Samysj’s Weblog

You’re telling me that’s art?!

A couple of days ago my boyfriend’s mum made me laugh with stories of a weekend in Liverpool with her friends. While her and most of her friends were happy to shop, drink and dance the weekend away, one of the women insisted that they visit some art galleries, one of which was the Liverpool Tate. She told me how after queueing for some time to get in, with much anticipation they came to one piece which was basically ‘a pile of twigs’. Laughing to her friend and complaining about the length of time they had waited, she asked was this it? Her friend tried to reason by saying that she must see the artistic relevance of the composition of the twigs (or something like this…?) but she stuck to her guns, “no, it’s a pile of twigs, you can’t tell me that’s art!”.

This made me laugh because it reminded me of my own friend Jane, even on my first visit to York St John before starting university, she dragged me along to the art gallery at the earliest possible opportunity, when all I wanted to do was find out about the University and the course. The same thing happened on a shopping trip to Newcastle, first came the Baltic then the Laing and god knows how many others she’s dragged me to.

While I can appreciate some art, like the work and detail that might go into a painting, I do find a lot of it to be ‘just a pile of twigs’, much like Tracey Emin’s ‘Unmade Bed’, this particular artist pretty much made her name through this exhibition in which she displayed the bed which she apparently lived in over a period of months. While my friend Jane looks to this woman as her idol and loves all the work that she does, I on the other hand, struggle to understand how she has made such a living out of displaying things such as a messy bed.

It all just got me thinking about what makes some people see artistic relevance and not others? Do we all see it and it’s just that some of us choose not to take an interest? or do some of us genuinely not get art, and just take things at face value? I think, in general that people who aren’t interested in art have only ever known art as ‘nice pictures’ that we have to like to be considered as art, and the more we are exposed to abstract art we will eventually begin to see things as more than just ‘a pile of twigs’, although this doesn’t necessarily mean we will like the art!

In relation to my ideas surrounding art and its audiences, I found an article from january 2003 on the bbc news website titled ‘Are London art audiences more sophisticated?’ claiming that people in the north of England are not sophisticated enough to appreciate major works of art.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/talking_point/2658785.stm

Brian Sewell – a London based art critic, said that a new exhibition by post-war artists due to open on Tyneside should have been displayed in the capital.   “By the very nature of the audience in London it is exposed to very much more art and culture and is therefore more sophisticated. There is no doubt about it.”  Member of the Arts Council Paul Collard, and chairman of Northern Arts suggested that Northern audiences were just as sophisticated as those in London. “Investment in cultural facilities in the regions has stimulated an extraordinary renaissance in regional capitals like Newcastle,”

As I have said, and also as Brian Sewell  is trying to suggest, it is not likely to be the region we come from which determines how artistically sophisticated or experienced we are, but the amount of exposure to art we have.