For me, art is something that requires effort and skill. Something that you can look at, appreciate how much work went into it and enjoy its beauty as a result. These are the things that should be filling the walls of art galleries around the world.
What shouldn’t be filling art galleries around the world are plain black canvases called ‘Abyss’ or just an enlarged photo of a saggy boob. This is what I saw when I visited the Tate Modern in London about a year ago, somewhere it’s safe to say I won’t be visiting again. Now, I’ll be the first to say that I’m pretty uneducated when it comes to the art world, and am certainly not qualified to make educated analyses about pieces, but surely these examples don’t qualify as art?
I could go to Wilkos, buy a canvas, paint it black, give it a pretentious name and present it to an art dealer asking for a million pounds, and do you know what I’d get? A raised eyebrow and a snotty refusal is what I’d get. And rightly so, because it literally took a grand total of five minutes’ work. I could have, there and then in the Tate Modern, taken a picture of my brother’s nose, zoomed in a bit and demanded an award and my own personal exhibition room. But I didn’t because it would be completely undeserved.
But what amazes me is that you’ll still get floaty-scarfy dressed people who walk past these “creations”, take off their brightly-coloured, oversized glasses, raise their eyebrows and make an impressed “mmm” whilst scribbling down some notes on “what this black canvas means to me”, before no doubt, trying to replicate the artist’s style. Go home, get a life, and paint something worth paying to see.