11 December 2006
Modern art makes me smile, I just can't help it.A week ago I spent some time in Tate Modern, the world's busiest modern-art museum*. Actually it was my second visit, and as before I wandered around with a big old smile on my face. No choice. It's the audacity... the sheer bare-faced-tongue-in-cheek-getting-away-with-it-audacity of some artists... and what they do for a living. How can you not smile?
Tate Modern has plenty of wonderfully clever and technically brilliant works of art... but it's the others... the plastic cubes, or the totally black paintings, or the casually arranged piles of sticks that make me smile. "That's just bollocks. I could do that!"**
But of course I didn't do it. They did.
Sure we can argue about whether a pile of sticks is art... but we can't argue the fact that these artists got their stuff out there... into an environment where it could be viewed, used, praised, derided, loved, abhorred, made fun of, and perhaps enjoyed. In short, they did something.
In my experience doing something almost always beats doing nothing... because whatever else happens, you learn. Of course we can all find reasons to hold back, but sooner or later, if we are serious, we have to put ourselves out there. Even at the risk of having our work called names... or worse... laughed at.
However you feel about it a visit to Tate Modern will make you smile. And that can't be bad.
*According to Time Magazine.
Posted by Nick Warren at 11:07 PM
