Dialogue: High art - sure to prick your senses

By DAVID HILL

Our provincial art gallery has just had a McCahon exhibition. Fifteen works - apt for a rugby-rooted province. To complement them, the gallery showed a bunch of McCahon's contemporaries - Fomison, Albrecht, Hotere et al.

Public reaction in the paper and on talkback was predictable. Pathetic rubbish ... Use them for lavatory paper ... My 5/6/7-year-old could do better. (Somehow the child geniuses never get around to doing so.)

Why do so many of us react to modern(ish) art like bigoted, ignorant prats? Probably because some of us are bigoted, ignorant prats.

But there is more to it than that. I would suggest several reasons behind so many New Zealanders' reflex frothing about contemporary art.

First, some of it is bad.

Second, some is smug. You get artists announcing that our world is materialistic and sterile. Fair enough: some of it is. But that is not likely to win over those who toil to keep it chugging along.

The New Zealand painter who blared that he was attacking the facade of hypocritical suburbia deserves to have a few facades fall on his silly head.

Third, grotesquely large amounts of money are involved - sometimes - a very few sometimes.

But precious little usually goes to the artist. You do not see painters rubbing their hands when the Higher Salaries Commission sits.

Fourth, artists are suspected of being people who think they know it all. Indeed, I have heard a few being so arrogant that I wanted to send them to their rooms.

But most artists accept they do not know any of it. They make their pieces partly to try and find what it is.

Another version of this is that artists think they are cleverer than other people. This is never a wise move in New Zealand.

In fact, artists are cleverer - but only in terms of seeing the potential in paint, plastic or paper. We do not sneer at a joiner or electrician who is cleverer than us with wood or wire. Why sneer at an artist?

Fifth, contemporary art is a con trick played on ordinary people by an arty-farty elite of dealers, critics, the artists themselves.

Okay, conspiracy theorists are everywhere, and beyond terrestrial logic. But if 100 people say in 100 places that a book or movie or computer game is good, we do not assume they are part of a plot. Again, why art and artists?

Sixth, I cannot make head or tail of it. True, some contemporary art can resemble a foreign language. I am not being offhand when I note that you can always try learning a foreign language.

Seventh, and a variation on the above, what is the point of it? None, I hope.

What is the point of the Mona Lisa? Or a flower garden or a mountain or a Mozart symphony? A work of art just is.

Eighth, and another variation, it has nothing to do with real life. Neither has quantum physics, but nobody rants against that on Newstalk ZB.

Anyway, why should art have any connection with real life (whatever that slippery term means)? I always thought one great facet of art is the way it can subvert or extend concepts of reality.

Ninth, people talk such drivel about it. Indeed, some do. Anyone who writes, "This reasserts the bodily within a patriarchal language system ... gesturally inverting the interpretation of the communitarian as feminist discourse" needs a good shaking.

But condemning the artwork for that reason is a bit like ripping up the message because of the speech habits of the messenger.

And last, my 5/6/7 year-old could do better. Uh-huh. In that case, ring me when his/her exhibition opens.

Then I will come and - no, I won't bother to come; I will just dismiss it as pathetic rubbish.

* David Hill is a Taranaki writer.