different. Over the course of the past 15 years, the art of the moment has become the dominant cultural force in much of the western world. Institutional behemoths such as the Tate and Guggenheim museums fill their spaces with the dream demographic: young people with money to spend. Auction prices spiral into lunatic realms. Art fairs combine the brashness of the supermarket with a conceptual trickiness that used to be the sole province of leisured intellectuals with too much time on their hands.
The Young British Artists who brought glamour and notoriety to the art scene in the last decade of the last millennium have aged, prospered and become fixtures of the new century. One of them, Damien Hirst, is said to be worth £215m. Critics insisted that their prominence would fade; instead, they heralded a profound shift in the cultural life of the country. Our new-found taste for contemporary art is the bubble that refuses to pop.