'Seven Keys to Modern Art' published in Korean

I recently published a book called ‘Seven Keys to Modern Art’ with Thames & Hudson. I’m pleased to say it has just been published in Korean by Ahn Graphics, so I thought this was a good time to introduce the book in my blog.

“Seven Keys’ is aimed at anyone interested in modern art. It is the belated fruit of all the years I spent giving guided tours, talks, workshops, and short courses in various museums and galleries, mostly in London. In the book I discuss 20 works of art by 20 different artists, ranging from Henri Matisse to Doris Salcedo. Each work is approached using the same seven ‘keys’. These ‘keys’ are not meant to be compatible. A work of art invites multiple and often contradictory interpretations.

 Here are the seven ‘keys’:

1. THE HISTORICAL KEY

In this approach, a work of art is understood to be involved in an ongoing, developmental dialogue with subjects and styles inherited from earlier periods. The new often has more in common with the old than is at first recognized, and so the best way to understand the former is to compare and contrast it with the latter. Therefore, in this key the artwork is seen in a context that views it as a sign or symptom of the broad socio-cultural conditions and stylistic norms that prevail at the time it was made, rather than as an artefact with intrinsic aesthetic or expressive qualities. Art is judged to be important because it has symbolic value and must therefore be considered in relation to changes and continuities through time, organized in terms of recurring codes and stylistic properties.

2. THE BIOGRAPHICAL KEY

Paying attention to the life of the artist is considered in this mode to be the best way to understand his or her work. The latter is the expression of the former. There are two versions of this approach. The hard version, often called expression by ‘contagion’, argues that the character of an artist is experienced by a viewer directly via an encounter with their work. The soft version suggests that the uniqueness of any work of art is intimately related to a specific personality and local circumstances that give rise to it and depends for its power on the emotional and intellectual life of the maker, through which we are given access to more general social and psychological issues.

3. THE AESTHETIC KEY

In this mode, a work of art is approached primarily as a visual artefact, consisting of specific plastic or formal properties to which we respond emotionally and intellectually. The focus here is on our emotional responses to line, colour, form, texture, and so on. This mode recognizes that, in responding to a work of art, we use the same cognitive and affective processes as when appraising ordinary objects and circumstances, but within the aesthetic state of mind, the object of perception – the work of art – is removed from the realm of practical knowledge and goals. As a consequence, the aesthetic experience will also involve a degree of detachment, and a reflexive attitude. Everything we experience has the potential to become art, because everything can have an aesthetic dimension. But what a culture defines as art will be determined by social consensus, and how a work is judged ultimately comes down to a combination of factors that include the biological, personal and cultural.

4. THE EXPERIENTIAL KEY

The main concern here is how a work can communicate across time, place and culture, touching on basic affective and psychological realities. There are two aspects to this key. One is subjective and phenomenological, focusing on how a viewer directly responds to the stimulus of the work as a multisensory experience. The second analyses these responses by drawing on research into the psychology of perception and the neurobiological foundations of perception, imagination and creativity. Social conditioning greatly affects the ways in which we respond to art, determining the meanings we attribute to the experience, and the brain functions in tandem with the body and the surrounding environment to generate the specific experiences that are derived from the encounter with an artwork.

5. THE THEORETICAL KEY

This mode encourages a language-oriented and intellectual relationship to art rather than an aesthetic, affective or expressive one. It emphasizes the potential of art to make us think, instead of treating it as a way of accessing the artist’s psyche, engaging our sensibility, or exploring our sensory and emotional faculties. There are two broad possibilities. In the first, the manifest theoretical positions adopted by artists and critics and voiced at the time of making the work are addressed. The work of art is understood to be involved in exploring abstract ideas or immaterial subjects, such as existence, causality and truth. This approach links art with examining first principles and ultimate grounds, and an artwork is understood to exist within the context of deep and timeless existential questions about the meaning of life. In the second approach, the work of art is judged to require comprehensive review and analysis in relation to unexamined assumptions about value and meaning. In particular, attention is paid to the institutional frameworks in which the work functions, and the ways in which meaning is socially constructed and politically implicated, and how the work includes, in often unconscious ways, traces of the prejudices of the society within which it was produced.

6. THE SCEPTICAL KEY

The consensus view can’t be accepted without question, and this mode emphasizes that the cultural credentials of a work should not be taken for granted. Value judgments are largely the opinions of elites. Although the work is in a museum, praised by the experts, and sought after for its economic value, this does not place it beyond constructive criticism. Furthermore, decisions about the value of the art in our own era are inevitably myopic, because only the passage of time brings the necessary distance from which real judgments can be made. History is full of examples of fashion influencing judgments. It is therefore valuable to maintain a sceptical attitude. This key encourages the reader to play the ‘devil’s advocate’, to seek different opinions, and to adopt constructively critical viewpoints.

7. THE MARKET KEY

Art is deeply embedded in a complex web of power relations, involving different kinds of exchange, and the status of the work of art as a commodity within the capitalist economy, and as a symbolic and political token deployed by the state system, are the focus of attention in this mode. The work functions within an economic system that it helps to sustain, but also, paradoxically, can also actively critique and subvert.

These seven ‘keys’ converge on the same object – a single work of art – but they choose to see different things. On occasion, they are also clearly incompatible, in that the point of view promoted in one is ignored, contradicted or even denigrated in another. Inevitably, some of the keys will be more enlightening than others in relation to the specific character of the work they discuss, and this is reflected in the different running orders in which the keys are presented. But this order is fairly arbitrary, and the keys could be arranged in other ways.