To the surprise and dismay of many gallery-goers, we awarded the Open Art Prize, worth £750, to Neill Fuller, for the painting above. The decision came in for a great deal of criticism. People hated Neill's painting. They didn't like the colours, they didn't like how it made them feel and they certainly didn't want it on their wall.
"So why," as one woman said to me, "choose that?"
Here's what I said at the preview:
To enter an art competition you need to be really courageous or deluded. But I expect that most artists are both.
Wassily Kandinsky said that you could learn the craft of carpentry and be fairly certain of being able to make a table, but that you could learn how to paint and never be sure of making a work of art.
And then there are the judges. In a wide-ranging, 20-year-long study of experts in numerous fields, their opinions were found to be no more reliable than the toss of a coin.
Aptly-named, David Picker, who worked in the motion picture industry for more than 40 years confided that if he’d said ‘yes’ to all the projects he turned down and ‘no’ to all the ones he took, things would have worked out about the same.
Certainly for me and my fellow judges, with 400 works of art to study and only enough room in the Black Swan for about 80 of them, the most effective use of our time was to say ‘No’.
I’ve entered the Black Swan Open on three occasions and scored two ‘No’s and a ‘Yes’. But it wasn’t ‘No’... ‘No’... ‘Yes!’ it was ‘No’... ‘Yes!’... ‘No’.
“David, you’re work wasn’t so much rejected as not selected.”
Beauty’s in the eye of the beholder, isn’t it? It’s all a matter of personal taste, surely?
But here’s the thing. It’s your work that is not being selected. Not you. You are still the same courageous, deluded, misunderstood artist you always were. But you’re also resilient.
The American composer, John Cage, came in for a fair amount of vitriol during his lifetime for his demanding, sometimes unlistenable music. When he was asked how he felt about all the criticism, he said that once he finished a piece, it was no longer anything to do with him. Like your children, you have to let your art go and find its own way in the world.
So how did we select? With Kandinsky’s warning in mind, what were the criteria?
Think about all the people who bet on the Grand National. How do they pick a winner? Most of them know nothing about form, so what they do is choose the horse’s name that they like the best. Now, you can pick a work of art like that. We’re all allowed to say what we like. But no amount of liking will make it a winner.
I’ll tell you what I was looking for.
I’ll tell you what I was looking for.
The work had to be well-made. By that, I mean that the sculpture, print, painting, ceramic was put together by someone who had an intimate relationship with their materials.
Whatever the work had to say, it had to say well. If it was fresh, startling or original, so much the better. If the work was beautifully executed, but merely re-hashed the same old artistic tropes, then it probably wouldn’t make the final selection.
Confession time. On one occasion we selected a work because the title was so amusing, another was just plain bizarre and we chose another because it was small.
Thirdly, it had to be intelligent. It had to be something that we could turn to again and again, rather than give us a temporary, rather superficial thrill.
Art evolved from primitive mating rituals and displays to become the highly-specialised way that we explain ourselves to ourselves. That’s how we bond. That’s what culture is. No matter how much you might like the idea, other animals just don’t do it. Culture, said Fitzroy Somerset, is roughly everything we do that monkeys don’t. Take tonight and all the conversation that’s been going on. If it was only about the £750 prize-money, nobody need say a word.
Finally and most importantly, for me, the selected work had to be aesthetic. A word that comes from the Ancient Greek, meaning to feel, to perceive, to be conscious. The opposite, of course, is anaesthetic. Art should wake us up, rather than put us to sleep.
The winner of the Black Swan Open Art Competition 2013 is Neill Fuller for 'Goin' Down To The Country'.
Thank you, Neill, for waking us all up.
Neill Fuller and the public reaction to his award-winning painting at Black Swan Arts is the subject of my next Seeing Things podcast for FromeFM. You can listen here.
