Le Flâneur

Lately I have had the desire to keep a blog again.  In part this is due to my having more time on my hands.  But also because of a change of heart about certain issues relating to artistic practices.  A lot of the worries I had about art have dissipated and I now see things more clearly.  My mission will be to write my responses to art as honestly as I can and cut through much of the bull shit that so often accompanies discussion about fine art.  I hope to write in an accessible manner and be fearlessly opinionated.

Although art critics are more  powerless now than they ever were historically, it seems to me that they are all the more important too in the face of an art market controlled by a super-rich elite.  Further. as I shall try to show, I think that the tide has turned.  I believe people are beginning to look again for transcendence in art.  There’s a return to valuing craftsmanship; people are looking for a more obvious sense of substance.  Was Richard Wright’s triumph at the Turner Prize really such a surprise?  Even Damian Hirst creator of ‘For the Love of God’ has started painting.  `In my view there is an appetite for the spectacular again and the dry and inaccessible conceptual stuff just seems underwhelming and passé.  Maybe it’s the economic conditions, or perhaps we’re collectively beginning to get over the gargantuan hangover from the party that was modernism.  Theses are some of the issues I would like to explore here.

From now on I intend to keep a record of all the exhibitions I visit.  Currently I am based in Birmingham and so for the mean time the focus will be here in the West-Midlands and perhaps the North West.  But I also hope to visit London as often as possible.  In the last couple of years I have started painting again myself and become interested in non-western art.  It was an great privilege living in London because  it allowed me to have the enormous revelation that some of the best art I have ever experienced is contemporary.    It feels good to be alive right now.