BOOKS & ARTSWhen it comes to art that is being made
right now, the volatility is even greater.
Recently, I’ve been looking at Private View,
a lavish coffee-table book published in 1965.
It was intended as a snapshot, as the subtitle
puts it, of ‘The Lively World of British Art’,
including gallery owners, writers and many
others, but mainly artists.
In many ways it’s a marvellous volume,
with wonderfully evocative photographs by
Lord Snowdon. Quite a few of those featured
are still highly familiar: Bridget Riley, Francis
Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud. But
dozens of names are now known only to spe-
cialists in the period. Some of them even the
experts would have to look up.
David Hockney, who got a few pages in
Private View, once observed that ‘very few
people would know what the truly significant
art of today is. You’d have to be an incred-
ibly perceptive person to do so. The history
books keep being changed.’ That’s demon-
strably true. And it’s possible to climb a long
way up the pole, then slip right down again.
Some years ago, I was lining up to go
into a lunch in honour of the artist repre-
senting Britain at the Venice Biennale. I fell
into conversation with an elderly man stand-ing behind me in the queue whose face I
couldn’t quite place. After a bit he remarked
in a melancholy tone: ‘In 1970, this lunch was
given for me.’ It was Richard Smith.
During the 1960s and early 1970s Smith,
and his friend and art-school contempo-
rary Robyn Denny, were among the bright-
est stars in British art. The glittering prizes
— Venice, Tate retrospectives while they
were still in early middle-age— were theirs.
Then it all went away. There are 85 works by
Denny in the Tate collection, but only one is
currently on view (which is more than there
have sometimes been).
Towards the end of his life, Smith reflect-
ed sadly: ‘I was the right kind of artist for
that kind of time. Then... I don’t know.’
Denny kept telling him, Smith said, ‘Our
time will come, Dick. Our time will come.’
But he’d been saying that for a long time:
‘years and years and years’.
So the answer is that it would be entire-
ly conceivable for Hirst — mega-rich and
colossally well known though he is — to melt
away like mist. Indeed he has several resem-
blances to Makart and Smith. Like the for-
mer he is a master of self-presentation. Like
the latter, it seems to me, he had good ideas,Opera
Small wonders
Michael Tanner
Pagliacci; L’enfant et les sortilèges
Leeds Grand Theatre, and touring until
18 NovemberIt has been a reasonably good week for
peripatetic opera-loving female-underwear
fetishists. In La bohème at Covent Garden
Musetta slipped out of her knickers and
swung them round, as everyone, except
me, mentioned in their reviews; and now,
in Leeds, in the first of Opera North’s ‘Lit-
tle Greats’, what laughter the actors in the
drama got was from Tonio and others trying
on Nedda’s bra.
This new production of Pagliacci by
Charles Edwards, sadly under-attended, was
possibly too ingenious. It is set in a rehearsal
room, and we see the first day of rehears-
als and then the final run-through. It kind of
works, but anyone unfamiliar with the opera
would have found it mysterious, and some of
the time I felt I was on shifting sands. Still,
the central thrust of this sole real master-
piece of verismo hit one powerfully, from the
superbly delivered prologue by the Tonio of
Richard Burkhard to the final despairing cry
that the comedy is over. There are occasion-
al vulgarities in the score, the last few bars
being the most egregious case. But mainly it
is dramatically pungent, wonderfully melo-
dious, and frequently inspired. Its usualbut only for a short period (approximately
1988–93 in Hirst’s case; 1959–63 in Smith’s).
He certainly managed to provide just
what a particular era wanted (future histori-
ans may call it ‘the plutocratic period’). His
auction of new works at Sotheby’s — held, by
eerie coincidence, on 15 September 2008, the
day Lehman Brothers collapsed — realised
£111 million. But his prices and reputation
have been bobbing up and down since then.
His current exhibition, Treasures from
the Wreck of the Unbelievable, which fills
two large museums in Venice until Decem-
ber, looks like an attempted relaunch. It has
pulled in the crowds but received some hos-
tile reviews (‘undoubtedly one of the worst
exhibitions of contemporary art staged in
the past decade’ according to ARTnews).
The numerous exhibits, fabricated at a cost
of millions and priced accordingly, might
well sink back down into the cold, green
depths of collective indifference.
The good news, from Hirst’s point of
view, is that what disappears may always
resurface. Makart, Smith and Denny may
yet make a comeback. To echo Hockney, it
would require an incredibly perceptive per-
son to know what, if anything, being made
today will fascinate future centuries.‘The Japanese’ by
Hans Makart,
1870–75PHOTO BY VCG WILSON/CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES