Draught(wo)manship

The art world today is a confusing place. Usually when a high-profile figure is bathing in the news - they never feature; they always bathe - the story is freckled with words like 'fame', 'money', 'bad boy', or 'bad girl'. Seldom is an epic sweep of creative majesty acknowledged instead, or life as hard labour made good by art discussed as one of the creative world's mainstays. For years I thought I was simply missing something, that in the ideas of people like Derrida and Baudrillard there was a kind of lofty, intellectual justification for the abandonment of skill in the name of semiotics, and I just did not get it. Painting or drawing for example was absurd apparently, surplus to requirement, certainly in a world peppered with easily accessed imagery. In time, more and more well-known artists grabbed the limelight doing exactly that - work without any personal investment of their skill, or even labour. No, art became something only other people did for you, which is not to decry some of the more genuinely gifted moments of conceptualism. In some cases, a kind of master and slave mentality developed. Artists became neo-colonialists. 'Oh, I've an idea,' they might quip, then get a load of frustrated other artists to do the work for them. Years ago, I made a film, an ugly documentary, about this fact. I never thought then it would continue to burn with such relevance. Now, however, when hands-off artists are interviewed on TV, each, one by one, comes out with the fact they only moved from doing the work themselves - from painting, or drawing - not because they were drunk, say, on the power of alternatives, not because of forward-thinking ideas, post-modernism and the like: but, no, simply because they could not paint, could not draw, or did not have faith in their draught(wo)manship. They are negativity's children.