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Over-Educated
Our lunch guests were asking questions about some of the pictures we have on the wall. Had they been asking about the Hogarth prints it would have been fairly easy to satisfy them. Hogarth tells stories- fairly simple stories- and he's fun- but they were asking about the "concrete poems" by Ian Finlay and Stephen Bann and you have to have understood all sorts of cultural esoterica before you can begin to join up the dots and make sense of them. I'm not sure I even like them anymore. They're so left brain- as 20th century artworks tend to be- and the further we move away from it the less I'm in awe of the 20th century.
So I burbled. I could hear myself burbling. I talked about Poussin- and his Et in Arcadia Ego. I talked about Suprematism and the Roman invasion of Britain. I mentioned Malevitch. I wasn't sure I was making much sense- and I was certainly hot and bothered- but our guests seemed to get whatever point I was making.
Back in the day I once brushed off a request to explain the Finlay by saying it was "too difficult"- and the questioner took offence because he thought I was calling him thick, so I'm never going to make that mistake again. But it is difficult and I hate/love trying to do it because it's a struggle and there's always the likelihood that you're going to come across as an over-educated twat...
So I burbled. I could hear myself burbling. I talked about Poussin- and his Et in Arcadia Ego. I talked about Suprematism and the Roman invasion of Britain. I mentioned Malevitch. I wasn't sure I was making much sense- and I was certainly hot and bothered- but our guests seemed to get whatever point I was making.
Back in the day I once brushed off a request to explain the Finlay by saying it was "too difficult"- and the questioner took offence because he thought I was calling him thick, so I'm never going to make that mistake again. But it is difficult and I hate/love trying to do it because it's a struggle and there's always the likelihood that you're going to come across as an over-educated twat...