If you want to be successful in the art world you’ve got to look to the art world; you don’t make it for the bloke next door and then hope the art world is going to look at it. That’s one of the big mistakes people make. Craft people, for instance, they’ll call themselves a potter or a craftsman or whatever, then they’ll hope that the art world is going to somehow recognize them as artists. It’s not going to happen. You’ve got to call yourself an artist and point yourself at the art world and make art for the art world. But of course the art world wants to be antagonized, that’s the great thing about it. If you can antagonize the art world, you’re made.
The art world is a slightly different place in that it’s so self-conscious and so sophisticated about issues of taste, but it still has the element of fitting in. I sometimes think when I make a lot of my artwork that it’s too colorful. It’s just not going to fit in with the design of the collectors’ houses, I better make a black-and-white artwork, or a beige-and-white artwork that will fit in to all the collectors’ houses better.
Starting to really hate the words “art world.”
But really, the interview is very good, at least the parts where he talks about class and taste and how they funnel into art:
Most of taste is unconscious—it comes from your upbringing, from your family, from your society, your gender, your race; it’s a melange of all those things. The basic premise of taste, as Stephen Bayley, the cultural critic, said, is that taste is that which does not alienate your peers. Most people want to fit in with their tribe in some way or another, so they give off signals, whether it’s with their clothes, their behavior, their car, their whatever, and gain status. Every tribe has a hierarchy, and that’s what taste is: it’s an unconscious display of who you are, and where you want to be.
There’s a desperation in middle-class people to try to be individual. I think it’s an illusion on the whole, because curiously they all end up being an individual in the same way. Because not many people are creative, really. They’re kind of individualistic but within a very narrow bandwidth of what is acceptable at the time in fashion, or what they’ve seen in magazines. Genuine maverick taste is quite rare.
Middle-class people, in Britain, anyway, tend to be the intelligentsia; they’re well educated, they’re very aspirational, they’re very anxious because they’re looking down thinking, “Am I going to go that way?” or they’re looking up saying, “Oh, I’d quite like a bit of that action.” They’re the most self-conscious about it, and best informed.
To be creative, you need to be unselfconscious. It’s like the sound barrier when you’re an art student. You have to reach the terminal velocity where you go through the sound barrier of self-consciousness, and then pop out the other side where you’re confident enough to handle it. A lot of people never make it through and that’s a real block to being creative.
Cultural capital is something you accrue, and it’s a subtle thing. Middle-class people in particular are more aware of it. They want the culture they consume to sort of rub off on them somehow. A big part of culture is to be seen to be consuming it. Just having art in your house…. I was talking at the Met [recently] about the fact that when I made the tapestries to go with the show, I put loads of art historical references into the tapestries, because that will give a chance for all the middle-class people who come to the show to show off their knowledge. It’s like the knowing laughter in the difficult art-house film where some reference is made.