The comments are fairly straightforward, and similar to what I have heard and read before.
'Not what I would call art' says one. Another opins on a 'pretentious load of attention seeking claptrap'.
These are reader's comments on our website, commenting on a story I wrote about the latest exhibition by one of Scotland's leading contemporary artists, Christine Borland. In her new show at the CCA, she and collaborator Brody Condon are exploring the possibility of using the bodies of two donors, once they have died, for an art project. It is a rigorously researched and painstakingly organised work of conceptual art which is both fascinating and potentially ground breaking.
But as those reader comments show, conceptual or contemporary art still can agitate, annoy and alienate the public. Frequently, in conversations with people outside the art world - friends, relatives, acquaintances - when I mention contemporary art, Tracey Emin's My Bed (1998) and even Marcus Harvey's Myra from 1995 (a controversial portrait of Myra Hindley made from a child's hand prints) come up. Noses twitch and lips sometimes curl. The shock waves caused by the sometimes brash British contemporary art explosion in the 1990s still resonate. Some art writers still tilt at contemporary art as if it was a beast they can slay (they can't). And curators at major modern and contemporary art galleries often speak of the need to engage and inform the wider public.
And, it seems, in Scotland some fruitful work has been done in this regard. The final visitor numbers for Generation, the nationwide series of exhibitions of Scottish contemporary art, now released, show success: it attracted 1.3m visitors last year and early this year, across 60 venues. These visitors saw work by more than 100 artists from the last 25 years of Scotland's artistic scene. A collaboration between the National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) and Glasgow Life (which runs the city's museums and galleries) as well as Creative Scotland, the project also generated record attendance figures at several venues. The NGS had more than 390,450 to the exhibitions at their three Galleries in Edinburgh, there were 33,598 at the McManus Galleries in Dundee, 8,666 at An Lanntair in Stornoway, over 16,000 travelled to Mount Stuart and 11,787 to the Pier Art Centre in Orkney. The show at the RSA in Edinburgh was, from this view, a brilliant display.
Did Generation engage with the public? Well, those numbers seem healthy. And, to add to those, 65,000 young people took part in "learning and engagement activity" across the venues. The generationartscotland.org website attracted 770,587 page views. One of the aims of Generation was to inspire another generation. Obviously it will take some time to see whether that has happened, and how that inspiration will be expressed by future artists is yet to be seen. But Generation should be applauded for what it attempted to do. It opened some eyes and perhaps some hearts. Attention seeking? In some respects - certainly. Claptrap? No.
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