A photographic imagination

How did ‘Art bollocks’ become the default way of writing about visual culture? Could Mao have the answer?

The results of this conceptual approach are not so much art as a commentary on art – and, inadvertently, a commentary on the shortcomings of art education. And one should not discount how readily egalitarian assumptions and economic influence can be brought to bear in this realm. Whereas creative genius is, by definition, unequally distributed and often expensive to develop, theoretical facility is cheap to disseminate and all too easy to regurgitate. While very few of us can hope to create things of extraordinary beauty, rather more of us can learn to ‘reference’ things of beauty or, better yet, to say why beauty doesn’t matter. Interviewed in The Guardian last year, artist Gavin Turk said: ‘My work is full of quotations – as though I’m a dj recycling other people’s work. I’m just doing what everybody else does, but more explicitly. What really interests me is the charade of creativity.’