Comments at an Art Exhibition

Here is one done by Joan Miro’s great-great-granddaughter at the age of five or six.  If you stand far enough back you can see how colourful and lively it is,

But what about his one?  It looks like some distant cousin a few times removed of Vassily Kandinsky did it soon after a painful stomach operation.  You could just smell, as well as well as taste, the consequences of all that churning about still going on. 

I liken that painting over there, the one where the mother has chased down her son in the subway to clean his ears with a tissue and spit.  Wrong, alas.  Read the caption: a wild woman has throttled a child and threatens to cut its neck with a shard of pottery.  Are you sure about that? I could swear someone found a photo of the time my mother did that to me on our way to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, must have been in 1949.

Well, not too many years later, when I was almost eighteen and just starting to think about things, such as art and history, I went to the Met, walked into the room where a giant Jackson Pollack was hung, and I sat on a long stone bench and said to myself that I would not get up until the work made sense and proved it really was a work of art.  After less than two hours I gave up and left. Ever since, it has seemed to me that not such a long time need be expended, like today, in this exhibition.   

The bright colours there are striking.  Where? In the far corner on the left.  Looks like a semaphore flag, slashed diagonally.  Yes, but the colours, so bright and attractive.  Must mean something.

My most best favourite, hmmm, that’s not easy to say, but that thing over there in the corner, some kind of, wha’dya call it? a project or a projection or whatever.  Yes, that’s it.  What! No, you’re kiddin’ me, a fire extinguisher?  Well, I’ll be darned.

Did you vote for your favourite? They keep asking me. You are so negative, I wonder if you have any favourites, or even any you could bring yourself to look at again.  Now don’t get nasty, please.  Of course, I put in my ballot.  It’s the one with the dark girl facing away from the painter’s gaze and our observation.  Very skilfully done, and traditional.  Traditional?  Yes, there are several outstanding portraits of famous men with their heads seen from behind.  It’s as though the artist tried to capture not so much the personality of the model or the deep feelings welling up from within him or herself, but rather the subject stands as a medium through which the artist wants us to look out beyond the canvas, away from us, into the unseen dimensions at the very heart of consciousness.

Surely the winning candidate must have something you like.  Not really.  It only tells me what is fashionable in the art schools over the last few years.  The creator’s statement seems more important than the product of insight and technique.  Shows you how far someone could go with minimum skill and lack of insight.  I beg your pardon, but that is a gross insult to the judge and the committee, isn’t it?  I hope so.

No use expressing yourself until you have has some experiences worth leaving behind..  If you have never gone anywhere, done anything, and don’t visit museums to study and imitate what has proven itself, what’s the point?  Why waste our time?

All the great art of the nineteenth century has to struggle for acceptance.  The artists suffered in garrets and ruined their health with drink and drugs, dissipated their lives, committed suicide.  So you say.

It’s not the work itself, someone said, but the narrative behind it and the conversation it engenders.  What lies behind such a statement is, to be sure, a load of codswallop, as though some constructivist fool decided to do away with art altogether and replace it with social science gobbledigook.  If someone decides to kill him/herself an artist, then no matter what, whatever they do is a work of art.  And no one can gainsay this since, in post modernism, everybody’s opinion is as good as everyone else’s no matter how lacking in  substance, evidence or truth. The function of art, it is further asserted by those who make such assertions, the objective of art is to create controversy, debate and a whole lot of empty noise in public.  And yet, these are the self-same people who deny the validity of any Big or Master  Narrative, and conceive of a debate (there are no rules) or a dialogue (no one listens to the other side and constructs a rational reply) as ill-informed and uneducated voices shouting over each other: may the loudest voice win, or at least the last to croak into silence.

The child of twelve or thirteen walks around the exhibition hall thoughtfully.  Did you find any picture you like?  I liked almost all of them.  And what made you like them? They were really cool.  What about the others, the ones you didn’t like so well?  They were sort of ok but they weren’t cool.  Isn’t she clever?

Later the artist and the runners-up come to the stage to receive their awards.  Thank you, everyone, for liking my work.  It is really cool.  Next year, I will do the same picture again using different crayons.

Art should not have to be this or that, for this and that depend upon styles and tastes, ages and cultures.  If “should” is forbidden, then so, alas, are “beauty”, “truth” and “significance.”  But what about “skill” and “talent,” “insight” and “genius”? Perhaps “art” itself should go, since, from early in the twentieth century, it was overtaken by “design” and “ornament”.

The judge stood up to make her speech.  The exhibition hall went almost silent, except for the children still careering about in a mad frenzy of delight, and servers served the last glasses of wine and offered the final squares of cheese on toothpicks.  “Ahem.  It is my pleasure and honour to be here tonight.” The audience applauded politely.  “I have looked twice at these paintings, first, in the photographs you sent by email attachment, and then, here in your beautiful little city when I first arrived and walked through the hall.”  “Here, here,” several; enthusiasts murmured in a no otiose way.  “My feeling is that all these works should deserve awards”—titters of laughter—“but, of course, that is impossible—there would no funds left to pay me”—guffaws and nervous coughing—“so I will name only the third runner up, the second prize, and all the around winner.”  The audience drew in its breath in anticipation of the results. “Third runner-up is a painting I found delightfully provocative.”  Shouts of approval.  “The second prize goes to a work of art that shows how engaged the artist is in finding her place in life after many years of very difficult issues.”  Loud applause.  “And now, what you have all been waiting for, the over-all winner of the Art Awards goes to a painting that I found excruciatingly cool.”  A stunned silence.  Then shouts of “Cool, cool, cool!”