This is not a review of a single show, nor a review of a single painting, but rather a brief opinion of a number of shows at once. 

I went for a run through as many Cork street galleries as were open. How refreshing to see so many different artists’ works in one street. Each of my visits lasted 5-10 minutes, just enough time to see everything in each gallery, the galleries are not huge and if you don’t have a personal interest in the works it is not easy to stand in front of them for very long. 

Except for one gallery in which the managing curator gave me a personal tour of the work, and another in which the curator remembered me from a previous visit, I paced quickly through each venue, glancing up at the ceilings, down at the floors, onto the walls, through the windows and at the information desks. Then out onto the street and into another gallery and so on.  

My main question at this point was curatorial selection, how every gallery show omission or inclusion reflects a set of priorities – institutional, financial, political, or personal, if one can break human choices into such categories, and whether I would fit somewhere on that list. 

I then went to the Courtauld to see the Oskar Reinhart collection where I was pleased to find many works by familiar artists.  

Although there was only one Goya, it is a special Goya (3 salmon steaks). It seemed though somehow peculiarly overly varnished, as though varnished by a clumsy amateur, and the bad light did not do it justice. The light broke from the ceiling to cast a very off-putting reflection across the top of the painting. I do not have any information as to whether the painting was varnished by Goya, or by anyone else since it was bought. 

That experience kind of ruined it for me so I didn’t stay long here either. Just enough to feel admiration for the three or four masterpieces Van Gogh, Picasso, Renoir amongst the numerous other paintings in there. 

I went then to the tate’s electric dreams and was shocked by the disjointed arcade style arrangement of objects.. Ugliness dawned. Two or three masterpieces (Ernst, Takis, Yamaguchi) incoherent spatial arrangements, and omissions (Amacher, Kubota) from the heavily curated scene, plus music, plus special effects. I would have thought that given their resources they would at least foster meaningful connections between the works. Instead, a standard category-chronology method of textual narration attempted to weave its way, in a way not possible from the broken narrative given to you through rectangular wall-text boxes. 

I wondered if I should make the connections myself and pretend the gallery was doing it for me.

As I left that gallery, I landed in the shop.  

That’s what it felt like.

About the writing.

It’s the slowdown which kills. You slowdown the concept in your head while you write it. You hone it to a specific language. You lose all the visuals in order to retain words. Sometimes the words don’t make sense, they don’t refer to anything, all the clues have gone. 

For further opinion see my essays on 

1. The Politics of Selection in Curatorial Practice

2. Labelling in Art Exhibitions

3. Curatorial presentations which smell heavily of ‘catalog’.