On art

I attended an opening at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria last night. I had never been to an opening before, and I expected to see a lot of pretentious people, but then I realized that pretension is not necessarily something you “see.” You'd never know that Frasier and Niles Crane ooze pretension unless you had heard them in conversation. So, since I didn’t talk to anyone except my girlfriend, I couldn’t tell you how many people in attendance were, in fact, pretentious.

(“Pretentious” is spelt with a “t” instead of an “s.” Now that’s pretentious.)

The exhibit is called “Safety Equipment for Small Animals.” Bill Burns created and built it with a small team of helpers. He’s mostly bald and wore an open black sweater over a closed red sweater which was tucked into his pants. He speaks with a weird accent, clears his throat frequently and leaves long pauses in the middle of his sentences. He lives in Toronto. I didn’t like his work very much.

Art galleries are strange. Whenever I’m at one, I analyze everything – not just the paintings and sculptures, but also the lighting, the stairways, the water fountains, everything. I know very little about art, since I’ve never read a book about it and don’t expect to in the near future, so I’m never quite sure if my reads are any good.

The main problem is that at an art gallery, I’m never sure what’s art and what’s not. The theory of postmodernism that says “anything can be art,” has created a sort of post-Warholian syndrome. “What’s bad is good!” “What’s ugly is beautiful!” “What’s mundane is fascinating!” So why shouldn’t I spend half an hour staring at the snack machine?

I guess it's a question of objectivity. If I know nothing about art and anything can be art, then how do I distinguish between what's good and bad? Can I make distinctions without the historical and cultural knowledge of the critics? Does my virginity as a critic make me a purer judge of what is good and what is not? Or does my ignorance as a critic render my opinion irrelevant?