These Things I Have Learned

By Sebastian Smee

`Degradation of taste, colour, composition ... have kept pace with moral depravity'

Denis Diderot, 18th-century critic, on Francois Boucher

An art critic's life is not just about airing opinions, writes Sebastian Smee

ART critics, like other critics, are paid to have opinions. That's their first duty. And if they can't rouse themselves to get off the fence, form an opinion and express it, they are surely in the wrong trade.

And yet, opinions on their own can become banal: they are (as you quickly discover if you try reading blogs) the opiate of the insecure.
The more you discover about art, the more interesting facts become. Facts give you something you can actually hang on to.

Of course, art is not a branch of science, which is why, for critics, it can be deadly to get too carried away with facts. Nonetheless, one of the great privileges of being employed as an art critic is that you are paid each week to learn about a subject -- art -- that you already love.

Here are some of the facts, or little parcels of wisdom, I have been amused or astounded by since I took up the reins of my job in late 2004.

I learned that Vivienne Westwood once said: ``You have a much better life if you wear impressive clothes.''

I learned that Edgar Degas once said: ``What a delightful thing is the conversation of specialists! One understands absolutely nothing and it's charming.''

I learned that an interchange at the southern end of the new Westlink M7 in Sydney is marked by a 25m-high pile of dirt, compressed into a triangle-based pyramid. Asked why he wanted to build a pyramid at Liverpool, its designer, Colin Palworth, replied: ``Why build a pyramid at the Louvre?''

I learned from Alex Danchev, the biographer of Georges Braque, that ``if an ism can be said to be invented by a person, then cubism was invented by Georges Braque. It was Braque who painted and exhibited the first cubist pictures. It was Braque who established cubist motifs. It was Braque who established cubist space It was Braque who set the tone. And it was Braque who led a second revolution -- the move into 3-D, making the first paper sculptures in 1911 and the first papiers colles in 1912.''

I learned that in Rajasthan in the 18th century, a maharaja's paraphernalia of power included a parasol, a peacock fan, a whisk made of yak tail hair and a sun disc, surrounded by black felt or feathers, on a pole.

I was told this by Robert Storr, the curator of the next Venice Biennale in 2007: ``I think politics and art are both ill-served by bad political art. There's an ocean of it out there. I do think
the politics of our present situation are extremely dangerous for many people in many places. But I think art should be not humble about politics but aware that its grasp of politics is fragile, relative to the changes that are actually happening. I also think that artists should act politically as citizens and not simply make political art as an alibi for not doing so.''

I learned that the Australian performance and new media artist Stelarc once wrote: ``The body as an organisation is obsolete.''

I learned that Basil Burdett, the man who organised the 1939 Herald Exhibition of Contemporary French and British Art, counted among his friends Picasso, Leger, Vlaminck, Cocteau, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, and that with the help of his boss, Keith Murdoch, he was able to secure loans from curators and scholars such as Kenneth Clark, Alfred Barr and Rene Huyghe. I read that Burdett saw the success of the show as proof ``that the public here [in Australia] is far ahead of many of its alleged leaders and most of its entrepreneurs''. I also learned that one angry artist made his view clear by smuggling a pile of dog shit into the exhibition and captioning it as a piece of sculpture.

I learned that the notion that goldfish have an attention span that lasts just a few seconds is a slur on goldfish, whose memory is actually far more impressive.

I learned that on Anzac Day in 1967, a year after the Australian artist Sam Fullbrook married, when his wife Janice was expecting their first child, she killed herself. She had been staying with her mother and Fullbrook didn't find out about it until the following month. When he did, he went to pieces.

I learned from Hilary Spurling that as Henri Matisse got older, he became concerned about eye strain: ``His oculist explained that the eye could not fabricate pigment fast enough to keep up with the speed and intensity of Matisse's response to colour.''

I learned that the 18th-century critic Denis Diderot wrote this about Francois Boucher: ``I don't know what to say about this man.
Degradation of taste, colour, composition, character, expression and drawing have kept pace with moral depravity.'' And elsewhere:
``That man there only takes up his brush to show me tits and arses. I'm happy enough to see them; but I don't like it when they are so brazenly touted.'' I also learned that, after Boucher's death in 1770, Diderot wrote: ``I said too many bad things about Boucher, I retract them.''

I learned that Sidney Nolan, along with his fellow art students at the National Gallery School in Melbourne in the 1930s, furtively spat on Arthur Streeton's post-1900 work when they passed it in the National Gallery.

I read that an art dealer at London's Frieze Art Fair told The Art Newspaper: ``I have to have the option to lie to collectors about what's available or quote them prices ten times what other people paid.''

I learned that Lloyd Rees called Margaret Preston ``the most naturally conceited person I ever knew'', and that Preston once said:
``This country needs its artists, writers and poetesses, and when they settle in foreign lands they are betraying the land of their birth''; and later: ``Let us have no travelling for our budding
artists!''

I learned that in 1967, Picasso's La Belle Hollandaise was stolen by an art lover who had heard unfounded rumours that it was to be sold. The rumour was untrue and, a week later, it was returned to the Queensland Art Gallery unharmed.

I learned that the Art Gallery of NSW spent $2.1 million last year on a painting by an early 17th-century Italian painter I was embarrassed never to have heard of: Giulio Cesare Procaccini.

I learned that Judy Cassab once said: ``Marrying an unselfish man was the most significant moment in my life.''

I learned that Cecil Beaton came out as gay while at Cambridge, where he played, according to John Richardson, ``the parody of a 1920s sissy ... trying to lure inebriated undergraduates -- the better born, the better -- into bed''. Later, Beaton said: ``I have always hated fairies collectively. They frighten and nauseate me, and I see so vividly myself shadowed in so many of them.''

I learned from Matthew Bogdanos, the American in charge of recovering items stolen from the Iraq Museum after the fall of Baghdad, that the misreporting of the number of objects stolen (about 15,000 pieces, not 170,000 as was first reported) meant that ``once the lower numbers became known, many governmental and private organisations quickly moved on to other crises, thereby depriving the international investigation of essential resources and funding''.

I learned that, several years ago, Ricky Swallow listed these influences on his work: ``hobby stores and the techniques required to construct models; special effects used in old-style fantasy films; the changing design of entertainment technology; the timeline perspective of the film Planet of the Apes; Logan's Run with its scenes of an overgrown Washington; the bleakness of closed-down, unkempt service stations; the idea of constructing a hoax; plastic TVs and computers in IKEA; the working practices of other artists; the beautiful ability of everything we own to eventually end up as hard rubbish; stories of buried film sets; good design; good architecture/bad architecture; Power Peralta Skateboard graphics of the '80s.''

Source: Australian, The, JAN 06, 2006