A small play about big issues is how the producers like to portray Art, a sensation when it opened in the West End 20 years ago and now packing ’em in again in a revival at the Old Vic in London. The play is a three-hander by French writer Yasmina Reza. It opened in Paris in 1994 and, in a translation by Christopher Hampton, swept the Anglo-Saxon world two years later, helped by starry casts – the first, unveiled in London in October 1996, was Albert Finney, Tom Courtenay and Ken Stott. That production won the Olivier award for best comedy in 1997. “But I thought I had written a tragedy,” said Reza when she picked up the prize.
The setup is simple. Serge, who fancies himself as an art collector, has bought a painting – “a white canvas with fine diagonal white streaks” – by a fashionable artist called Antrios for €100,000. His old friend Marc thinks it’s “shit”, and the ensuing argument about its merits threatens their relationship. Their mutual friend Yvan, a committed fence-sitter, is caught in the crossfire.
It is a clever, calculating piece of theatre, but does it really have anything to say about modern art? We set up our own three-hander to find out – Guardian art critics Adrian Searle and Skye Sherwin, and me in the middle, playing the part of the hapless Yvan, eager to get answers to big questions: what is art; how do you judge artistic value; should we venerate the artist; and what the hell is this play really about?
“I hadn’t seen it before,” says Searle. “I’d been very much put off by the rotating casts, and had sort of assumed it was about taking the piss out of art. The posters had put me off, too – pictures of sweaty men throwing buckets of coloured paint at each other, which doesn’t happen in the play. So I went in feeling ill disposed towards it, and when Serge brings out his white canvas the waves of laughter from the audience immediately antagonised me, but I think it’s much more complex than that, and not entirely in a bad way.”
It is not just an idle assassination of modern art, whatever some members of the audience might think. But Searle doubts whether the play wants seriously to engage with the nature of art. “The artwork is a portmanteau, the McGuffin, and they could just as easily be talking about cars,” he says. “It’s really about male friendship.”
Searle also argues that Tony Hancock made many of the same points about the art world – and more forcefully – in his 1961 satirical film The Rebel, in which Hancock chucks in his life as a clerk in London to become an existentially inclined artist in Paris (despite a singular lack of artistic talent). “It’s a favourite film of artists,” says Searle. “The art world is best debunked by artists. When you get literary types writing about art, they do it badly.”
If Searle takes the part of the Marc character – there is less to this than meets the eye – Sherwin tends towards the role of Serge, who feels he has found truth through his expensive purchase. “I enjoyed it immensely,” she says. “One of the things I liked was the way Marc deflates the rhetoric used in the art world, as when he turns round to Serge and says, ‘Why are you saying the Artist?’. She [Reza] uses the idea of the ‘system’ around art really cleverly.”
It is Yvan, trying to defend Serge’s purchase to Marc, who first uses this key word: “It’s a work of art, there’s a system behind it ... It’s the completion of a journey ... It wasn’t painted by accident, it’s a work of art which stakes its claim as part of a trajectory.” Marc mocks Ivan for “parroting Serge’s nonsense”.
When do we take an artist seriously and why? Is it because they have a “system”? Is that what makes them an “artist”? “If we’re living in a world where anything can be an artwork,” says Sherwin, “it’s not necessarily to do with the materiality or the craft. It can be an idea. So the figure of the artist becomes much more important in terms of bestowing value. The artist has to have some unique vision for the whatever-it-is to be special.”
“I agree with Duchamp that the artist’s greatest invention is the artist,” adds Searle. “A kind of critical mass builds up behind a successful artist. They get written about by critics and academics; people start writing theses about them; the view becomes fixed. But that can start to break down after a bit. Often when artists die, there is a dip for a while – or that can be permanent. There are figures who are very fashionable in their lifetime who then fall out of favour.”
Some artists are also lucky, or adept at catching a wave. “They are remembered not because the work was great, but because of its sociological context,” says Searle. “The diamond skull of Damien Hirst is precisely that, and I think Jeff Koons is a lot of that. What has he [Koons] added to Andy Warhol? Not very much.”
How, then, does one judge the value of art? I like the question Marc puts to Yvan about the Antrios: “You’re getting married tomorrow, and you get this painting as a wedding present. Does it make you happy?” Yvan admits it would not make him happy. But Searle rejects happiness as a criterion for judging art. “I hate it when people say ‘What art do you love most?’ I don’t love art.”
He tells me not to worry so much, and dismisses any simple terminology I try to apply to art. “‘Importance’ is a posteriori; ‘beauty’ is not a word I use very often; I can only say the word ‘masterpiece’ in a Darth Vader-type voice; and I’m not looking for ‘happiness’.” So what are you looking for? “I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t know what I’m looking for, but I find things.”
“Going to an exhibition with a set of criteria to tick off a list would be a huge mistake,” says Sherwin. “The point of art is freedom, and if you’re a critic going in with a preconceived list you’re doing a huge disservice to your subject.” The market is always seeking to put a value on art; critics couldn’t give a damn. “I try to avoid even reading about the market,” says Searle.
Can you ever, like Marc, say that something is “shit”, or is such language hopelessly subjective? “There is shit,” says Searle, “but questions of whether this is good or bad are the least interesting part of what we do.” “‘Is it good, is it bad?’ shuts down conversations,” adds Sherwin. “As a critic you want to open up conversations by thinking through the work. There are no essential questions, just as there are no essential forms.”
Sherwin reckons writers are too keen to look for meaning in art. She cites Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye and Siri Hustvedt’s What I Loved as novels in which the art is intensely literary – all about narrative, symbols, content. “The idea that it could be just process, material or about the circulation of images, the massive completely open box that art actually is, doesn’t come in to it,” she says. “Writers always think of art in literary terms, as something that can be unpacked.”
If writers want art to mean something, collectors want art to celebrate their own success, good taste, modernity. Serge is seeking to validate himself through art. “It’s all to do with consumerism,” says Searle, “not just judging art but judging each other through the decisions they make. The play was written in a period of boom for the French bourgeoisie. It is art as luxury commodity.”
He is dismissive of the painting at the centre of the play. “It is exactly the kind of painting that would be used as a prop in a furniture catalogue and made by the yard. And there’s nothing very outre about a white painting. Robert Ryman has made his entire career out of making white paintings.” Indeed, there is an honourable tradition of all-white paintings: Kazimir Malevich unveiled his painting White on White as long ago as 1918. Far from being a modernist statement, the Antrios is old hat.
Near the end of the play the painting is defaced by Marc, with Serge’s complicity. Sherwin says she sensed from the start this would be the inevitable denouement. “It’s a blank canvas with three men arguing over it,” she says. “What other possible way could it go?” “Somebody’s got to get their cock out and piss on it,” adds Searle. Now that would be artistically innovative.
How did Searle feel when the painting was defaced? “I thought, ‘Oh, this reminds me of a Michael Krebber painting’,” he says. Krebber is a German conceptualist whose paintings tend to be characterised by enigmatic splodges on white backgrounds. It emerges that Searle once, urged on by the artists, defaced an artwork by Jake and Dinos Chapman on a TV programme. Acts of destruction, it seems, can be acts of creation. It may be that Marc’s desecration of Serge’s beloved Antrios – carried out in the name of classicism, essentialism and representative art – is a more modern gesture than the painting itself.
• Art is at the Old Vic, London SE1, until 18 February. oldvictheatre.com.
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