For Art’s Sake

“Don’t walk that way!” barks a gallerista at me in a London museum. I can’t help my funny walk I think to myself, but I’ve got a feeling that what she meant was I should follow a certain strict route around the exhibition, which considering it’s a showcase of so-christened ‘street art’ tickles me no end. When a show is dedicated to the ultimate free-for-all, break-every-rule, anti-Establishment school of art, why be so precious about how punters journey around it?

I asked the Gestapo gallerista the same question and got this priceless reply: “This is the way we designed the show and how it’s meant to be seen.” Eh? So, I’m at an exhibition of art which, by definition, is all about freedom of expression – as all art is – and I can’t mill around freely, forming my own opinion? Why not cut the confusion altogether and install a Travelator in every museum so we can glide along robotically watching the art go by as if on a Tesco checkout?

The real problem lies in the place museum-going occupies in the British psyche. We’re too intimidated, in awe, enslaved by what we should think instead of just thinking for ourselves. So, we dutifully follow the arrows and stick limpet-like to the audio guide and off we trot to read from the gallery gospel without any deviation from the museum-prescribed path. But isn’t the whole point of art to prick some kind of reaction, be it good or bad? Shouldn’t it provoke that punch in the gut that is specific to you personally? Even if the artists themselves are there on hand in front of you to explain their motivation and what effect they wanted to create, it shouldn’t matter: whatever response you have is entirely an individual thing and shouldn’t be committee-dictated.

It’s very different in other countries. I was in Paris recently and the people traffic in the museums there was fascinating. There were teenagers jabbering away animatedly whilst simultaneously dicking about on their iPhones, desk monkeys on their lunch break taking in some art with a side-order of baguette, couples snogging amongst the sculptures – the French position art as part of life and not something to be religiously revered as otherworldly, separate, untouchable. And that’s our problem. We pedestal museums as churches, hushed mausoleums that taxidermy art for us to worship at its altar. But art, in its bare essence, is meant to be a living, breathing entity that engages us in a dialogue. And you wanna know something? In that conversation, we are allowed to speak. For art’s sake we need to be heard.

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