HOW TO BE A FAMOUS ARTIST

27 April 2006

To be a famous artist is a very easy thing, all you have to do is make work about fame, violence sex and death. It is a cliché to say it, but nonetheless true – the media will never tire of covering work that touches these topics. We all know this, even if our knowledge of it is not conscious.

This has lead me to a position where my reading of most work that uses fame, violence sex and death as a central theme is not first and foremost about those topics but about the artists themselves looking for the fastest short-cut to their own fame. And again, they might not be conscious of this but just be instinctively drawn to subject matter that will deliver them fame in the shortest time possible.

This knowledge has led me to write off most work that uses any of these topics as its subject matter. Fame, violence sex and death are as likely to grab my attention as they are anyone’s. These are undeniably the big topics in life, but once the imagination has been grabbed what does the artist tell us, what do we learn? So often work seems to be no more than grabbing attention. All headline and no content. For many of us that is all we want or expect from art. We just want our attention grabbed. We like the sensation of it being grabbed. Another route to being a famous artist is to make big art. If you make big art, it will, by its very obvious nature, get noticed. If Christo were to wrap up the ashtray in front of me it might make better art than the iconic buildings he chooses, let alone the coastlines he attempts to wrap up, but it would not deliver the fame he seems to crave.

I have written before about my unease with big art and the compromises I have made in my own work to accommodate this unease. There are numerous reasons why the statue David by Michelangelo is rubbish, but first and foremost the reason is its size. The story of David and Goliath works on our imagination because David is a boy, the youngest son, the most unlikely. But he settles the war. We all know that in later life David goes on to be an arsehole and a cunt, or you do if you had the education that I had. The David that Michelangelo is supposed to be celebrating is the young David moments before he is about to do battle with Goliath, yet Michelangelo resorts to using size and sex to grab our attention and in so doing the statue is unable to deliver any other meaning. If he had made a life-size statue of a 12-year-old Middle Eastern boy, its power would have resonated meaning beyond his excuse for a celebration of male beauty.

To offer a little balance here, his statue of Pièta is one of the most potent and throbbing with meaning in the Western canon. The dead Jesus draped over his mother’s lap. Jesus with the perfect figure of a young man cut down in his prime. Mary, who must have been 50 by then, is portrayed as the young virgin, no older than the night her baby was born and she held him in her arms for the very first time.

Actually I don’t know if I agree with myself. Maybe it would be far stronger if she was portrayed as a middle-aged woman worn down with the struggles of life, her virginity a distant memory. A completely different Mary to the innocent mother who has been rammed down the throats of Roman Catholic women for hundreds of years, as the woman they should all judge themselves against (and fail).

As for the fame bit of my equation, time and time again artists have made work that attacks, ridicules or even just comments upon the famous or iconic. It may not be great art, or even good art, but it works every time. For a start you are using subject matter the public will already have an emotional connection with. Add something negative or disturbing into that emotional connection and you are on to a winner. Make work attacking McDonald’s and you will find plenty willing to leap on your bandwagon; make work about something as iconic as one million pounds, and your fame will last the full 15 minutes; make work with somebody who is already famous and others will take notice.

I know some of the examples I give work as they, as you may already know, are works that I have been associated with in the past. Admittedly it has only been with the luxury of hindsight that I have put these theories together. Over the past few years I have found myself wanting to evolve ways of working that do not use these methods. This has in part been conscious and in part instinctive, this wanting to make work that does not seek to shock, nor feign to attack the powerful. Some of the work that I initiated some time ago which is still in process does fail by these standards: the How To Be An Artist piggy-backed on the reputation of Richard Long; youwhores.com obviously appeals to an appetite for the sordid; Is God A Cunt seeks notoriety by association with the most powerful force in creation.

However hard I try the one I always seem to fail at and am failing at right now is the fame-by-association one. In the past it might have been ABBA, Doctor Who, Tammy Wynette, the Turner Prize or the already mentioned Richard Long. But now it is me, Bill Drummond. Now I know I am not famous in a celebrity stakes sort of way but for certain people my name is a brand of sorts. They read my name and it triggers things off in their head, whether I like what it triggers or not.

With what I’ve been doing over the past few years, I’ve tried to keep my name away from what the work is. The thinking is that if people come across the websites that I have set up like openmanifesto.com or mydeath.net or youwhores.com, they will respond to it in a far more natural and I hope true way. This is compared to if they came across them knowing them to be associated with whatever the Bill Drummond brand means in their head.

So on to The17 and the lack of ticket sales for the ten events at the Hatton Gallery. At Fylkingen in Stockholm and at the Hatton Gallery in Newcastle I tried to insist that the poster and advertising did not use my name. I wanted people to come along, shell out good money and take part because they knew it would be a good thing.

I suppose I thought the name alone, The17, resonated something powerful and unmissable. It did in my head, so why not in others’? ‘The17, a choir that is going to change our relationship with music? That sounds great. I’d better not miss it. Ten quid? A snip.’ This was obviously vanity in my part. The reality is that people were more likely to consider giving up their evening and shelling out ten quid for a ticket, if this 17 thing was associated with whatever the brand name Bill Drummond meant in their head.

Ben from Amino, the promoters of the events in Newcastle, made it clear to me this morning. ‘Bill, whatever you think The17 is, it is not that. It’s the latest work by the artist known as Bill Drummond. Doing what you wanted us to do – and we have been trying – has been like trying to sell tickets for a name band without putting the name of the band on the poster, just the name of their new album that nobody has heard of yet. No one would buy the tickets.* Or an exhibition by Andy Warhol without his name, just what the curator of the show dreamt up as a title. You have to accept your name is now a brand name out in the public domain. As a brand name Bill Drummond resonates in the imaginations of a section of the population. They might not like what you do but there are a lot of people out there who have an interest in having an opinion about it. If we had put flyers and posters out there across the northeast with your name big and bold on them, we would have sold out immediately.’

What Ben was saying made sense. I understood what he was telling me, even if I didn’t want to accept it. In my head it still meant that whatever I did in future would be condemned to suffer a fate of seeking fame by association – with that bloke who used to manage Echo And The Bunnymen, was a one-hit wonder with the Time Lords and tore up a 20-quid note or something.

Originally this story was going to be called Fame By Association, it got changed as soon as I started writing it to How To Be A Famous Artist but somehow the theme of the chapter seems to be split between the two titles. Maybe to resolve this difference I should accept that The17 should seek fame by association, but find someone or something far more famous and iconic than Bill Drummond to achieve fame with.

Any suggestions?

Reality time. I have to come up with a way of using my name in conjunction with the name The17 which works before I take this 17 thing any further and piss off people trying to sell tickets down the line. Just as long as they don’t use those three letters K, L and F anywhere.

Post Script
Me going on about Michelangelo, as if I knew what I was talking about. Me trying to big myself up, by making light of one of the giants. It is so easy to be the armchair critic. If you don’t like something, go and do something better. Does this mean I have to go and do my version of David? I bet at least I could get him in proportion.

Contradictions, contradictions, contradictions.

* John Hirst has just pointed out that it was him that first made the analogy about a poster for a concert without the band’s name on it.