There is so much about the contemporary art world that I dislike, that I have always stood against, and yet there is also something here that I value beyond measure. The tension is another source of energy in this restless art, preventing me from settling into the illusion of knowing. Today, it turns on the idea of preciousness, another of those ambivalent, Janus-headed concepts that points one way to disaster and the other to salvation.
My life in community art began with murals and screen-printing—two ways of creating visual art that are accessible to most and, which was just as important to me at the time, resistant to domination and exploitation. In Western art, scarcity is a key source of value, especially monetary value. Paintings are the apex of its financial system because they are—at least in principle—the result of an individual artist’s physical labour, the trace of a performance that cannot be replicated, even if it can be reproduced photographically.
The introduction of industrial printing in the 19th century threatened this scarcity economy because the first print is neither better nor worse than the ten thousandth. The dealer’s answer is the artificial rarity of the limited edition. It has nothing to do with art. It is about markets, control and power—a manufactured preciousness that has since been extended to other forms of intangible value, including brands.
Everything I’ve done in community art, from the aesthetics of the work to making my writing freely available online, is a refusal to buy into that system and a defence of humanist ideas of common value. I reject structures that create artificial inequalities so as to allow some to get a larger slice of the cake at the expense of others. This kind of preciousness is just the art world’s way of doing that and it is a house of cards.
And yet. And yet and yet and yet.
I’ve spent my life in art because I believe it can have extraordinary value, and that value can be expressed in an infinite range of languages, forms, aesthetics and media. The source of that value is the care that the creators invest in what they do and how they do it. It might be a Roman glass funerary bowl painstakingly restored after excavation to its luminous perfection. It might be a single line of poetry handprinted on costly paper and sold at a substantial price that I saw recently. But if that is what matters to the creator I can appreciate work whose preciousness is intrinsic to its creation, not an artificial addition to manipulate the market. There is always a place, more than that, a need, for art that seeks only to create beauty, wonder, delight, to share an otherwise inexpressible feeling, to encapsulate the fragile preciousness of human existence.
I’ve never been able or wished to make such work but to encounter it is a joy. A world without beauty, without things done for their own sake to the highest possible standards, would be a cold, dead place. Almost as bad as one where such precious things are commodified, auctioned at inflated prices and locked away in storage facilities for future profit.
François Matarasso 