WE WENT to this fancy Caff for a posh nosh-up and it looked the goods until the grub got trundled out. The prawns were definitely iffy and the button that called itself a steak - hiding under some unidentified leafy mass – had never seen a flame and would’ve mooed if it had a mouth so we decided to kick up a stink.
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The top dog came out, listened to our gripes and said, “It’s not meant to be edible food.”
We asked what it was then and he explained: “If people aren’t complaining I haven’t challenged anything - If I don’t challenge, then I’ve just capitulated to taste.” We said that capitulating to taste might be the exact thing that people wanted but he was “ardament”, as Dorrie Evans would say, about his craft.
Well, not precisely: the quotes are actually from sculptor Richard Goodwin whose concrete column with writhing figures on it (likened to a “broken brontosaurus tooth” by Leo Schofield) now menaces passers by on the approach to the NSW Art Gallery – a warning of the tortures awaiting the unwary inside perhaps.
Goodwin said, “It’s not meant to be decorative, public art. If people don’t rip into you, you haven’t challenged anything. If it doesn’t challenge, you have just capitulated to taste.” Why do we readily accept that assertion about art – “You’re not expected to LIKE it, you Philistine!” – when we would be appalled were it applied to anything else that we pay for – a meal, CDs, DVDs, clothes, a novel, a haircut?
When we open our own wallets to buy something, you can bet your life that the person who’s made it has taken our “taste” into consideration unless they enjoy being broke. But when the public purse creaks open to buy public art and the tax paying punters have no say in it – suddenly we’re a bunch of mugs. The greater our horror at the banal mediocrity or simple ugliness of a lump of cobbled together dross, the more successful the artist feels.
Of course, only grumpy old buggers will ever complain. Most people nod and smile without really knowing what to say without offending someone or, worse still, being asked to elaborate.
To that end, I’ve compiled a handy list of phrases that are completely meaningless but sound very flattering; more importantly, they’ll trumpet your complete command of art appreciation.
Just take any old phrase from column A and complete it from column B:
A) There’s an effable sense of time
Social awareness is purged
Contractual sensibility dwindles
Bellicose grandiosity shimmers
B) in an orgy of spacial vacuum.
and colour overwhelms reality.
replaced by Jungian mass.
juxtaposed within urban tensions.
Stroking your chin and nodding slightly will augment the delivery of your pontification. If the artist is nearby, don’t worry – his eyes will light up in the hope that someone might finally be able to tell HIM what in blazes the thing means – he’s just as clueless about it as anyone else.
You probably think it’s a bit cruel to blurt out meaningless gobbledegook about something that is otherwise a mystery to all who look at it. Again, don’t worry: if you actually liked it you’d know what to say and probably everyone else would enthusiastically agree with you – leaving the artist, as explained, feeling that he was a miserable failure. Only meaningless twaddle can describe meaningless twaddle but still leave everyone happy.
