Today Louise Explains... modern art pretentious wank.

I quite like a lot of what would be referred to as ‘modern art’. Not just Pollack or Kandinsky, but even slightly more divisive stuff such as Fontana’s slashed canvas, or Nan Goldin’s uncomfortably candid photos; I’m not of the ‘if I could do it it’s not art’ school. And just so we're clear, it’s not the product which I consider to be pretentious wank; I do like modern art per se. So I enjoyed a recent evening of modern art-related escapades as part of Timeout/Whitechapel Gallery/Art Council – run ‘First Thursdays’. On the first Thursday of each month, lots of galleries in East London open late and have events etc. Many have free wine too, as we found to our delight when we started off at the Kowlasky Gallery at the DCA, Farringdon, where we were shushed by a pretentious wanky lady who nervously scuttled around telling people to be quiet, looking very disapprovingly at us for whatever heinous crime we'd committed, possibly that of existing, making it very obvious that she was thinking 'you know and I know that you're not going to buy anything, you're just going to stand there drinking the free wine, and I'm very suspicious of you'. I always find this kind of pretentious wankery ironic - especially when you’re looking at modern art which is pushing boundaries, saying ‘fuck you’ to authority, y’know.. generally not being constrained by the norm. But you have to experience it quietly and in an extremely decorius, sober manner - I thought for a minute that we'd accidentally taken the train to Normandy for the D-Day memorial service. However- did I mention there was free wine? And the art (interpretations of Orwell's 1984) was actually pretty good.

Brief interlude: I should mention at this point that our next stop was a small gallery where we walked in, saw the television screening showing a naked man, sitting on a Perspex box, trousers down, pooing, and then we left. There were only middle-aged white men in suits in this gallery. Very strange.

If I disliked the fact that the atmosphere in the DCA wasn’t quirky or expressive enough, I should’ve been pleased to enter the next place, where the building was asymmetrical, shabby and quirky, but not nearly so much as the haircuts and general attire of the amazingly cool people we shared the “space” (it’s not a gallery, it’s a space. Yup.) with. The ones outside had shunned the suffocating convention of standing up, choosing instead to sprawl over the concrete ground, in an edgy fashion. The girls were clad in skin-tight ripped leopardskin jeans, vintage-esque sweatshirts, brooches, heavy eyeliner, trilbies and pumps. The boys also. Yes, that’s right; we were in Hoxton. Meanwhile, inside, Alex and I were finding it increasingly difficult to out-pretentious the others- we struck upon a crack in the wall and spoke of how it clearly referred to the chasm in people’s hearts created by globalisation and the war in Iraq. Then one Hoxtonite (who’d probably popped over for the evening from his comfortable bedsit in Holland Park) said to another, completely seriously, ‘yah but like, it’s rahly about the space.’

I don’t want to be closed-minded or come across as a philistine, but I find a lot of pretentious modern art wank totally baffling. When people complain about disliking modern art, most of the time they actually quite like or at least don’t mind the paintings/installations, but it’s that little square of text next to the exhibit in the museum which puts them off; pretentious wank written by pretentious wankers. Having said this, I will keep trying with the modern art scene as I had a lot of fun nonetheless and the building of last place genuinely was pretty cool, if lacking in terms of Health and Safety (flip flops and crumbling stone staircases don’t mix, kids). We left Hoxton and headed for bagels, with me feeling profoundly uncool, but a little relieved that at least my hair was the same length on both sides.