A visit to the Serpentine

This evening after work I headed along to the Serpentine gallery in Hyde Park to take a look at an exhibition by American “artist” Richard Prince, whom I later discovered has made his entire career largely out of appropriating the work of others. Since my lovely girlfriend is American I hoped to admire the work of one of her compatriots. I might have guessed that her own painting is vastly superior to what I was about to witness…

Private views at the Serpentine are very different from those at other galleries. This is immediately apparent by the presence of a large number of security guards who look as if they are protecting the President of the United States. They’re big, meaty men in their forties with curl wired earpieces and they scan their area as if… well, as if it’s something far more than it actually is.

Another difference is the visitors, who were in general far younger than I am used to, and who seemed to treat the event as more of a fashion show than an art exhibition (indeed, perhaps it was). Women wore over-sized sunglasses and one who looked like Keira Knightly spoke in a private school drawl, but punctuated with profanity, as is so common now (in both senses of the word). This particular girl, I noticed, was accompanied by a man who looked like he had never done a day’s work in his life. Of course I don’t know for sure, but I dare say he simply pushed money around or was a middleman of some kind - work would more than likely be beneath him, and he would be admired by his peers, and of course by the girl, for this fact. The women? I would guess that many of them were “in marketing” (or PR, of course). I have been meaning to point out that so many London females seem to work in marketing now (if you can really call it work) that it is a wonder there are enough things to market, or any of them left to do anything else.

There are a lot of staff at the Serpentine Gallery (which is in a beautiful park, by the way). Far too many, as far as I could tell. A lot of them seemed to know the guests, and there were a lot of “mwah!”s and “daahling!”s and all the other pretentious nonsense one associates with gatherings of people who have nothing better - nothing deeper - to say.

But what of the art? It had the usual multi-thousand pound, “life-saving hospital equipment value” price tags, so surely it had some merit? Hm, I think we know not to expect that by now. In fact, I am beginning to feel as if I am visiting the scene of a crime every time I go to these galleries now. A moral crime. The artwork here consisted of the usual enlarged photos, otherwise no more remarkable than one would find on any stock photo site, some collages involving the mandatory ugly genital shots (yawn), some muddled up words printed on very large canvases, and then some casts of car bonnets that looked pretty much as they would in your average car repair garage. This was “art”. This was what we are supposed to consider our modern day equivalent of Turner and Constable.

So what was going on? Was it that my first class degree in Philosophy and generally reflective nature were just not enough to enable me to see the deep messages in this work? Or was it just that the work was, in fact, utterly mediocre? I know what Brian Sewell would have thought (see a great video of the inimitable Sewell putting a “modern artist” straight on the otherwise trash that is Big Brother). British MP Kim Howells admirably spoke the truth too, when he wrote:

“If this is the best British artists can produce then British art is lost. It is cold mechanical, conceptual bullshit. Kim Howells. p.s. The attempts at conceptualisation are particularly pathetic and symptomatic of a lack of conviction.”

These people point, unashamedly, to the elephant in the room. Incidentally, I rather like a lot Howells’ realistic comments on other issues too.

If you want real art, make a bee line for the Tate Britain gallery near Pimlico. It’ll enchant and humble you (well, it does me). If you want a free beer and just to keep a check on the “art-crime” scene, head along to somewhere like the Serpentine. You might be surprised - there might be something of value there (I mean real value, as opposed to monetary value), but don’t hold your breath. The most you are likely to see is the Emperor’s New Clothes; and, of course, you won’t even see them.