Walking The Dog

Sometimes, when I visit an art exhibition, it is enough to spend an hour or so getting lost in the paintings. Sometimes, the paintings are not to my taste and rather than getting lost in the art, it loses me and I leave feeling that I have walked through a sweetshop and failed to eat any of the sweets. I have been to art exhibitions where every picture is a wow - Turner, Lowry, the 2017 BP portrait award - and to some where none is - Rauschenberg at Tate Modern. And I have been to some unexpected gems - Ernest Shepherd's illustrations at the Winnie the Pooh exhibition at the V&A and a marine art exhibition in 2016, in a small maritime gallery in Mystic, USA. Special exhibitions or event exhibitions are expensive and I have devised a private, retrospective is-it-worth-it score. If there is one picture that makes me stop and stare. And stare again. That pauses time. And takes my breath away. If there is one of these - there only needs to be one - then the is-it-worth-it wor...

According to Tate Modern - ART CHANGES WE CHANGE  I wonder if it's just me ... just me - the sufficiently pedantic one, who bothers to be bothered by this declaration? Everyone else simply walks on by. If they notice the words, perhaps they glance, read, shrug a 'yes, whatever' and walk on. Me - I glance, read and the words trigger an agitated avalanche; a silent screaming 'Whaaaaat?!' Surely, something's missing. Perhaps, a comma. Or any of the following: when, how, where, if, and, as.  All would fit. Wouldn't they? Or am I alone in my nit-picking, pernickety little world; worrying what these words mean? What the intent was behind displaying them large above the brick wall of the iconic Tate? What they are meant to say? But fail to say. Perhaps, the point is that different people will read different things into them. If they bother to read them at all. I'm still bothered, though, about what they mean to me. And what they clearly do...

Littlest, wearing a classically draped dress (think Roman statue and generous folds of cloth), commented that her small frame didn't fill the dress, hence the draped effect and that this was due to her perimeter being somewhat less than the perimeter of the (modestly framed) friend who leant her the dress. "Perimeter?" I queried. "You mean circumference? Perimeter is usually used to describe the edge of something vast, like a sports's field." "Ye-e-es ..." she pondered, not really concentrating. But in not concentrating, she insulted her friend (who is most definitely not vast) and forced my brain to momentarily juggle 'perimeters' - bra size? Dress size? Waist? Hips? Chalked dead-body-on-the-floor outline? Height? Of course, she meant dress size. The dress she had borrowed was a size 8. Littlest barely fills age-appropriate dresses and could probably fit her perimeter into some age 8 clothes. Which got me thinking - the age at which...