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If such a question can be asked, the answer is inevitably that in the future, art will be made by giant sentient robots hanging in deep orbit around the earth. One day, the art will drift gently down to the surface of the globe and wipe out all life on the planet. That's what done it for the dinosaurs. Using a Tandy radio scanner, Cornish tide charts for 2002 and a pair of nipple tassles used by my grandmother, famed through the West Midlands for her naked water dowsing, I sat down and listened to the radio network used by the robot empire. Worked out the specification of the art due down the space chute any day now in the future.
So let's take the British Isles. Give or take a few, there's, say, 20 art colleges about the place. They've been going, say, since the mid-sixties. They have to have been. If we stick to your fine art only and don't get into the business of your graphics and ceramics and that, we can say roughly that there's about sixty students per year. Something like that. One-thousand two-hundred per year across the place. Multiply that by the number of years this lot of colleges have been giving out their certificates for. Say, forty years roughly. You've got forty-eight thousand artists graduated. Give or take a few hundred for suicides and the usual, and given that most haven't had a proper chance otherwise to die off yet, society faces a massive overproduction of the artistic talents on a per year basis. More artists alive now than ever lived. Times that by the number of places doing art education round the world. Plenty. So let's forget about the talents for a minute. A massive overproduction of people trained in available art methods. That's factor one.
Factor two. And the tassles were fully horizontal on this one, so no disputation. According to the robots, the actual art bits: the site specifics, the paintings, sculptures, net sites, tape recordings, photographics, relationals and all that are just a ruse. So the statistics again. Reading this, I'm guessing you've been through the mill in some way? You have to have been. Say, two percent of the people you know or knew from the period of artists' artistical training will or are still getting on with the art work full time? Give or take a few. So what happens to the rest? The model of the Sunday painter, just got a bit better trained? You drop one percent or two in the garden shed for a weekend? Certainly, the universities have their own answer: "Culture Industries". But that's just shit to feed the politicians with. Give us the shekels and we'll give you the bastards Adorno moaned about, advertising, jazz merchants and such. Simon Frith called it "Art into Pop". Love it. It's a new department.
So where does all this art methodology go? There's one tier we know about. You can read about that stuff on paper every month. It's worth something. Then a shed-load of half-in half-out. So many. You could send out a call for ten thousand opinions on the future of the art that we don't know what it is yet and you'll get them smartly back into the intray of your fax client before you can say "nominate a theorist".
But look, "Art into Pop" was alright. Was it Pulp or Suede that did "Common People"?
That was good.
The key thing about factor two isn't the quantity of art personnel still acting in accordance with their initial training. Not the people. It's the ways of going about it. Take one of them, reflexivity. Something that investigates the way it does something at the same time that it does it. Now this is a top art methodology. The good thing about it is that it doesn't need to be routed through the actual institutions of art in order to do the business. So it's pretty vague? You can still do a stripe painting on that one as much as you can set up an open source radio station for the massive give or take the shuffling a few variables. The good thing about it is, it proliferates. You can do technical music, invent an economy, a slice of bread and a cup of tea: reflexivity the lot. And there's more little ways of doing things that can be pulled out of one place and set down another, plenty more. All the routines for making stuff happen and making it happen in more interesting ways: art methodologies.
But what happens with the robots is this: The moment that all these art methods that have left art and started moving about in different places, the moment that they explicitly start clocking each other, a bit of chit-chat, a colloquium, an anthology. The moment when the powers of art that have gone awry start to cross-fertilise. Then: boom. The thing from the robots arrives. Anything?
Matthew Fuller
London
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