I was reminded today, while listening to the New Music Show on Radio 3, that art now is a professional job; that people, normally wealthy, middle-class people, go to an art school, to study a course often headed by a failed artist (that is, someone who needed a job in teaching because they could not 'survive' as an artist without one) to gain a generally meaningless qualification, because anyone can pass an art course as long as they turn up, then leave to create cultural content to specific briefs for architecture, businesses, local government, festivals etc. with the same élan and motivation as say a builder or interior designer. Not to belittle those jobs; builders, with genuinely honed skills and academic knowledge, may feel miffed at being lumped in the same category as artists, who may qualify with no actual knowledge or skills apart from the random anything that they did during the two years of art school, but artists do necessarily learn how to explain the meaning of their work in the context of history and contemporary practice.
Explaining the meaning of art in the context of history and contemporary practice usually kills it as an artwork, because explanation kills emotion; the enigma of art is one of its lures. The professionalisation of art filled gaps in society; when architecture, businesses, local government, festivals etc. needed lots of reliable people to create 'pretty things' for their ugly functional things. They needed the 'artist' to tell everyone how these pretty things were 'good art', and the colleges saw a demand for people who wanted to be artists.
But all of that isn't really what art is. All of that is a sort of fake art, for commerce. Academic fake artists wouldn't make art for no money. For a real artist, art is a life or death matter, there must be a creation from the soul, in a very much romantic way. Even being asked to create something for someone else is a sort of pollution of this unseen, almost divine, 'sublime', drive.
It annoys me that the academic fake artists get any sort of attention from the arts media; but part of the ploy of the professional is to prove that their art is valid, prove by merit of their fake qualifications and their ability to explain the meaning of their work 'in the context of history and contemporary practice'. Also, the 'arts media' is a broad church and there's room to critique and highlight everything. One could make a valid arts magazine only about book covers, or snack taglines, or bath-tile patterns, anything. In the arts media, things are at their worst when other academic artists critique others, fake on fake, most often done for the very commercial reasons that professional art exists for; and both for reasons at odds with the motivation and soul of real art.
The essence of art, perhaps even the central purpose of art, is to create something for nothing except itself. Real art has no purpose except human to human communication: art is the expression of love in new terms. This is the opposite to professional art, where the aim is to create anything for a specific function/place/time, then justify it as 'art' by explaination, academic rigour, and essay. Those things will never be necessary in art, and, even if attempted, would serve only to harm it.
