KEY POINTS:
Matthew Collings has a problem. The critic known for his glib and amusingly readable surveys of the contemporary British art scene is getting a bit jaded by it all.
"I prefer art where there is a point," he says in London. "I prefer old-fashioned art, abstract painting. I tend to be alienated from very current styles."
The art of sensation - indeed, Sensation was the name of the 1997 survey of Young British Artists at the Royal Academy which included highlights from the collection of Charles Saatchi, including Damien Hirst's shark in formaldehyde and Tracey Emin's tent embroidered with Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995 - now looks shallow to him.
"I don't like to be bullied by artists," he says, citing Hirst as one of the leading bullies. "I don't want to hear about them and see their art any more.
"Emin and Hirst are stuck in a rut and their art is deteriorating because of repetition. What seemed fresh 10 or 15 years ago is now irritating."
Collings says that when the Young British Artists burst through they used many of the strategies forged in conceptual art and performance to great effect.
They were, in part, mocking German conceptual artist Joseph Beuys, but partly trying to emulate him in the East End of London, which was something great but refreshing, Collings says. "But we now realise the difference between someone who is serious, like Beuys, and a would-be celebrity."
Not that Collings is against modern art fundamentals such as irony. "Some people are viciously ironic but there is some depth to their irony. Picasso never stopped being ironic."
What concerns him is the pose of jaded bitter irony which he sees infecting the psyche of the art world.
"Art is confusing because it has more mass popularity than it ever has, but it is innately more trivial than it has ever been. That may be because society has that feel of hollowness to it.
"It may also be because of the rhythm of art, which has periods of richness and poverty. We are in a poverty period, just when five million people a year are going to the Tate Modern to see art."
Collings says that in that regard he agrees with Australian curmudgeon Robert Hughes, although he has a different shortlist of what he wants to look at. While Hughes is holding up figurative painters such as Lucien Freud as examples of unrecognised greatness, Collings wants to see what the less popular moments in modern art have to offer. "Abstract painting. The new contemporary audience is baffled by it," he says.
In books like Blimey! From Bohemia to Britpop: The London Artworld from Francis Bacon to Damien Hirst and Art Crazy Nation: The Post-Blimey London Artworld, Collings dropped the language of French theory and woolly meandering and talked in a direct way about the work of his contemporaries.
His latest, This is Modern Art, a tie-in with a TV series in Britain, is another rattling ride through the myths and concepts the modern art viewer should be familiar with.
He doesn't try to rewrite the canon, concurring with the widely held view that the first modern painting was Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon from 1907.
"Its transformation of reality is so radical it deserves its reputation as not only the first Cubist painting but also it introduced the themes of the 20th century - alienation and bitterness," Collings says.
He is fascinated by the way perceptions of art and artists change.
When Picasso's Guernica was first exhibited, critics panned some of its formalist lapses. Now the compelling narrative about the work being Picasso's response to the Spanish Civil War has crowded out other assessments."No one thinks about it as a painting. No one talks about Cubism."
Similarly, with Salvador Dali. Collings believes Dali was underrated when modern art was going through a serious phase - but now that modern art is foolish, Dali's serious contributions are not recognised.
"Surrealism is a drag because it is very much the current mode," Collings says. "All videos and so on are informed by it, so I don't want to see any surrealistic exhibitions.
"It was good in 1928 but the needle got stuck." A key point Collings makes in This is Modern Art is that the modern art we are seeing now is different to the modern art we had through most of the 20th century.
Rather than trying to build on the legacy of art, as Picasso did when he painted versions of works by Goya, the Chapman brothers treat Goya as a resource to be plundered for forms. Much present artistic activity is about the process of being an artist rather than the process of making art.
"Until relatively recently, people went about being an artist in the same way. They went to the studio and painted.
"The routine for the failed artist and the successful one was similar.
"What is exciting about the past 25 years is the revolution about the ways of being an artist."
But is this preoccupation with being an artist a sign of art's shallowness at present?
"The amusement in the ideas they come up with is genuine, but those funny ideas are only as good as a funny scriptwriter or an ad guy is coming up with," Collings says.
"While it seems exciting, it's what Clement Greenberg used to call middlebrow." Greenberg is an American critic known for his championing of Abstract Expressionism.
Collings' main area of inquiry is popularity, why contemporary art has that buzz about it in the past 15 years, and what that tells us about who we are. Although he sees celebrity as a psychological problem which makes many things about contemporary art hateful, it is the driver for the popular interest in modern art.
"People like the Chapman brothers, Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst are intelligent, they came into art for genuine reasons, they were motivated by the same impulses, but they were corrupted by the times, made shallow by shallow times," Collings says. "Their standards were lowering as audience standards were going up.
"The public is encouraged to take art seriously. When they go to the Tate Modern they think they are in an important place."
ART CRITIC
* Who: Matthew Collings
* Where and when: Auckland Art Fair, May 18, 6pm; and at the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival, Aotea Centre, May 24, noon and 6pm
