The Diversity Of The London Art Gallery Experience
http://www.articlesdirectory.org/articles/137394/1/The-Diversity-Of-The-London-Art-Gallery-Experience/Page1.html
Dominic Donaldson
Dominic Donaldson is a retailer of all gadgets and provides advice on all hardware. By Dominic Donaldson
Published on 20 April 2009
Whether you are a fan of Monet, like to indulge in the decadent delights of Marcel Duchamp, or prefer pondering the point of Pollock, the London art gallery experience is a diverse and entertaining adventure.
Whether you are a fan of Monet, like to indulge in the decadent delights of Marcel Duchamp, or prefer pondering the point of Pollock, the London art gallery experience is a diverse and entertaining adventure. The fact that art galleries have become 'fun' has caused some concerns within the art world, with puritans insisting that art should never mix with entertainment. Is this an outmoded point of view, or is it time that art went back to its roots and left the fun for the fair.
The question 'what is art?' has been unanswerable since it was first asked; when trying to establish just what counts as art, most people launch into a tirade about what is definitely not art. The debate however used to be a lot simpler when art works were divided into two categories: painting and sculpture. When visiting a London art gallery today, you would be forgiven for missing installations and sculptures that merge seamlessly with the gallery environment.
From light switches and bin bags to sculpted sleeping bags, galleries are showcasing work made from a variety of mediums that connect with an audience in many different ways. Visiting a London art gallery is no longer about standing in front of a picture or statue, it is about trying to engage with an object that may or may not be art. Contemplating the nuances and context of a scrunched up paper ball may be easy for the art elite, but it can ostracise an unsure audience.
Rather than contemplating whether whatever it is that is being presented as art, is actually art or not; we should consider that anything can be art, and it is just a matter of whether it is good art or bad art. There is definitely an audience for the more obscure gallery exhibitions that can be found in London, and it is this open minded audience that consider art as an experience.
Whether that experience is happy, sad, confusing, scary or downright dull is not the issue, it is the acceptance of art as a part of everyday life, and therefore accepting that everything has the potential to be art. The London art gallery experience does sometime verge on the precipice of entertainment, but going back to an art world where anything other than a statue or oil painting is judged as invalid is not the solution. Art is forever changing, and only time will tell which art movements have what it takes to battle it out against the elite.
The question 'what is art?' has been unanswerable since it was first asked; when trying to establish just what counts as art, most people launch into a tirade about what is definitely not art. The debate however used to be a lot simpler when art works were divided into two categories: painting and sculpture. When visiting a London art gallery today, you would be forgiven for missing installations and sculptures that merge seamlessly with the gallery environment.
From light switches and bin bags to sculpted sleeping bags, galleries are showcasing work made from a variety of mediums that connect with an audience in many different ways. Visiting a London art gallery is no longer about standing in front of a picture or statue, it is about trying to engage with an object that may or may not be art. Contemplating the nuances and context of a scrunched up paper ball may be easy for the art elite, but it can ostracise an unsure audience.
Rather than contemplating whether whatever it is that is being presented as art, is actually art or not; we should consider that anything can be art, and it is just a matter of whether it is good art or bad art. There is definitely an audience for the more obscure gallery exhibitions that can be found in London, and it is this open minded audience that consider art as an experience.
Whether that experience is happy, sad, confusing, scary or downright dull is not the issue, it is the acceptance of art as a part of everyday life, and therefore accepting that everything has the potential to be art. The London art gallery experience does sometime verge on the precipice of entertainment, but going back to an art world where anything other than a statue or oil painting is judged as invalid is not the solution. Art is forever changing, and only time will tell which art movements have what it takes to battle it out against the elite.