JohnBulleyArt

I don’t do ‘culture’. Culture is like air,  it’s all around us. Culture is ephemeral, a chimera. Trying to pigeon hole it is a very middle class concept. The imposition of ‘arbitrary rules’ on the masses by those cognoscenti in the know…the biggest joke of course is that they themselves think they are somehow ‘cutting edge and a little bit ‘dangerous. When in fact they are uber conservative and merely following the latest fashionable trends…baa…
Real culture is on the street and by the time the aesthetes have latched on to it, it has already moved on.

I don’t like most ‘contemporary art’, it’s trite, half baked dribble posing as profundity, not worth wasting those few valuable seconds of your life on when you could be doing something useful like picking your nose or doing the washing up.

I saw a local  contemporary art exhibition described as containing ‘difficult art’. What the fuck does that mean? And who the fuck has the temerity to consider themselves so special that, by implication, they plainly understand it, but that we, the plebs, don’t. …and when did art become a chore, something hard to understand. When was art elevated to such a rarefied place that only those in the know could possibly decipher its secret codes. Art is never ‘difficult’…you either like it or you don’t…you don’t even have to know why and you certainly don’t have to justify your opinion. So please, the next time you find yourself in a ‘gallery’, don’t get suckered, don’t spend hours quizzically looking at a piece of bollocks  displayed reverentially in a sacred space trying to figure out what the hell it is… just laugh, possibly roll your eyes disdainfully and move on. Even better, don’t look at the work, look at the strained expressions on the faces of the audience desperately hoping that no one notices they don’t get it and therefore, by definition, must be stupid and, horror of horrors, uncultured…if you pulled that stunt with a piece of music or a book people would certainly have an opinion but somehow the visual arts have carved themselves this little niche where the quacks and charlatans can prosper unquestioned.

• I give you the Lego building aka the student quarters. In ten years time people will be looking to pull it down as an eyesore.
• The pylons on the golden mile. So grossly out of scale that only an architect could see any worth in them.
• The tiny statuette plonked awkwardly in the middle of the mass of concrete that occupies Victoria Circus. Again pathetically out of scale, only this time underscale.