Con-art and the end of irony

Next time you go to an art exhibition opening, look out. You may be in for a lot less than you bargained for.

There’s a little something we often overlook about art galleries and exhibition openings. Sure you go there for the free booze, hors d’oeuvres and to meet artsy chicks you can talk about ‘Baudrillard and the End of Authenticity’ to and still seem like you’re flirting, but few of us know that these galleries have a sinister side to them – a side so dark and sordid, an agenda so malevolent, that you’re not going to like what you read. That’s right, these so-called ‘gallery openings’ are nothing but fronts for pushing art… Conceptual Art.

All around Beyoğlu, the insidious forces of Conceptual Art – or ‘Con-Art’ – have been wreaking havoc on the aesthetic sensibilities of our city’s denizens. And the scourge is spreading. Even Nişantaşı – long a safe and secure bastion of tasteless and uninspired Figurative Art (or ‘F-Art’) slopped into existence at the hands of bored housewives – is already in danger of being swamped by thick-rectangular-designer-eyeglass-wearing hordes with a penchant for postmodernism and visual irony. Not even the working classes are safe… Con-Art has even infested abandoned warehouses and workshops in areas like Karaköy, where overeducated artists look upon average working class people as mere ‘Organic Repositories of Super-Ego Subjectivity Reproduced in Pre-Ideationally Superimposed Modes of Self-Authenticating Collective Signification’. The menace is all too real.

‘Not so!’ I hear you say. ‘I’ve been to a million gallery cocktails and have yet to see any art!’ But you’re fooling yourself if you think it’s not there. Trust me, next time you go to one just do what you normally do – sip your cheap wine in a plastic cup, nibble your inedible canapé before tossing it into the nearest potted plant, ask someone for a cigarette before being told you can’t smoke inside, pretend to listen as a guy with a bowl cut and a lisp explains how he’s a synophynomurfflemurffle artist… But while you’re doing all that, secretly look around you, past the obligatory busty-girl-with-tight-black-turtleneck-sweater, past the balding guys with shaved heads sporting their shiny millennium combovers, past the drunken obnoxious diplobrats… There, you see it now? That’s Con-Art.

Your eyes adjust to the inexplicable horror around you. You see twelve video screens all showing the same image, with one of them blinking on and off, and it’s called ‘Ghost in the System’; you look away in disgust only to have your eyes set on a big yellow smiley face icon with a spray-painted frown where the smile should be, and it’s called ‘Ideal Happiness’. You want to scream ‘BULLSHIT’ but your breath is taken away as you look behind you and see a slide show of incongruous images with a fully grown man singing along to each image as they appear. You realize you’ve just been subjected to Conceptual Performance Art as you drop your cheap wine in shock and it stains the sticky floor the way it stained your teeth. You try to run but you nearly trip over a Styrofoam sculpture of a conceptual man, himself conceptually tripping and flinging a bunch of conceptual eggs in the air… The suspended Styrofoam eggs bounce off your forehead as you push through to the nearest exit, but you’re blocked by a crowd of art critics. They speak, but you don’t understand… ‘Art art art’ says one ‘Aaaart, artartart’ answers another, before asking you ‘Art art?’ You’re sweating. You scream ‘AAAART!’ and throw yourself out onto the streets as the cool air alleviates your nausea… for now.

This nightmare is all too real. Con-Art’s everywhere, pushing their heinous work on innocent people as we speak. Some blame Damien Hirst and his big fish in a glass box; others point fingers at Tracey Emin and her semen-stained bed; still others indicate the influence of the Young British Artists as a whole, whose collective work can only be described as… um… zzzzz… Sorry I fell asleep, where was I? Oh yeah, suddenly, all over the world, and in Istanbul too, herds of self-indulgent art-school-graduate rich kids are using either daddy’s or some Scandinavian government fund’s money to make things that would arouse as much interest if the underlying concept were simply written out in a single sentence. ‘Imagine a man standing within a glass enclosure in a room and the work is called “Personal Space”’ is as good as actually seeing a man standing in a glass enclosure in a room with a tag slapped on to consummate the earth-shattering work of art entitled ‘Personal Space’.

If the idea (concept) precedes the aesthetic materialisation that becomes the artwork (as is implied in the term "Conceptual" art), then surely the idea can be just as easily conceived and appreciated as idea without the need for any substantiation of it, unless of course the aesthetic dimension were at least equal to the concept. The fact that nobody spends more time looking at a conceptual artwork than they would thinking about it if the aesthetic appeal is not equal to the conceptual one, proves that. It shouldn’t take a hundred thousand dollars worth of equipment and organisation to express the ‘Alienation of Modern Man in Post-Industrial Capitalist Society’ by making a video showing a mechanical shark biting repeatedly into a peach. But that’s what we have: a bunch of poncy self-important ‘I’m-gonna-blow-your-mind-with-my-amazing-idea-!’ crap devoid of the necessary aesthetic dimension – oh, and the HARD WORK – to carry it from just being an elaborate way to express irony, to actually becoming both an aesthetically and intellectually challenging work of art that engages the beholder beyond eliciting a mere ‘Oh yeah, I get it’ to inducing an impressive silent ‘Whoa!’ instead. But then that’s why everyone’s a conceptual artist nowadays: because it’s easy. Next they’ll start telling us photography is art too.

Solution? Outlawing tags. If an artwork can't stand on its own merits without being superexplained by some clever postmodern pun for a title, then it should be ignored. No, I take that back, it shouldn't be ignored, it should incinerated.