After a very long but perfectly pleasant drive along a coast road extraordinaire, we finally arrived in Venice! Here, as per usual, it was a mixture of a lot of business and a lot of pleasure (the latter meaning inspecting places of interest, for all you jumping to the wrong conclusions!). Also as per, I’ll not go into the useful though boring business bit; I’ll dive straight into the juicy pleasure bit. And juicy it was; a succulent adventure into the avant-garde of the bizarre world of modern art…
Modern art – it’s a… divisive topic.
From the point of view of modern art’s consumer, or observer, it can invoke utter delight and rapture just as much as it can indignation and disgust. It can be thoroughly appreciated as true to the ideals of the avant-garde aesthetic, as much as leave the beholder utterly flabbergasted and even angered at the absurdity of some of the exhib(sh)its on display.
It’s not only divisive; it can get confusing too. What’s high art, what is pure BS? What’s an exhibit, what are fixtures and fittings of the building the exhibition is housed in, like a ventilator, a trash can, some ongoing repairs to the roof, a plug in a wall socket?
The latter sometimes needs a placard saying ‘this is a plug plugged into a wall socket; it is a work of art of our electrician’, otherwise the ‘connoisseurs’ might take it for a modern kunst masterpiece. Then there’s stuff like Malevich’s Black Square – a plug-in-a-socket if ever there was one; no matter: folks have kept traveling from all over the world to see it in the flesh in Tretyakovskaya for several decades.
What have I just been saying? :)
Read on: First impressions? Can you guess?…
