Is it art — or is it interior decorating?

Is there, I wonder, anything worse you could say to a serious artist than that you bought their new painting because it worked well with your sofa?

The whole project of modern art was, in a way, to escape the confines of the parlour walls. From Marcel Duchamp to Jackson Pollock, artists were smashing their way out of the frame, knocking art off its pedestal. The absurd, ad hoc sculptures of dada appropriated everyday, mundane objects. The vast canvases of the Abstract Expressionists would not fit over a fireplace and conceptual art remains a riposte to easy commercialisation and commodification.

But even the biggest, the most shocking, the most idiotic and the most apparently resistant work eventually becomes subsumed into the world of interior decoration as its shock value fades and it merges into the canon of the accepted and the acceptable.

Auctions still pretend otherwise. There are art auctions and there are decorative art auctions. We know what art is. Perhaps. But decorative art is a strange, shifty category that embraces furniture, design, craft and so on, an almost endless cascade of desirable things that are not quite art, things that were made for commercial rather than cultural reasons. The term is fading a little now — “design” is more widely used — but it carries within it that condescension; the notion that the decorative precludes art. Art, in other words, is above all that.

But is it? When we contemplate buying an artwork are we not always, at least faintly, aware of its context? The interior? When we acquire a painting surely we are asking, “Where could I put that? Where would it fit?” Unless we are acquiring art as an asset to be stored in a humidity-controlled, tax-free storage facility in a freeport (which is a huge chunk of the top of the market), are we not thinking about the effect it might have in our homes?

It might be painful for artists to hear (less so for their galleries, who are complicit in the hypocrisy) but almost all of the art bought anywhere in the world is for decoration

It might be painful for artists to hear (less so for their galleries, who are complicit in the hypocrisy) but almost all of the art bought anywhere in the world is for decoration. Whether it is acquired to enliven the globalised, overscaled banality of a corporate lobby or to hang on the walls of a restaurant, to fill a hole on a newly painted wall or to create the effect of a historical period — or just to show off — art is, mostly, ornament.

I’ve recently become intrigued by the interiors that Instagram’s algorithm has decided I like. It shows me images of elegant rooms, situated somewhere between toned-down Modernism and grand, historical interiors painted in shades of grey and dark green, in which the walls are crammed with artworks, academy-style. Sometimes paintings are hung over bookshelves. Some are new, some conspicuously old and worn, like the rooms of old intellectuals, and some seem generated by AI. There will be a mix: some prints, some architectural drawings, a landscape or two, some abstracts.

The works are eclectic in the extreme. So much so that it leads me to believe it has either been accumulated by an interior decorator (“to get the look”) or by a buyer more interested in what we might call the interior picturesque than the pictures. It is as difficult to discern a collector’s taste through these works as it is to ascribe a taste to a holiday rental crammed with Chinese-painted scenes of New York in the rain and framed AI-generated inspirational slogans.

The idea in both situations is to create an effect. In the latter it is to inculcate a sense of domesticity through some form of generic decor (which, ironically for a travel destination, makes everywhere look the same). In the former it is to indicate taste and a back-story of refined acquisition. The collector’s pictures are there to suggest a lifetime of accumulation, inherited works, works with stories behind them, signifiers of cultural capital.

Even Francis Bacon’s screaming, squirming body horror has been absorbed so that it is just as much at home at home as in a museum

Some artists, of course, are ahead of the game. Damien Hirst, who started as a conceptual terrible infant, has built a factory of decorative art, art as branded wallpaper: spots, butterflies, flowers. But even Francis Bacon’s screaming, squirming body horror has been absorbed so that it is just as much at home at home as in a museum. We have become inured to shock and artists have adapted to new demands, willingly relenting (despite the rhetoric) to self-commodification.

Architect Peter Marino has been instrumental in promoting the pick’n’mix of modern works with old bronzes and Old Masters, creating for his clients interiors that appear to illustrate a nonchalant connoisseurship that sees only quality, not style. Photo shoots for interiors magazines then create value for the aesthetic, which the works become caught up in, accruing value and desirability.

For artists there is an arrogance in the assumption that their work is so existentially essential; that it can only be appreciated in a purpose-made context, depleted of domesticity. Art, no matter how striking or brilliant, has become a moodboard. The work is unimportant, what matters is that it creates an impression. Even the best art is now decor.

Edwin Heathcote is the FT’s architecture and design critic

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