Tom Sutcliffe: Don't confuse DIY with art

(EPA)

I've been struck by sheer craftsmanship a couple of times recently in an exhibition – a quality that we don't expect to see in an art gallery any more, at least not in the sense that it might be the raison d'être for going in the first place. You know you're likely to see well-made things, and you assume, in most cases, that the artist will have taken pains to get everything precisely so. But since the definition of what counts as art has expanded to embrace the contingent and the knowingly shoddy, it would be unsophisticated to say of anything, "It can't be art because it's too easy." The mark of the artist isn't any longer the ability to make something the average person could not. It's the ability to think of something or see a connection in a way that the average person couldn't.

From which flows a lot of popular anxiety about contemporary art. That millennial guarantor of the artist's public status – uncommon skill in rearranging brute matter so that it conjures an imagined thing – has been set aside, to be replaced with a more uncertain way of verifying talent. "My six-year-old could have done that" is the most popular expression of the widespread discontent with this alteration.

What's slightly odd, though, is the way in which skill in making has not only become irrelevant in the judgement of an artist but may have tipped over into becoming a liability. That the first element of that contention is true is demonstrated by the Jeff Koons show at the Serpentine Gallery. The Popeye Series consists, in part, of painted aluminium casts of children's inflatable pool toys, often interpenetrating with household objects. The precision with which these replicas have been made is remarkable, down to the exact texture of paint on vinyl. What's more, the points at which they meet with some other artefact have a hallucinatory exactness to them. You know that an inflated object can't be penetrated by a step-ladder and remain inflated, but if it could, this is what it would look like. The point is that while there are hundreds of man hours in each sculpture, few will figure on Koons' timesheet, since he has an atelier of worker drones doing the making for him.

In contrast, Charles LeDray, the New York artist who has opened an installation called Mens Suits at Artangel, does all the work himself. LeDray laboriously crafts his tableaux of men's thrift shops, complete with miniaturised jackets and clothes hangers and garment bins, entirely from scratch. Again, the attention to detail is startling. Even the little colour-coded size markers you find on clothes hangers in shops have been handmade at quarter scale – the doll's-house perfection of the world he's created goes all the way to the bottom.

The effect is unsettlingly toy-like, particularly because LeDray has arranged his stage sets under a miniature version of the suspended ceilings you find in cheap offices; you have to crouch to see all the details. Oddly, one of the effects this obsessive attention to detail has is to make you question his status as an artist. Isn't this a hobby that has got out of hand – and where does model-making stop and sculpture begin? Bizarrely, they're all questions that wouldn't arise if he'd followed standard practice and hired in some handy types to do the construction for him. It's as if making the things yourself is a strange breach of manners. It can't be long before we hear a reversal of the famous put-down: "Don't tell me that's art – my six-year-old couldn't do it."

A whiff of intrigue

Theatre has always prided itself on its physical immediacy, one trump card over the convenient, but sometimes clinical freedom of the television screen. Occasionally you get productions, usually down at the children's-treat end of the theatrical spectrum, which reach out into the auditorium, either with actors or cascades of foil or, as in the Lord of the Rings musical, a powerful wind effect. But until I went to see Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem at the Royal Court recently, I don't think I've ever encountered a production that ropes smell into its theatrical armoury. In one scene, when a character is splashing petrol around, you notice that a pungent forecourt perfume has filled the theatre. I'm told, too – though I didn't notice this – that a scene in which a character is attacked with a red-hot iron is the cue for an unmistakeable smell of burnt hair and scorched meat. Frankly, Butterworth's script and Mark Rylance's central performance (below) are so vivid and enjoyable that I'm not sure they need the added flavourings, but Ian Rickson's experiment in Sensurround was intriguing, even so. I've been to a lot of productions that got up my nose, but never because that's where the director wanted them to go.

I've had to revise my list of top movie car crashes since seeing Just Another Love Story, which contains a canonical example of the art-movie crash, one which could vie with the car crash that initiated the story in Alejandro Iñárritu's Amores Perros or the smash that concludes the story in Godard's Le Mépris. The point about the art-movie crash is that you get very little warning before the collision. Popcorn movies revel in automative damage. That kind of crash is meant to arouse you, so a bit of preliminary strip-tease is often included (screeching tyres, etc). The art-movie crash, by contrast, is supposed to stun you by its apparently arbitrary interruption of the trajectory you imagined the film was taking. Some viewers were furious about Godard's crash precisely because they regarded it as arbitrary, even though the central truth of a car-crash is that you don't see it coming. Ole Bornedal's crash is a pretty good addition to the canon, both in terms of sheer kinetic crunch and narrative consequence. Not sure whether it can nudge Amores Perros off the top spot or edge out Paul Haggis's Crash for silver, but it's definitely on the podium.