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Why does contemporary art look so simple? You asked Google – here’s the answer

by Jonathan Jones

Why do the lights keep going on and off? How is less more? What place does a balloon dog have in an art gallery? Or, as a lot of people have been asking Google: “Why does contemporary art look so simple?”

I am tempted to answer – because it’s idiotic. But first, we need to define what contemporary art means in this question.

Plenty of today’s art does not look simple at all. On the contrary it looks complex, and rewards the beholder accordingly. There is nothing simple about the paintings of Anselm Kiefer, saturated with troubling imagery and made with forbidding layers of ash, wood, straw and pigment. Nor is there anything simplistic about Tacita Dean’s eerie photographic panoramas of landscape and memory, or Cy Twombly’s sensual scrawled epics, tremulous with poetic erudition. Does it look “simple” to quote Cavafy and Catullus as much as Twombly’s paintings do?

Yet we all understand what kind of art the question is about. When artists such asDamien Hirst were taking the Turner prize by storm in the 1990s I used to hear old-timers moan about the triumph of the “one liner”. The essence of contemporary art has come to be seen as a smart, precise, quickly absorbed conceptual masterstroke. An empty room, with some sound art echoing in it.

Art reflects its times. We live in an age of constant visual and conceptual barrage by adverts, TV shows, and pictures that go viral on Twitter. Seriously, what kind of art do you expect the information age to produce? We want information we can quickly decode and respond to and share. As long ago as the 1960s artists were pioneering the reductive aesthetics appropriate to our time. Andy Warhol turned soup cans into portraits and news photographs of celebrities into portraits. The Minimalists created an almost religious cult of unaltered industrial materials. Conceptual art, invented in the late 1960s, denied that a work of art needed to take any unique physical form.

By the 1980s, on the eve of the internet, artists such as Jeff Koons and Barbara Kruger were insolently fusing these avant garde notions with the blunt rhetoric of advertising. Why shouldn’t art be as grabby as a good advert, Koons asks, in his early works, which directly “appropriate” adverts. Richard Prince borrowed the Marlboro Man with the same utter simplicity. Then a new generation led by Damien Hirst freed this bold, shameless style of conceptual wit from its advertising roots to make “big” statements about biology, time and death.

To complain about Warhol, Koons and Hirst is in many ways to shoot the messenger. They are simple in a way that addresses the speed and distraction of contemporary life. The apparent simplicity of contemporary art has become the secret of its success. You can grasp this art so quickly – from a spiralling slide in Tate Modern to an Antony Gormley statue, the instant impact of so much of today’s best known art means that busy people can enjoy it easily, not as boring old high culture but as entertainment. It takes hours to watch a ballet or a play and even more hours to read a book. It can take just minutes to appreciate the most acclaimed art of our time.

That may seem a condemnation. Yet it gives contemporary visual art (not that it’s always visual any more) an edge over all other elite art forms.

A novelist like Jonathan Franzen may spend hundreds of pages trying to describe the reality of our time, but a work of art can express that reality in its own nature, because the triumph of simple bold conceptual art is one of the phenomena that define our age.

So, one answer to the question “Why does contemporary art look so simple?” is that by being throwaway and ephemeral and as blunt as an advert it sums up the time we live in. Deal with it. That’s your reflection in the balloon dog. By embodying the crassness of this era of spectacle, what we think of as “contemporary art” has turned itself from a minority interest into popular culture.

Why does contemporary art look simple? Why did rock replace jazz?

Yet the question reflects an anxiety – and that anxiety has to gnaw at anyone who really cares about today’s art. The simplification of art that began in the 1960s, reached truly reductive levels in the 1980s and 90s and is part of the fabric of today, has made a lot of people rich – because the other great thing about simplicity is that it sells. Collectors seem to like stuff they don’t have to think about too much. It creates that unique Tate Modern vibe that always leaves me wanting to go next door and buy some tickets for Shakespeare’s Globe. It is a picture of the way we live now, but it is an ugly, depressing picture.

Does art really have to imitate the lowest attention span horrors of modern life to be contemporary? Of course not. I’ve already mentioned some artists who are complex and serious and not in the least bit simple. The truth is that artists themselves are sick of the simple art of the Hirst era. Galleries are full of art that wants to be complex. Unfortunately, a lot of it ends up being boring and impenetrable instead. There are Godard-like “masterpieces” of turgid video art galore, terrible epics of performance art and desperate attempts to make art more “serious” by turning it into gardening, say, or community architecture.

Indeed, contemporary art is in danger of losing the “simplicity” that made it popular – without regaining the depth that might make it truly matter. That is why we live in such a strange time for art and why its future seems to be stalling.Art stripped itself of so many enriching things and reduced itself to such a stark mirror of this age that now it struggles to find a more intellectually and emotionally rewarding vocabulary again. There are formidable exceptions. Great art is still being made. It will be made in the future. But yes, the answer to the question is that a lot of contemporary art looks simple because it is idiotically one-dimensional, poetically bankrupt and perceptually banal.

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David Cameron needs to look beyond the veil 

 Remona Aly

For a man with an in-tray that never empties, David Cameron has strange priorities. This week, with the world economy shaking perilously and the EU campaign under way in earnest, his preoccupation was the claim that too few Muslim women speak English. Then he turned to the veil. If any public authorities put in place “proper and sensible” rules to ban women from wearing face veils, he would back them, he said. We must have done something to merit so much of his attention.

I wear a headscarf. I know women who wear face veils. Each time we are put in the spotlight in this way, the reaction is the same: here we go again. For we have seen veil or niqab debate thrown into the political ring on numerous occasions. Many have spoken out against a ban, saying it would be contrary to British values; others support one, citing the very same reason. These discussions never provide much by way of clarity. But they always mean trouble.

Each time the issue ignites a media furore, and Muslim women who wear the veil are exposed to more hostility in a climate where those in niqab and hijab are already under threat: 60% of the victims of anti-Muslim attacks are women.

When I started wearing a headscarf, I did so for personal and religious convictions. Now, whenever there is a media backlash driven by a political agenda, I feel frustrated that we can’t move beyond the broken record that is the veil debate. For the women who wear face veils, that frustration runs deeper; it’s a struggle not to feel like an outsider in your own country and it’s infuriating to be told to integrate at the same time.

Cameron would never go down the French route, he said. “I think in our country people should be free to wear what they like, within limits live how they like, and all the rest of it.” But that was not how his comments were received. I have some advice for him. Targeting a politically beleaguered minority of women who wear a face veil will not improve their fortunes or his own. The first thing he might do, for example, is try to base any future comments he might make on a reliably factual basis. Cameron referred to government reports that set the number of Muslim women who speak little or no English at 22%. The Muslim Council of Britain suggests the number of Muslims who struggle with English is just 6%.

Cameron is right that the acquisition of basic English skills should be encouraged. But the idea that the lack of them somehow fuels radicalisation and, down the line, terrorism is misplaced to say the least. It is, moreover, a reach to say that bad parenting leads to radicalisation – though an inability to speak English is not in itself a sign of bad parenting. As the clearly exasperated Tory peer Sayeeda Warsi pointed out, citing her own family, many Muslim mothers whose English might not pass the Cameron test have nevertheless raised children who have contributed significantly to British society at all levels.

Not speaking English doesn’t automatically mean a communication breakdown between mother and child, as parents, regardless of race and religion, don’t always know what their children are up to. And mothers without good English can still talk to their children.

I don’t want to be negative. Whatever his motives, Cameron’s spotlight on misogyny – a social ill throughout society – may have practical benefits, particularly if it challenges the entrenched patriarchy that undermines women’s rights and forms some of the so-called sharia councils - a fight that Muslim women have been leading for years. It is also laudable that Cameron wants to prevent female genital mutilation and forced marriage. But it’s a huge error to pin these unacceptable crimes on “segregation”. There is a texture that he needs to understand, complexities beyond the stereotypical notion of men controlling wives, sisters and daughters.

If he genuinely wants to help deprived sections of society, he should look at disenfranchisement and poverty at a broader level. Addressing educational disadvantage, tackling inequality, funding community projects, creating opportunities for the vulnerable from all backgrounds – these are some of the things that, combined with solid leadership, can really foster stronger, more confident communities. But by his own admission, the government cut £45m from budgets for teaching English.

Cameron says he wants “every young boy and girl growing up here to feel proud of our country and properly connected to it”. So do I. But the best way to nurture that would be to construct effective, alternative narratives that empower all women and strengthen society, rather than engaging in naive attempts to police a single group, in the unforgiving glare of the media. By speaking less and speaking more wisely, he could bring us closer to the Britain we all want.