There is a depressing state of shopping for art in Cambridge. Many new galleries are selling the most derivative art one could imagine. For a time I thought that most of it was chinese made or AI, but it seems there are people making these works. I pity writing about them, but it should be done, there is a taste vacuum in the city where for the same price you could have a piece by an artist with history, legacy and talent.
The most curious discover in these galleries is the progress of the “Unique Studio Edition with Textured, Hand-Painted Finish”. What does this mean? In some cases it’s a print that has been painted with brush marks of varnish, in others it’s a giclée with pallet knife paint added. Tacky stuff. But the meaning is so vague that it could be a print and then paint thrown over the top to mimic detail.
I should say, if you read this and feel rather insulted by my points of view, then good. I am not sure you are the target for my blogs that are aiming to highlight the good in the past. I feel the need to write this to point out the ghastly modern taste. This sort of art is so disposable has no talent, it is the outcome of the Coldstream Report of 1960, fifty years on. This was when William Coldstream presented a paper to government about how art should be taught in schools. Moving away from traditional painting and sculpture, where students would study from a model and learn how to paint. Art Schools since then have been in a slow rate of decline, where a pupil with little talent will learn how to market the poor productions they make as something radical.
Cambridge is a city where the university own a large amount of the shops and have very few cares if the units remain empty due to the high costs. So it is a city with fewer small shops selling antiques and twentieth century art. So the only businesses that survive are large shops that sell posters or pages from the books of David Hockney as if they are numbered limited edition pieces commissioned by the artist.
I have been trying to rationalise a conclusion but there is none, this is just a rant about how the sort of artwork found on a gift card is packaged and sold as high art. I tend to feature work more to my taste on this blog, so other posts might help you more.