The art museum and the circus

I arrived in Melbourne in 2017 and I avoided the NGV (National Gallery of Victoria) for the most part of my stay. The NGV is an art museum and one of the iconic places at the heart of the city, right behind the famous Flinders Street Railway Station. I mostly avoided it because it strikes me as pretentious and lavish, generally not my type of place to experience art, even though historically art, just as science, has been almost exclusive for privileged people, it makes me uneasy whenever I perceive it to be treated that way (same with mathematics or science).

To be fair, and to start with the positive note, I did avoid the Gallery to my own detriment, as it does have some amazing pieces in its permanent collection. I did happen to visit, however, during a contemporary art exhibition called Triennial. I generally say I don't like contemporary art because the line between art and entertainment, between the deep and the banal, the everlasting and the immediate becomes too blurry for me. Now, the thing with the arts is that there is no true definition of what constitutes art and what does not; even if one can point to elements that must be present in a piece, like aesthetics, intelligence and technique, most of these are still subjective.

I do think, however, that the institutional display of most contemporary art (such as the one displayed at the Triennial) comes with a price for society at large. It seems like most people qualify any creative piece with an elevated sense of depth as art. These tend to be the same people that think that the act of reading should be fun, or that mathematics has value only if it can be applied; this is not to say that reading can't be fun or that applied mathematics are not valuable, but the act of reading is generally an intellectual exercise that should start a dialogue with the author that might face us with uncomfortable questions and make us think (which is largely a difficult and uncomfortable thing to do), and mathematics has a value in itself as the purest form of thought we know and perhaps the only way we have of defining and uncovering truth. It seems to me then that the price of such displays in art museums is a society that can't distinguish these from amusement parks, from circuses (circi?), from glossy instagrammable installations with flashy lights and/or colors. Now, similarly I don't intend to say that all contemporary is consumable fast food with no nutritional value, but rather that a large part of it is sold and perceived as something much more that what it actually is, bringing masses to institutional places selling mainly entertainment as artistic expression.

In the end, contemporary art does deserve a place and people with respective credentials should get to decide what gets displayed where; as things stand today, however, in many places it seems like the line between an art museum and an amusement park is quite hard to draw.

Porky Hefer at the NGV Triennial