Never Mind The Art Bollocks
Yesterday we did something we’d told ourselves we probably wouldn’t do again. Every year there’s an event around these parts called Art in the Chapels. It’s pretty much exactly what it sounds like. A collection of artists each takes over a chapel and exhibits their work, with visitors following one of several suggested routes from chapel to chapel. It’s honestly a brilliant concept. The chapels themselves are lovely things – places we’d never normally have reason to visit, and using them as exhibition spaces somehow feels like a really cool concept. Each artist gets their own space, so you can spend time with their collections. We’ve been going for a good few years now, but after the last visit we’d pretty much sworn we’d never bother again.
For the last few years, we have come away feeling hugely disappointed at the work on offer. Now, I fully understand that I’m venturing into dangerous waters here because art is one of those things where admitting you don’t like something can make you sound uncultured and a bit ignorant. That may well be true, but honesty counts for something too, surely. As we drove from chapel to chapel, I found myself looking at installation after installation and thinking, “What the actual feck?” Some of it genuinely looked to me like the sort of work I’d expect from an A-level art student who’d spent the previous two years languishing in the pub and suddenly realised they had three days left before their final submission. Yes, I know the maths for an A-level student doesn’t quite work on the pub bit, but let’s not let reality get in the way of a perfectly relatable stereotype. To be fair, I spent a fair bit of time during my A-levels and how I passed them all is still a thing of wonder to me.
One installation made me think of someone discovering an old set of poster paints they’d been given for Christmas several years ago and deciding the mould growing on the chapel walls could probably do with brightening up a bit. Perhaps they had actually painted the mould, and that’s honestly what it looked like to me. These weren’t students exhibiting for the first time, though. These were established artists and were people actually making a living through their work. That left me wondering whether I was missing something spectacularly obvious or whether I was simply looking at what, to my eyes at least, was just crap art.
Then there’s what Linette and I rather unkindly (but I think astutely) refer to as “The Art Bollocks.” You’ll know what I mean if you’ve ever been to a contemporary art exhibition; it’s the little laminated card next to the work explaining how the pile of bricks, three feathers and a collection of soiled knickers is actually an exploration of post-industrial identity, memory, loss and mankind’s uneasy relationship with consumer capitalism. And perhaps a bit of global warming thrown in for good measure. Without the accompanying explanation, you’d probably walk straight past it and dismiss it as, well, a collection of feathers and soiled knickers. With “The Art Boolocks” you’re left wondering whether you’ve just spectacularly failed an IQ test. Sometimes those little descriptions genuinely do add another layer to the work and help you understand what the artist is trying to communicate. Other times they feel suspiciously like they’re doing all the heavy lifting for something that otherwise wouldn’t stand up on its own. I’ll be absolutely honest, in the vast majority of stuff I see now, without “The Art Bollocks” a lot of what I see these days just doesn’t do it for me.
After four or five chapels we’d had enough and decided to go home and finish og bingeing From on whatever channel it’s on. To be fair, there was one exhibit that we both thought was absolutely superb, and that pretty much justified the trip on its own, but not quite. We’d driven a fair old distance, spent the afternoon driving from chapel to chapel and, once again, came home feeling fairly disappointed. My immediate reaction was that we’d simply spent the afternoon looking at crap art. It was only later, sat at home thinking about it, that I began to wonder whether I’d been a little too dismissive of what we’d seen.
The problem, I think, was that I had assumed my own taste was somehow objective. That’s quite an arrogant position to arrive at if you think about it. Just because I don’t see merit in something doesn’t automatically mean there isn’t any. It might simply mean I don’t understand it (perhaps some Art Bollocks” explanation of the works might have actually helped me here. That’s an uncomfortable thought because it’s much easier to dismiss something as rubbish than it is to admit it might be speaking a language you’ve never learned.
That thought took me towards thinking about music. People are making wonderfully “experimental” electronic music by banging away on deliberately broken synths, twisting knobs and coaxing out sounds that, to my ears, sound like someone trying to repair a washing machine using a box of particularly angry wasps that have been shaken in a jar before being let loose as musical instruments. These folk absolutely love what they’re doing, and their audience seems to love it too. I couldn’t honestly listen to more than about thirty seconds before wondering whether the equipment had developed a fault or that they’d gone just a bit far on the old dropping acid front. Who’s right? Equally, there are avant-garde composers producing music that some people more “educated’ than I in these matters describe as profound and deeply moving. To me it can sound like complete chaos. But then some listeners hear beauty, structure, composition, and emotion in those same pieces.
Classical music presents another interesting example for me. I can appreciate that much of it is technically amazing, emotionally rich, and culturally important, but I’ve never really developed a taste for it. We didn’t listen to classical music at home when I was growing up, and it simply wasn’t part of my family’s world. Every now and again I’ll hear a piece that I get, but most of the time I’m aware that I’m standing outside looking in. Rock music, on the other hand, feels instinctive because it’s what me and my mates were into when I was a teenager. Move further into the more extreme reaches of metal, though, and I’m lost again. To me it all sounds like an unholy racket. To somebody else it’s complex, expressive and deeply emotional, just like the avant-garde electronic stuff I was banging on about. But then I love Crass, who to many sound like…well, an unholy racket.
The more I thought about it, the more I began to wonder how much of our taste is actually ours in the first place. How much of it is built in and how much is just learned? If I’d grown up in a house where opera and Mahler were played every Sunday afternoon instead of rock records, would I now be sitting here extolling the virtues of Wagner? If I’d spent years studying contemporary art, would yesterday’s exhibitions have moved me rather than left me wondering how the hell someone gets paid for this kind of stuff? Or would I still have quietly looked at what appeared to be brightly coloured mould and thought, “Someone’s having a laugh here!”
I don’t know the answer, and perhaps there isn’t one. Taste seems to be something that accumulates and develops over a lifetime. It’s shaped by our parents, our friends, the records we buy, the books we read, the places we visit and the conversations we have. It develops without us noticing until one day we find ourselves drawn towards some things and absolutely repelled by others. We often mistake those instincts for objective truth when, in reality, they may simply be the product of the path we’ve taken through life.
It’s something worth remembering in our own little HiFi world too. We spend a lot of time arguing about loudspeakers, amplifiers, DACs, records and streaming services as though there must be a definitive answer somewhere. We talk about gear as though everybody should hear it the way we do, yet our musical tastes are wildly different before we’ve even connected the first cable. Someone who listens almost exclusively to chamber music is almost certainly going to value different qualities to someone whose shelves are full of punk, techno or death metal.
So perhaps I was a tad wrong yesterday when I dismissed most of what I’d seen as being, well, a bit crap. Perhaps some of it genuinely was crap, but then not everything creative has merit just because somebody says it does, and I’m still convinced there are people in the art world whose greatest talent lies in coming up with impressive-sounding explanations for stuff they cobbled together out of their dirty laundry basket. Equally, perhaps some of what I dismissed really was excellent, and I simply lacked the experience, knowledge, or understanding to appreciate it properly.
Reading this back, I’m pretty convinced I’ve touched on this subject in the past, but I thought I ought to come up with an explanation of why I wrote this monumental and important piece of writing.
And here it is:
This article deliberately occupies the liminal space between artistic observation and human uncertainty, inviting the reader to question their own relationship with aesthetic judgement whilst simultaneously destabilising the inherited hierarchies through which taste itself is constructed. By rejecting conventional notions of narrative resolution, grammatical certainty and objective criticism, the writer foregrounds the democratisation of opinion as an act of quiet resistance against the dogmatic frameworks that continue to privilege cultural consensus over lived experience. The repeated wavering between certainty and self-doubt functions as a dialogue in which meaning continually collapses under the weight of its own self-awareness before reconstituting itself as an exploration of subjectivity. In doing so, the article resists being read as either an essay, criticism or satire, instead existing as a post-discursive contextual intervention that challenges the reader to recognise that all acts of interpretation are, themselves, creative performances and of themselves. Consequently, any perception that the piece is rambling, self-indulgent or, indeed, complete bollocks should not be understood as a failure of the work itself, but rather as an invitation to confront the unconscious aesthetic biases and culturally conditioned expectations that each reader inevitably brings to the act of reading.
There you go, The Art Bollocks!
Stu
