THE UPS AND DOWNS OF THE HOT 100

May 2005

‘Art is in the eye of the beholder.’

That’s it. That is Number One in the Open Manifesto’s inaugural Hot 100. The people have spoken. They have cast their votes and they have chosen that particular one above all the other new doctrines, dogmas and principals that exist at the Open Manifesto. It doesn’t matter what you think or what I think. That is Number One for those who did vote.

The one at the other end of the scale, the one that scraped in at 100 goes like this:

‘Let’s not argue about art:

it is all valid

it is all invalid

all universal

all particular

they are only ‘Songs in The Kiosk of Life’

Now I will try and explain what the Open Manifesto is and then what relevance its Hot 100 has. Here goes. I was driving up Britain in May 2000, as part of some other job I was working on, and I was thinking about how I was bored with big art and how I liked Martin Creed’s ball of screwed-up paper. From these thoughts an idea started to take shape in my head. The idea almost immediately took on the name the Open Manifesto. Some time after my return home from this drive up Britain, I registered openmanifesto.com and worked on the following text to be used as poster, advert and site notice.

The Open Manifesto exists. It exists to define what art is and what art is not. And how art should be made. And what art is to be used for. And how art can be discussed. And what there is to be learnt. And who it is for. It accepts: Whatever is said today makes redundant what was said yesterday. What was said ten years ago might be suddenly as fresh as what will be said tomorrow morning. The Open Manifesto will never close. The Open Manifesto needs more. All new doctrines, dogmas or principles are welcomed for consideration to be added to the Open Manifesto. WARNINGS: No jokers, no timewasters. Mean what you say even if you fall short of what you proclaim.

In reality the Open Manifesto didn’t exist as the openmanifesto.com until early 2004. I don’t know what I was expecting from the site, or what use it would be to me or anybody else. Over the months there was a steady trickle of people stumbling upon it, some of whom have submitted their doctrines, dogmas and principles. By the end of the year there were almost 150 entries. I am afraid there was a sprinkling of jokers and timewasters, most of whom we have weeded out.

This year (2005) I wanted to give the site a number of gentle pushes. The first of these was to involve the launch of the Open Manifesto’s Hot 100. But first I’m going to have to go back 40 years to 1965 when I was 12. Like millions of others, the pop charts fascinated me. Sunday evenings were all about listening to the Top 40. The ups, the downs, the straight-ins at… and of course the occasional single that came from nowhere by a singer you’d never heard of, which stayed at No.1 for seven weeks. And you’d be thinking, ‘Who’s buying this rubbish and how come they’re still buying it after seven weeks, and how come my all-time third favourite record only got as far as No.18?’

And it wasn’t just the single that stayed at number one for seven weeks which was rubbish, most of the records that were in the charts in any given week were rubbish. Maybe that’s what gave the ones that weren’t such a hold on my imagination.

When I grew up and got involved in the pop charts for real, I became aware of the Billboard Hot 100. They were basically the pop charts for the United States of America, and as such the most powerful charts in the world. Of course, being America they had to have a bigger chart than anyone else. A Hot 100, not just a Top 40. But the percentage of rubbish records in the Billboard Hot 100 was pretty much on a par with the percentage of rubbish in our Top 40.

Charts still hold a fascination for me, now that I’m no longer involved with pop music. Maybe that’s why I’ve evolved the idea of the Open Manifesto Hot 100. The Hot 100 would work as follows: as well as being invited to make submissions to the Open Manifesto, visitors to the site would be invited to select their own Top 10.

This Top 10 should be made up of the ten submissions to the Open Manifesto which the visitor found the most inspiring, enlightening, incisive or important to the world we live in today. These Top 10s need not be ranked in a 1–10 order of merit. Each individual submission will be awarded a point and over a period of time, as more Top 10s are submitted, the points will be added up. The doctrine, dogma or principle with the most points will be given the much-coveted No. 1 slot in the Hot 100, the one with the second highest score will get the No. 2 slot etc. etc., all the way down to the hundredth highest holding the anchor position.

The Hot 100 will then be given its own page on the site and each time somebody submits a new Top 10 the ten new points allocated will be added to the grand total, thus affecting the order of the Hot 100. My hope was that as the Open Manifesto grew and evolved the Hot 100 would evolve too and tell us something. That something might of course not be worth knowing, but I was willing to take the risk. Like any popularity chart it would be open to manipulation, such as people endlessly sending in Top 10s featuring their own submission to the site. In an attempt to try and curb this, only one submission will be accepted in any 12 months from the same email address.

Around the same time that this Hot 100 thing was bubbling around in my head I was asked to write 500 words for this year’s Fine Art degree show catalogue at Nottingham Trent University. I agreed to write the 500 words in exchange for 100 students sending in their doctrines, dogmas and principles and their Top 10s. They agreed. What I wrote about is some of what I’m writing about here. In fact I have ripped off whole chunks of that piece for this piece. I wrote the 500 words but I don’t think we got more than 50 submissions and Top 10s. And many of those submissions seemed to be rather trivial, ‘Art is blah blah blah’-type one-liners. But we did get enough Top 10s to construct the first Hot 100.

On my first reading of the Hot 100 my immediate reaction was ‘well, this is a pile of shite’. I was tempted to tamper with the democratic process and rig it in the hope that I could make it look more threatening and challenging to the given order of all things concerning the world of contemporary art and not just a dull list of platitudes. I conquered that temptation for the preference of keeping it how it was and using the act of writing of these words to confront the reality of it, not just my disappointment that it did not live up to my half-baked ideas of what it might have been.

After a certain amount of debate with my colleagues Cally and John Hirst, we decided to make the site – and there is no getting around using this dreaded phrase – more user-friendly. I hope that over the next year or so the Open Manifesto will continue to develop and that the Hot 100 in a year or so will look at least a tad more interesting. Maybe I have to accept that like the real pop charts most of the Hot 100 will have to be rubbish to make the truly great entries stand out.

Mind you, if you were to read it, your reaction might be totally different.