Art: the handover

There has been a handover taking place, lots of aerial shots of speeding limousines and out-riders slicing through the leafier parts of a capital. In a moment - perhaps one of those moments we measure our lives by - power has shifted from one pair of hands to another. Above all, we are reminded of change, of flux. Leaves remain on the trees but the familiar is gone, and a stranger now stands in the doorway. But to an artist a handover means something else entirely. For them it can be when weeks or months of industry culminate in a finished piece of work and the artist if lucky makes a sale and the work in an instant is released - a stranger itself - into a new home. And because this artist goes to such lengths, and in such detail, and uses something so close to her as subject matter, she is often asked how she can bear such a handover, bear to surrender something so special. Well, this is not a problem, I have noticed, and not only because of a need for funds, but also her training and discipline. Besides, she has never bogged herself down with an over-possessive nature. (Even when it comes to an errant husband.) I bought a knife sharpener the other day. A sharp knife is like a sharp mind, I was thinking, as the shopkeeper wrapped it up. Well, the artist is like that. Sharp. Sharpened. Sharpening. She is not a sentimentalist, not your meek slave. If the work is personal and people feel awkward about it, presumably preferring long-distance lust or macabre re-invention instead, then they should get over it, grow up. What is so terrible about art these days that it has to shy away from simple human emotion, as if it somehow contravenes a kind of masonic vow of commerce which all artists seem to have to make these days? Art - I hope, I wish - does not have to be just a tool of fashion. Art - and long live the handover - should be ungovernable.