22 March 2018
Is It Art?
The £25 a bottle rule.
By Chin Chin
As far as the arts are concerned I am a £25 a bottle man. That doesn’t mean that I need a stiff one before going to the Tate Modern or that I slope off to the bar between the intervals at the opera (I had a grandfather who did that. He always claimed to have enjoyed every bar of the evening). Rather it goes to the level of my capacity for enjoyment.
I like wine. It is an interesting subject and the industry surrounds itself with an aura of mystique which adds to the fun. I enjoy the taste of it too and am reasonably discriminating up to a point but that is where the £25 limit kicks in. When I buy a case of wine, travelling through France perhaps or taking up one of those attractive sounding en primeur offers which come in over the internet, I generally make £25 a bottle the top limit because good wines at that price are at about the edge of my level of appreciation. Of course there are bad wines at that level too, and many good ones at much lower prices, but when you go over £25 pounds a bottle, if you have chosen wisely, you are paying for something which you need a better palate than mine to fully enjoy.
It is much the same with art. I like a good representation of something physical and admire the skill with which it is portrayed. That doesn’t mean chocolate box images of a near photographic quality, nor an unhealthy fixation with seventeenth century Dutch still lifes, but representation in all its variety: Impressionist, pre-Raphaelite, Banksy, whatever. All this falls within the limit of things I can admire. Where I cross the line is with the abstracts, pretty patterns to be sure and perhaps a useful idea for the design of curtains, but often apparently unconnected with the things they are supposed to portray, “Inner Peace” perhaps or even “Image number 43”.
Here I begin to lose the plot, normally no doubt because I do not have the educated palate necessary to appreciate the artwork. Sometimes, I suspect, because the emperor is wearing no clothes. The difficulty is to know which.
My father was an amateur painter and, at the end of his day, would wipe his brushes and his palette knives on a spare canvas which he always carried with him. When it was covered in paint he added a large sphere in red and something which looked like a goalpost. He decided that it was his contribution to abstract art. There were two difficulties. The first was which way up it should hang. The second was to find an appropriate title. In the end he decided to mount it on a swivel so that you could spin it round and he put a different title on each side of the frame. One way up it was “Dawn at Stockton on Tees.” Revolve it 90° and it became “Goal to the Hotspurs.” Again to “Evening in my Garden” and then “Grave Abdominal Operation.” Beneath it was a small plaque reverently inscribed “Contemporary Alternatives by Pissarso.” It hung in the judges’ lunchroom of the Lands Tribunal, where distinguished members of the judiciary were often entertained. Invariably, they were invited to examine the modern art and, normally after saying that they didn’t know much about that sort of thing, they talked so much nonsense about the “form” and “depth” that they saw in the painting that it became impossible to explain to them that it was a joke.
Although abstract art is generally outside my £25 pound a bottle rule, that doesn’t necessarily stop me from creating it. In the 1970s there was a fashion for fancy dress parties and I found that by putting a cardboard cone on my head, padding myself out a bit and covering the entire assemblage with a barrister’s gown it was possible to make myself into a black cone. The next job was to run parallel ribbons round the structure. Inevitably they met at the top of the cone. What did I claim to represent? Why, the point at Infinity, of course: the place where parallel lines meet. It was perfectly good mathematics, certainly. The question I could never answer was a different one: “Was it art?”
