I was talking to Rosie a few days ago about one of the upcoming essays for her art history course and found the idea of having to physically view a work of art in order to write about it somewhat strange. After all, in my own education I have written at length about many artworks I have never seen exhibited, relying instead on reproduced imagery.
This thought returned to me whilst watching the coverage last night of the Turner Prize and reading subsequent reviews and comments in the papers this morning. I was becoming increasingly despondent reading the predictable criticisms of the work (especially Martin Boyces’) as cold, elitist and facile. Used as I am to considering work on its intellectual or theoretical merit, I suddenly realised that any defence I might offer would in a way be almost as ill informed.
Ok, so we can discuss what a work may or may not be about or be referencing and so on by viewing images and perhaps reading the words of the artist, curator or critic but how well can we judge a work without sharing a space with it for a while?
It made me think what a bizarre idea the televised Turner Prize is, The programme repeatedly told us of its ‘controversy’ (A view I have little time for) and then expected us to form an opinion from a few slow panning shots and slightly inarticulate interviews with the artists.
Don’t get me wrong; I did start to form opinions, such as which artists interested me enough to make an effort to view their work in the future (conveniently the two who are Glasgow based) but it confuses me that so many can appear to make absolute decisions on this basis.
I thought this could be an interesting topic to try to explore, to what extent does a work need to be physically viewed in order to be received rather than just understood?
Apologies for length.
Sam x
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