VISUAL ARTS/NORTH

"Rock on"

One major record company will soon be putting onto the internet all the CDs that they have released and will release. Everyone will then have free access to download their favourite music, create their own CDs and discover music they might never buy.

Wouldn't it be great if it was like this for all art forms? I suspect though that galleries will remain more interested in selling to an élite audience than in widening the audience. Established artists will be more concerned about prices than about having that work engage with a vast non-buying public.

The visual art world has taken a few tentative steps into the digital world. The trouble is, it seemed to want to colonise it. In true western style a tired art world wanted to take but not put anything back. Hopefully in a postdigital art world it will be possible to see how new technology can open things up. Art should be as ready as music to widen its audience, change the way it engages with audiences.

Matt Lennon, in Belfast curating the Horsehead project, says

"move the artists not the art."

This means that the artists are, if only briefly, part of the society which the work is being made for and shown to. They can address current issues and react to what is going on around them. Some artists, including me, had their work vandalised but I realised that half a mile away people were rioting on the lower Ormeau Road. If the work and not the artist had been transported, then that would have terminated my contribution. As part of the wider community I have been able to learn from the Horsehead experience: I made a second piece of work, which I hope will attack some of the problems. To work in a way that will avoid vandalism and even learn from and poke fun at the vandals.

What about the importance of the art object? Well there probably always will be ‘shops' selling anything from the boy with a tear in his eye to a grey canvas. From a painting of the west of Ireland to the artist's shit. Buy what your social status dictates and place it in your house to reinforce your friends' view of you. True contemporary art will always engage more with the world around it than with the shop window.

Of course some works will filter into museums and become part of our history of visual culture. This visual culture will be forced to be more democratic through new technology. This technology makes it possible to view work from around the world—to walk around a sculpture in New York, or around a building in Italy, in one's own home. It is important to have the actual objects. How else could the experts disagree about the provenance of a work? Or about the importance or relevance of a work? The experts are constantly changing their opinions about these things. Art history like all histories is written by the victors and each generation has its academic victors.

Can we now release the contemporary visual artist into the large democratic world out there? No longer expecting them to create precious works for precious places. An artist's ability to go somewhere to create a work and to address current questions is more important than an artist's ability to produce a symbol of social status for an undemocratic audience. "Move the artist not the art." Let's rock ‘n roll…

Brian Kennedy