Dickinson College Humanities Program in Norwich

I first have to state that this is a blog about people watching, not art or museums.  My trip to the Tate Modern confirmed something I’ve suspected for a long time:  I just don’t get modern art.  I don’t get the art itself or the the people who do.  For the most part (there is some modern art I find appealing), I found that what I saw was trying too hard to say something and in the end, was communicating no message whatsoever to me.  Yes, paint splatter looks interesting, but to quote the seven-year-old girl who walked by me, “Daddy, I can do one of these!”  One exhibit, a series of pieces by Agnes Martin felt as if the artist looked as if someone had taken a bunch of American Apparel t-shirts, made them very large, and put them on a wall.  I just could not get a sense of “euphoria, contentment and memories of past happiness” (for more go here) from a series of stripes.

Taken from the Tate Modern Website

Once I had realized that I was not going to be spending my afternoon sunk into an emotional pit inspired by paint splatter and lumpy statues, I turned to people watching.  This activity confirmed what I’ve long suspected:  modern art officianados are the same no matter where you are.  There seem to be two breeds: those who actually know what they are talking about and those who do not but wish to appear like they do.  The first is a fairly respectable bunch.  They tend to be middle aged (with some exceptions, of course), upper middle class, educated, and most of all, unpretentious.  The other category is much more fun to watch: those who wish to seem cultured.  They tend to be young adults adhering to the “hipster trend” (the men are over groomed and the women are disheveled) and have a number of behaviors: there is the intellectual pose (involves leaning slightly back with a hand on one’s chin and staring intensely to the corner of a piece of “art”), and the catch phrase (a hurried “yeah, yeah, yeah” followed by some inane and impossible to understand comment about the power of a poka-dot).  This is not an exclusively English symptom — it transcends borders and appears in almost every single modern art museum I’ve ever been to.  I’m not quite sure what this says about modern art or humanity in general, but I do find a strange comfort in knowing that across nations people experience the same insecurities and behaviors.