I e-mailed my 23 year old London-based daughter who lives handy to the Tate, to suggest she not miss the much lauded current Cezanne exhibition.
She’s grown up awash in art and thus is not susceptible to buying into the bull-shit which permeates the art world. Anyway, she immediately popped in and sent back the caption she photographed, which lay under a plain fare still life.
I sent this sort of nonsense up in my novella “Modern Society.”
What’s unique about this is its author, Luc Tuymans, is an Antwerp artist of justifiable good repute who should be beyond such silliness.
Four decades back the very good New Zealand painter, the late Garth Tapper, did a few years tutoring at Auckland university’s Fine Art School. Garth dropped me a line once to say there was a pattern to his student outcomes. The talented ones, doubtless after a few years starving in the garret, soon developed a following sufficient to paint full time.
It was the untalented ones’ subsequent careers that fascinated Garth. Most gave it away but many developed new careers as critics and attendees at our expense representing us at international conferences and writing nonsense like Tuyman’s caption etc.
Perhaps they also supplement their income writing ludicrous wine reviews, which I struggle to believe anyone actually reads.