Sorry about yesterday, I think I had low blood sugar or something

Following on from my half-crazed rant about music yesterday, here is a - slightly saner - observation. 

The other night at dinner with my parents, I decided put some music on. I chose Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon as a suitable aural accompaniment. And it suddenly occurred to me that when that album came out it was quite radical, definitely something for the yoof, and not something for their parents. 

I asked my dad about it (not worth asking mum as if you ask what her favourite album is she will vacillate at length between the three Lord of the Rings soundtracks, and eventually wander off to watch the special seventy-six hour special extended director's cut. Music is not her thing). Did he ever think that when he had kids of his own they would sit down to dinner with him and play him Pink Floyd? What did he think that music would be like now?

Aside from telling a delightfully racist anecdote about my grandfather's hatred of the wailing woman in The Great Gig in the Sky (who he mistakenly assumed was black, with hilarious and appalling results), he said that music these days just isn't radical. He wasn't being dismissive, it's just that there it's hard to imagine what else could be done that would be totally new, and still something you would want to listen to. 

I suppose the same is true of visual arts as well - in order to get a reaction you have to push further and further towards 'shocking' just because there isn't much that is new. I know that's not a new observation, and I'm not in any way being snotty about it. I just find it interesting. 

I wonder if the answer isn't to refine art forms, to move backwards rather than forwards, to focus on honing techniques. I know I've got pretty suburban tastes, but I'm a big fan of things like carefully wrought line drawings and intricate guitar playing because they demonstrate a dedication to an art form that needs a lifetime to perfect.

Anyway, that's enough navel gazing for tonight. My usual unhinged ranting will resume tomorrow.

I wish the world looked like this

The Guardian has a lovely slideshow of pictures by Oliver Jeffers, by far my favourite children's author. His pictures are wonderful, and his stories have just the right amount of sentimentality and whimsy. I cannot recommend them highly enough - imagine drifting off to sleep as someone read this to you; 

Banana thieves foiled again

Today was a fun day. I saw a sign in the window of a cafe that read 'No cash or bananas kept on premises overnight', which made me laugh (I was going to take a photo but I chickened out at the last minute because there were people sitting at the table right in the window). 

I also saw a magazine display at the supermarket in Mosman* (super snooty suburb, for those of you not in the know) which confirmed all my prejudices about the people who live in the area; it went New Idea, Women's Weekly, OK!, Business Review Weekly and Quadrant (a fusty right wing publication) - that's the Mosman target market of trophy wives and racist property developers catered to, then. This was right after I saw a swish BMW with a vanity plate that read 'FTSE' run a red light, so basically all the cliches you could think of were demonstrated for me.

And I went to the SH Ervin gallery. I'd been curious about this place for years - it's the art gallery just off to the side of the harbour bridge where they have the  Salon des Refusés, also known as the Alternative Archibald Prize. 

It's tucked into in a funny spot just next to the bridge and behind Observatory Hill, and it took me a while to figure out how to actually get there. Which was fine because it meant I also had a nice wander around The Rocks, which is possibly the most appealing part of Sydney. Oh, I know there are umpteen places selling Ug boots and Genuine Art by Real Life Aboriginals TM. But all those little sandstone houses and funny little alleyways are really lovely, and give a nice feel for what it must have looked like when Sydney first started to become Sydney. 

It is a really nice area, and I can't recommend the gallery highly enough. The art wasn't really anything that earth-shattering, but it is a fantastic building with a really peaceful feel to it, especially considering that just outside the door are the six lanes of traffic that cross the harbour bridge. I did like a few of the paintings;

Tanya Chaitow, Four Types of Ambiguity

Scott Marr, Bob Brown

Helene Grove - this wasn't in the exhibition, but I couldn't find an image of the one I liked

but I the main think I liked about it was just wandering around the room. I'm going to go back when I've got a bit of cash so I can have lunch in the restaurant, which looked nice and sunny and friendly. I'm so happy I finally got around to going to the gallery, I feel as if I've filled out another little corner of Sydney on my mental map, which up until now has pretty much been a big blank space with 'Here Be Dragons' scrawled across it. Next - the uncharted wastelands of the Western Suburbs.

*Just as a side note, spell check doesn't recognise 'Mosman', and suggests 'Madman' instead.

This is your chance to redeem yourselves.

So a few weeks ago I asked for people to buy me things. And no one did. But that's fine, because I have spent a lot of time looking at art gallery websites this week (for boring work reasons), and I have found these things and I love them more than monkeys on dogs or flamingo costumes.

Jeremy Kibel

Sam Leach

Karlee Rawlins

Mikaela Castledine

I need a minimum of $3,000 so that I can buy at least one of them, but feel free to give whatever you can afford. Cheques are fine, cash is better.

...and you're next!

I freely admit that I was being childish

It was a quiet Sunday afternoon with not much happening. Our flatmates were occupying the lounge room, watching some sort of game show that we couldn’t quite follow in spite of the fact that it was being watched at the maximum possible volume, so we felt the need to be out of the house. The museum here has free entry on Sundays, and it seemed as good a time as any to check it out. The ground floor had an exhibition of amateur photography, some of which was stunning, and some of which was horribly earnest, but the real attractions are the art works and archaeological exhibitions on the higher floors. 

There are some beautiful Roman mosaics and some stonework from the medieval period, which were wonderful. I would have been happy to pay the admission fee just to see the stone carvings;

And there were some nice Roman artefacts; I’m always enthralled by these little everyday objects, far more than I am by massive statues or buildings. 

I always find the idea that someone handled these things every day touching, and somewhat sobering. I wonder if they were treasured items that had been scrimped and saved for as presents to mark a special celebration, or if they were just trinkets that were lost in the mountains of stuff that person possessed.We wandered around these floors for quite a long time, at first trying to read the little Spanish descriptions of the objects, but after a while just enjoying looking at them.

Then we went onto the higher floors where the religious art is shown. I know I’m going to sound like a philistine, but I just found it tedious. I can appreciate that the paintings are old, but basically, they’re pretty rubbish. There. I’ve said it. If an HSC student presented one of these paintings as their final work, they’d get a verdict of ‘must try harder’. I find it hard to enjoy looking that these paintings on any level other than that the colours are quite nice, and that I’m impressed that they’ve survived for so long basically intact.

What I’m trying to make sound less low brow is that I eventually lost interest in pretending that I cared about the art, and I started judging them on my own neanderthal criteria. 

Such as, which statues would work best as models for monsters on Dr. Who?

                                        or

Or, which painting is less homoerotic?

                                        or

I realise that I was being juvenile, and that anyone with any kind of religious sensibility probably doesn't think this is at all funny. 

It was it this point that one of the guards told me off. I didn’t see any signs that prohibited photography, I wasn’t using a flash, and I was being relatively discreet; I wasn’t actually pointing at things and laughing. So I can only assume that he picked up on the fact that I was behaving like a stroppy teenager and making fun of the exhibits from the less than reverent air I had about me. In which case, he gets a gold star for his observational skills. 

I was told in no uncertain terms to put my camera away, or I’d be asked to leave. For a brief moment I considered trying to impress the guard by telling him that I did in fact hold Bachelor of Arts, and had some experience studying art history, and that I was perfectly qualified to point and laugh all I wanted. However,  it occured to me that no one is impressed by a BA, and shame overcame my urge to bluster. I was sufficiently chastened that I spent quite a long time looking appreciatively at some disastrous modern art they had on the top floor in order to look less like a total pleb.