Modern Art - a lot like Marmite

Whenever I think about Modern Art, I'm reminded of the Rowan Atkinson quote about Modern Architects - "Ask a modern architect to design you a building, and you end up with something that looks like a dustbin with a bicycle on top." And this is somewhat how I feel about modern art.

I find myself perplexed, a lot of the time. There is, occasionally, a feeling that my daughters, when they were 4, could have produced a piece of work of at least that quality, possibly better. I'm convinced that some of Picasso's pieces were phoned in, because he CBA to actually come up with a finished picture. I've seen some of his better stuff, you understand - it's GOOD! Whatever one may think about women with eyes in places where eyes were never meant to be, the work is revolutionary. There is, however, a piece of his work at the Tate Modern right now which definitely comes under the CBA heading. It looks as if he had some paint over from a bigger work, but he'd already put his brushes into the cleaning solution, and so he used his fingers. It looks like a lazy piece of work. I absolutely HATE it. I was all fired up to declare Picasso a crap painter, when I remembered that he's actually done a bunch of REALLY good, albeit strange-eyed, work. It would be unfair to say that his work is all dreadful, based on one, not particularly good example.

After all, there was one installation consisting of an entire room (ok, not THAT large a room) which had 4 large canvasses, each of which was covered in swirls of red paint. Not meticulously painted swirls, you understand, but the sort you could reproduce on the wall of a room you were painting with a 1" brush dipped in red emulsion. Now, while it has to be said that I enjoy my art work to be more colourful, this is what I'd classify as a lazy-arsed piece of work. That said, I'm in awe of someone who can SELL such a piece on the basis of a weasely worded piece of text about "imagining the negative space". I'll never forget the time, in my A-level art class, when I'd been messing about for the whole of the lesson (seriously, you DIDN'T mess about through at least one lesson during A-levels?), had produced nothing, and as the art teacher did his rounds, I drew a number of vertical and horizontal lines on the paper, and told the teacher is was a graphical representation of a cedar tree. I don't know if the teacher bought it, but he nodded sagely and wandered on.

There was an installation consisting of no more than wood, parcel tape and polystyrene dummies heads. Another perplexing piece, and although the parcel tape had been applied with enviable precision, I was unable to LIKE it. I could admire the effort involved in the application of parcel tape, as there was not an unsightly bump (unlike MANY of my own attempts with that sticky material), it was a bewildering and disturbing installation.

And then there were some wonderful pieces. The planks of wood, cut in geometric designs...

Wood

For some reason, I LOVE this installation. Something here makes me want to touch the wood. I want to run my fingers over those cuts, and feel the sharpness of the serrated edges, feel the points of the little square pyramids. Why on earth do I like this one so much?

Another work, cunningly entitled "Clarinet on a Mantelpiece" is, for all that I'm buggered if I can find either the clarinet OR the mantelpiece, a wonderful picture. I can imagine having that on my wall at home, and finding a new way each day to completely and utterly fail in finding the items. I DID find a dog in there...

Clarinet on Mantelpiece

Well, I THOUGHT it was a dog. Oh! I've just googled it, and it is, in fact, called Clarinet and a Bottle of Rum on a Mantelpiece. I know - it's not particularly colourful, is it? And yet I'd love to find wall space for it. And for the record, I'm also failing to find the bottle of rum, either...

And so to the crux of the matter.

Modern Art makes you FEEL! You can feel deep hatred, ecstatic joy, warmth, annoyed, or slightly disturbed (and sometimes VERY disturbed), but you can't come away from a visit to a Modern Art Gallery without quite a strong opinion of the work. The one thing I DIDN'T feel was indifferent.

This is the Year of the eBook

Oh yes, dear readers, this is the Year of the eBook.

As it happens, I've been reading ebooks for quite some time now, on one device or another. My early experiments with ebooks having been conducted on my Palm Pilot, I didn't really get into ebooks until a rather later device, on which I was able to run Mobipocket - probably the Palm V, I should think. In fact, on installing Mobipocket, I discovered that if I downloaded the PC software, I was able to create my own ebooks. This and the discovery of Project Gutenberg filled my device with classics. I scanned in some of my own books, pushing them relentlessly through character recognition software unable to distinguish the old fashioned fonts of my collection of Biggles books, and filling the void manually, when the software was unable to recognise for itself.

Every time I've upgraded my device, I've installed a reasonable ebook reader, copied my books across, and continued the Odyssey. On moving to the Clié, I re-installed Mobipocket, and found that the scroll-wheel at the back of the device could be use to scroll through the pages. Nice! I moved to Nokia, where Mobipocket was quickly superseded by FB Reader, Mobipocket having no support for full screen on the touch screen devices, and requiring a complete uninstall/reinstall to allow access to the library again.

More recently, on the S3, I installed FB Reader, but I also went ahead and installed the Kindle reader. This, my friends, could have been an expensive learning curve! How easy Amazon make it for you to click Buy on a book, and how many books one buys before realising that there are only so many hours in the day! I've also been able, recently, to set up the volume keys to move on to the next page or back to the previous (thank you Ian!) Thankfully my initial buying frenzy was tempered by the fact that I'd landed in the Bargain Books corner of the Kindle Store.

And so I'm set.

The point, though, is that having moved out of the Big House, and into the Somewhat-smaller-but-all-mine House, I'm a wee bit short of space. My bookshelves are stacked with the books I had spread round the Big House. In fact they're stacked, double stacked and, quite frankly, overflowing! This is all because, as a child having to return books to the library, I vowed I'd OWN books as soon as I had funds with which to buy them. And own books I do. Despite my love of technology, there's nothing quite like the smell and feel of a book. New, old - doesn't matter. They're a wonderful, tactile experience.

Thus the decision was made. Any book on my shelf (with a few exceptions) that I can replace with an ebook copy WILL be replaced with an ebook copy. I will not, however great the saving/provocation, BUY new books without attempting to find the ebook version first. Thus on a recent trip to London, having wandered into Foyles and seen a possible book, I picked it up to purchase... And returned it, resolutely, to the shelf from whence it came! Could I, was it just possible that I was able to buy that very tome, without actually buying THAT very tome?

Indeed it WAS! Not only that, but cheaper than the paper copy in Foyles, too! This is not always the case. A recent trip to Tesco resulted in the inevitable urge, once more, to buy a book, which I resisted, safe in the knowledge that I'd be bound to find it online, and probably save a pretty penny in the process - but alas this was not to be. The ebook price was more than the discounted paperback price. It's got to be said, mean as I am, that I've not yet talked myself into the purchase of said book.

And so the plan is this: If I want a book, I MUST attempt to buy it as an ebook before succumbing to the deliciousness of print.

Now I must go and clear out my bookshelves... Wish me luck!