One can register a certain vague mood of unease in connection with this year's Turner Prize, awarded to artist Simon Starling, for his installation featuring a bike and a shed that's been turned into a boat, and then back into a shed again.

Mark Hudson in The Daily Telegraph feels that modern art has become too mainstreamed, that shorn of it's outsider mystique, "modern art, more than ever before, has become safe, approachable… comfy."

I mention barricades, because modern art is, of course, bound up with heroic 19th-century notions of bohemianism and revolution.(...)

Even 30 years ago, when I was an art student myself, such ideas seemed relevant. There was a sense that even the most tasteful, decorative abstraction had to fight for its survival.

Yet the 1970s was precisely the time when modern art was absorbed into the mainstream. Grants, scolarships and residencies became more plentiful.

A new breed of impresario arrived, personified by the Tate's Nicholas Serota, with an aggrandising agenda that has massively raised modern art's profile, while utterly neutralising its radicalism.

While this idea of inherent radicalism powered modern art into the closing decades of the 20th century, it seems now to have utterly evaporated. A generation of artists has emerged - represented perhaps by this year's Turner Prize nominees - who have no real link to the great revolutionary modernist narrative. They make what used to be called avant-garde art because, well, that's what artists do.

Guy Dammann, in The Guardian, feels that Simon Starling's shed runs counter to the ethos of conceptual art, of revealing hidden depths of meaning in everyday objects (going back to Duchamp famously exhibiting a signed urinal), by virtue of it being too crafted.

Prominent in our encounter with Starling's £25,000 nautical shack, in other words, is awareness of its craftwork - an awareness, that's to say, of precisely the element of artistic production and consumption that the conceptual art movement took it upon itself to excise, for better or worse.

I'm not saying, of course, that this means Starling's stuff is no good. But if I'm not entirely sure whether it counts as art (and neither is he, I might add, on the evidence of his interview in yesterday's Guardian), I'm dead certain that it's not conceptual art. Then again, however, in just raising these questions, maybe it is.

In my view there are more fundamental questions to be raised by Starling's work, aside from whether it still has transgressive force, or whether it conforms to the strict edicts of conceptual art. What does it say about what art wants to be, irrespective of debates over quality?

Once most artists were artisans. What they made, whether it was a gilt sword handle or an decorated bronze krater for mixing wine and water, had a utilitarian purpose, aside from it's aesthetic qualities.

Over time the role of the artist proper diverged from that of the artisan, or as we'd call them today, designers. Art as such was divorced from manufacture. And artists moved into the more rarified atmosphere of aristocratic or upper-class patronage.

But then the expansion of basic education through larger segments of the population and the development of new technology reached a point where the high art of the day could be mass-reproduced, either as plaster replicas or prints, which ordinary people could bring home with them. Art was becoming available to the common man.

One can wonder if it is purely coincidental that art, at that very moment, started moving in a direction where the works could not be easily replicated, and embraced forms that could not easily be displayed in ordinary homes. Add to that the novel concept that the work was not "whole unto itself", but was incomplete without an abstract and esoteric exegesis, leaving the "true" work of art accessible only to the initiated few.

Art, which had predominantly been a concern for the upper classes and their classless dependants, the artists, was once again safe from the plebs.

Installation art, like Starling's, dominating the art scene today, has brought us to a state of affairs where not even someone rich enough to afford to buy it could display it in any lived in by humans space. Once bought it would have to reside at a gallery, or be stored at some warehouse, until it burns down, as was the case with the Saatchi collection. Art has, in the most literal sense of the word, been institutionalised.

Willfully cut off from the unwashed masses and guarded by a secular clergy, and wealthy patrons receiving their benediction for patronage, modern art sails serenely on in a floating world of white.


This article is also available at The European Tribune.