contemporary monkey

JMW Turner

I have a new art theory: the big difference between 19th century art and that of the 20th century are the parties.  It’s a tale of two Tates, in this instance, and ultimately it serves only to fortify the boundaries between centuries.  We’re just better at entertaining ourselves today than we were in Victorian times.

“Turner and the Masters” at Tate Britain is a subdued, thoughtful, quiet, whispered event.  I saw a security person reprimand a scholarly gent for delivering a reproachable glare to an underling.  So much musing and rumination going on.  And this was a Friday (Friday day, but still, you’d think everyone would be looking forward to a big weekend of ripping up the garden or cleaning guns for a field day of clay pigeon shooting and other horsey things).  Manners were the rule of day at Tate Britain, and you’d have to blame it on the Turner exhibit.  There was a mass of teenagers in the Duveen’s galleries above, but none skipped downstairs to the Turner exhibit.  The £12 entry fee was steep enough no doubt, but you’d think there would be just one old lady accompanied by a caring grand daughter.  Nope, just old ladies and old men being cared by more old ladies and old men.  I could have been at the dog races, and the crowd wouldn’t be much different.

The curation itself was very insightful, and a successful means to reveal the life of Turner, the man.  I learned a lot about Turner’s inadequacies, competitive streaks, and other incapabilities to gain some true insight into why geniuses do what they do.  It was a very impressive and learned time, and I imagine many others would have enjoyed it as well.

It’s not that the place was lacking a crowd.  Each room was filled with more gray hair than a Cotswold village.  Anymore and it would have seemed like a Sunday morning in church.  The type of people at this event were what one might call traditionally British: older, certainly middle age and beyond, and mostly white.  Maybe even all white.  All if this is unfortunate because it was a great chance to get inside the head of Turner; to see what professional competition and the pressure of history does to a man.  Plus, all those Turners next to all those Rubens, Canalettos, Claude Lorraines.  This is what art education is supposed to do - place the subject in historical perspective.

Pop Life at Tate Modern

Still, if you not going to throw a good party, don’t expect anyone to come.  At Tate Modern down the river (and frankly, on the happening side of it as well), they were doing just the opposite.  While the Millbank-induced sleep session at Tate Britain was in full snooze for its afternoon nap, Tate Modern had the pedal to the metal.  All sorts of age groups and colours were thumping about “Pop Life”, and the ticket price was no more than the Turner exhibit at £12.  Pop Art, as a subject, is always going to be more of a party than landscape painting will ever be; and for that day, more people learned about Pop Art than Turner’s art.  Tate Modern made you feel like you were in Warhol’s Factory alongside his contemporaries, while Tate Britain made you feel like you should be studying something important under a tree.  Because Pop art is really about people, it’s more entertaining to look at art about yourself than art about someone from 150 years ago.  I guess that’s why pop art is so appealing to artists in the first place: it comes with its own built-in customer base.  Like buying a photograph of yourself going down a roller coaster.

In the end, no matter how much you know about art, or how “good” the art is, it’s the parties that get folks to come down.  It’s a shame that Tate Britain couldn’t have thrown a better one.  Maybe the next Turner exhibit should be a big drunken barbecue; the contemporary landscape art happening of our day.