Good morning from sunny Cottenham. Hope it stays.
I went to The Human Touch at the Fitzwilliam Museum yesterday. Still had to wear a mask, and had to have 4 pages printed out with QR codes, but it was so delightful to be there, seeing some very small, light-sensitive works that don't often get put out on display. And then lunch with B, and tea with E and S. Also bought 3 paperbacks in Oxfam. Odd that they were priced higher than the ones in the Ely branch. Clearly, Cambridge is where the money is!
This is another of the five submitted to Curator Space in the vain hope that I might get picked. The process is always random and unpredictable. You cannot see a 'house style.' What is in vogue one year could well be anathema the following one when the panel of judges has changed. Maybe, commercial galleries are easier to follow, but someone should do research into the statistical probability of 'getting into' each competition. I see so much bilge in local and national shows, but the problem is that egalitarianism means every taste has to be catered for, including the awful kitsch that is the palette-knifed Lakeland landscape, the 'impressionistic' female nude on a sunlit couch, the hyper-real still-life that copies a photograph pixel by pixel.
But there again much of the work promoted by institutions is useless nonsense. It is that trick: put it in a museum or a gallery and it must be good. It often begets self-indulgent, vacuous nonsense, always supported by a pamphlet in artbollocks. The public wants to know what is being said, but wrap it up in arcane nomenclature and the 'meaning' may well evaporate completely..