Angry at Art
I’m standing in front of another blank wall. Two framed drawings hang on it—stick figures with blank eyes, a sun in the corner, some grass at the bottom, all in black and white. The one next to it doesn’t offer much more. The gallery owner sits bored on a wooden chair, tapping on her iPad. Around me, connoisseurs and collectors mill around. And I want to scream.
Art makes me angry.
Julia and I spent the weekend at Berlin Art Week. Small and large galleries all over the city, one cheap ticket gets you into a whole other world most people never see. So we drove to art berlin contemporary, the Opera Workshops, Kunst-Werke, Hamburger Bahnhof. Coffee in between. And my anger, deep in my chest, kept building.
I saw everything. Boulders on the floor. Fat sculptures by pillars. Fists hanging from ropes. Newspaper clippings behind glass. Brains on tables. Memes printed on cardboard. I waded through a sea of Justin Bieber posters and when I looked up, some guy was beating off another guy on an old color TV. I wanted to grab the next pompous art lover walking past and scream: What am I supposed to feel? What am I supposed to think? What the hell are you trying to tell me?
You have to figure out what the art means to you,
Julia says as we walk to the next gallery somewhere in Berlin-Mitte. Nobody can tell you how to feel about it.
Right then I felt stupid. Just stupid. Because in front of every painting, every installation, every sculpture, people stand with other people, talking about what they see. Discussing, praising, criticizing. What the artist was thinking with that color choice. That material. That angle.
The thing is, I love the art world. I love these well-dressed people, better dressed than anyone at fashion week. I love the big, bright buildings that used to be train stations and factories and now sit apart from the world breaking under war and hate and poverty. I love the magazines, the wine, the all-night philosophy in student bars. I love all of it. But the thing it’s all supposed to be about—the art itself—it doesn’t reach me.
That’s when I feel like I’m failing some fundamental test of taste. That if you don’t get art, you’re missing the point. Maybe I am. But I’m also watching other people watch art, and I’m feeling something—the absurdity, the reach, the way this world suffers and hopes anyway. The sharp cuts between money and nothing. I notice it all.
I love the anger the whole thing stirs up in me, the wondering if they’re fucking with me. Two thousand euros for this garbage, I tell myself, like I could do this in kindergarten. But I already know that’s not the point. I know it intellectually. It doesn’t matter. I laugh at the art and the bullshit it generates, and it’s all true at once—the bullshit and the real thing are the same.
The weird part is that despite 99 out of every 100 things I see making me furious, they flood my thoughts afterwards. They give me energy. They wake up memories and joy and a lot of anger. And the few that actually land, the few that stick with me—I chase those. I think about them at night. I want to know everything about them. Why, I ask myself. How. Where. And most of all: what the hell are you actually trying to tell me?