Tom Stoppard stomps on contemporary art. What else is new?
You’d think the British Broadcasting Corporation would know that England’s eminent playwright Tom Stoppard has a low opinion of contemporary art in the UK. A report from this near-century old broadcaster sounded stunned when it characterized a Stoppard speech at the Royal Academy dinner last week as “scathing.” Standard-issue Stoppard would be the fitting description.
Stoppard lambasted the work of the Young British Artists Movement as “artless, self-indulgent and without spiritual meaning.” Such disparaging words are unremarkable for him. He routinely pooh-poohs Britain’s current art scene, having famously said, “Imagination without skill gives us contemporary art.”
The derision at the Royal Academy followed the announcement of this year’s shortlist for the Turner Prize, the annual award for British artists under the age of 50. Stoppard made clear he wasn’t happy with the choices. Attending the speech was the chair of the Turner Prize, Tate director Nicholas Serota, who couldn’t have been happy, either - though certainly unsurprised to hear the playwright’s put-downs like this one: “The term artist isn’t intelligible to me if it doesn't entail making."
Stoppard was referring to work by conceptual artists (who cares more about ideas than images) and who the Tate Prize regularly commends. For example, he mocked Tracy Emin’s award-winning exhibit My Bed (her actual mattress littered with remnants of her life – whisky bottles, cigarette butts on sheet stained with menstrual blood and semen) saying, "It is but a hop, skip and jump to Tracy's knickers."
While Stoppard may sound stodgy for bashing the UK’s contemporary art, there’s nothing old-school about his own work. I’m thinking of his re-imagining the bard’s plays “Shakespeare in Love” after Romeo and Juliet or “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern” after Hamlet. He also has no problem appreciating Marcel Duchamp for entered a men’s urinal in an art show in 1917. He called the urinal a valid attack on the orthodoxies of the time. But when it comes to conceptual art today, he sees it as outliving its usefulness to become an orthodoxy, too, and overly applauded by the establishment.
You could say the same thing about Pop Art. The movement, led by Andy Warhol, had a point when it first appeared in the ‘60s with its easy to read imagery - a welcome relief from the hard-to-figure out Abstract Expressionism that dominated the ‘50s. But to borrow Stoppard’s reasoning for ending Conceptual Art, Pop Art has outlived its impetus and today is as empty as the Brillo boxes that Warhol pictured.