Moments of experience

At its annual exhibition at the Mall Galleries in May, the Royal Society of British Artists held a debate on the motion ‘This house believes that a found object cannot be a work of art’. The motion’s obvious subtext was that since Duchamp’s snow shovel the ‘found object’ has been digging away at the foundations of traditional hand-made art, with potentially catastrophic consequences. A team of speakers, including Julian Spalding (author of The Eclipse of Art), made impassioned speeches in the motion’s favour, and even those against seemed so half-hearted that Peregrine Worsthorne was moved to inquire from the floor: ‘Is there an argument here?’

If there is, it’s not one the found object seems to be winning to judge from the recent resurgence of interest in the fount and origin of all hand-made art: drawing. Admittedly not all drawing these days is on paper: Grayson Perry won last year’s Turner Prize by drawing on pots. But if there’s health in diversity, drawing can never have been fitter. On the one hand we have the Prince of Wales’s Drawing Studio upholding the values of traditional draughtsmanship, and on the other the Pizza Express Prospects 2004 Drawing Prize, selecting finalists such as Phil Coy, who redraws urban borders with potted marguerites. Between the two, we have the popular Campaign for Drawing — launched by Julian Spalding as master of Ruskin’s Guild of St George — promising in its fifth triumphant year to get the British public drawing at a thousand venues across the country, come its annual Big Draw in October. And now the Royal Academy — whose basement Schools once seemed the last bastion of drawing tradition — has, at the urging of Allen Jones and David Hockney, made drawing the focus of this year’s Summer Exhibition.

Have we come full circle? No, but we’ve come a long way since the nadir of the 1960s when drawing was dropped from the National Diploma in Design in pursuit of inspiration without perspiration.