Stuck in the slow lane

The ICA's celebration of its 60th anniversary — a changing cycle of exhibitions by 60 young, little-known artists — is spread over six months and is called "Nought to Sixty". That’s an unfortunate title for a show of this duration but an apposite one: the slow rate of acceleration, which it implies, underlines the lack of energy left in London’s flagship for contemporary art and culture.

The ICA is the Austin Allegro of London’s art scene. It is an uncomfortable ride, left far behind by the gleaming new DB9 of the Tate Modern. It is outpaced by the Serpentine, a girly, open-top convertible of a modern public art institution. Even a quasi-suburban Megane, like Camden Arts Centre, stages more impressive exhibitions.

Once upon a time, the ICA blazed a trail for contemporary art in London. In 1975, the genial Belgian conceptual artist Marcel Broodthaers exhibited Décor, a landmark anti-colonial installation featuring a lobster, deckchairs and Kalashnikovs. In 1991, the ICA staged Damien Hirst’s first one-man show. There are still occasionally memorable and sizeable exhibitions — such as Jonathan Monk’s in 2005 — but over the past 10 years the institution’s impact has steadily diminished, earning it a reputation as a great café with a small gallery attached. Why?

There are lots of things the ICA does well. Its newsletters are informative and well-written. The website is easy to navigate. It has the best programmed cinemas in London, with a comprehensive range of international independent films and documentaries that cannot be seen anywhere else in the city (and for which those of us in the know daily give thanks). The bar is cool and the bookshop fascinating. But the ICA’s problems are two fold — attitude and funding.

The attitude issue is typified by the first instalment of its anniversary exhibition. One of the three artists on show appropriates lighting from different locations and reproduces them in the gallery. The purple neon in the entrance hall copies that of a community centre in Hackney, the green lighting under the ticket desks mimics the lobby of BP’s headquarters and the dim blue hue in the ICA’s toilets is derived from Vauxhall underpass — clever but arcane.

Upstairs in one mostly empty room, a video of an old man digging up peat is projected into a screen propped with fashionable informality against a wall. A pair of maracas hang from the ceiling, while the amplified sound of the subject’s spade echoes round the room.

This should be one 30-second sequence from a documentary — yet it’s playing here for a month.

In the neighbouring space another artist has produced a Warhol parody with a series of identical images ranged around the room — a tiny idea occupying far too much space.

If the ICA is going to show a load of minor works by unknown artists, it should put them all together in one group show that requires one visit. Instead novice artists are given a room to themselves in a major institution, and the humble gallery-goer is expected to make numerous trips to get the same quantity of art they would get in one visit to the Hayward or Barbican.

It’s all part of a disease that deifies the artist while starving the viewer. In today’s inflated art world, being an artist is the most overrated, overpaid and overcrowded of professions. The ICA needs to make sure its artists are delivering significant experiences to their visitors.

The institution should be celebrating its anniversary by cutting the ribbon on a new multi-million pound glass-and-steel state-of-the-art home, designed by a starchitect. Instead it is reducing itself to a couple of project rooms for artists who don’t quite qualify as "emerging". And that’s the second problem - funding.