Amazon Review
Matthew Collings' amusing and readable take on the British art world in
Art Crazy Nation is as punchy and as clearly written as we have come to expect from the trendy
enfant terrible of art criticism. A natural successor to
Blimey (the subtitle of which,
The London Artworld from Francis Bacon to Damien Hirst, succinctly sums up the particular remit of that book),
Art Crazy Nation sees Collings in a slightly more sombre mood than we have encountered him before. While
Blimey was an urgent, polemical and, primarily, positive assessment of Hirst (whose recent book of interviews
On the Way to Work with Gordon Burn is an essential insight into that particular artists' mind),
Art Crazy Nation seeks rather to critique the "craziness" of the recent British love affair with the ironic and iconoclastic art of the post-Sensation generation. Collings here claims that while the YBAs may well be experts in the kind of cynical image manipulation we now flock to see in such hugely popular settings as Tate Modern they have simultaneously reduced the scope of what good art can offer. Art used to have its own spiritual and, principally, aesthetic concerns while now it seems to barely speak of anything except the gestural. Tragically Collings' own writing--arch, clever, bombastic but devoid of seriousness, weight or theoretical rigour--mimics absolutely the nescient, one-dimensional shallowness of the art he, rather late in the day, has come to suspect. Reading Collings remains a wonderful pleasure, but it remains a pleasure for the same reasons that viewing a work by Hirst remains one: neither Collings, nor those artists he now criticises, work hard enough to convince us that what they have to say to us is anything more than a joke, a glib anecdote or an amused observation. Both he and they need to put a little more effort into thinking through what questions they really do expect art to answer. --
Mark Thwaite
Synopsis
A personal perspective on the contemporary British art scene is given by art critic Matthew Collings in this follow-up to the critically acclaimed "Blimey". He examines how art attitudes and behaviour and art fashions have seeped into the wider culture. He questions what people want from Art now and who they think it is. He asks what the intellectual currents are that run through it and what are its values. Collings takes the reader on a personal journey into the London art scene to seek out the answers.
