The experience of invigilating my exhibition in Ilkley this week has been invaluable in several respects. One of the most thought-provoking parts of the experience has been the opportunity simply to stand and watch visitors going round an exhibition. I have noticed previously in a diverse range of galleries that the pattern appears to be the same. It doesn’t make a difference whether you have in mind my little show in a provincial Yorkshire town or the National Gallery in London, but the majority of visitors appear not to know what they are doing and why.
Many visitors do not pause at all, but walk at a slow and measured pace around the space, expecting to be “hailed” by a piece of art. They don’t appear to grasp the idea that they are free to pause and interrogate the items in the display. Put another way, they seem to understand their position almost as “victims” to which something might be “done”. It never seems to have crossed their minds that they could actually initiate the exchange. Of course, this is not always the case, and there are some visitors who will spend quite a bit of time with a piece of work, and even engage in conversation about the experience, but they are certainly in a minority.
I should say at the outset that I acknowledge that we artists do have a responsibility here to make work which does attract the eye. Nevertheless, any art that qualifies as “good”, to my mind, invariably cannot be assimilated in a passing glance, but requires some kind of engagement by the viewer.
Thinking about this question today I have begun to realise that, at the heart of the matter, is the fact that children in school are simply not taught anything about what it might mean to respond to a work of art. (Parents also, who have suffered the same degree of neglect, are not in a position to remedy this situation.) We live in a society in which the majority of the population, from an artistic point of view, are “functionally illiterate”. The saddest thing about this situation is that artists must bear a good part of the responsibility for this, in that under the umbrella of contemporaneity many of us have retreated into an arcane and specialised understanding of what it is that we are supposed to be doing as artists …. and what “art” means.
I would not want to overgeneralise this view. I have had several conversations throughout the past few days with visitors to the gallery who are clearly able to relate to what they see, and to give an account of their own experience at one level or another. It is not enough for us to dismiss the public as a bunch of philistines. If they don’t “get it”, however, then we should be asking ourselves why that should be so.