Roy Lichtenstein and Tate Modern

I thought I quite liked Lichtenstein, so I went to see his big retrospective at Tate Modern. And now I like him rather more. Pop Art may not be very deep, but it is rather appealing to look at. While I was familiar with his blown up cartoon style, like Whaam! this exhibition showed he had more than one string to hi bow. The semi-abstract landscapes were quite appealing, his versions of Chinese paintings even more so, and his versions of other artists, Picasso, Monet, Matisse, Mondrian are attractive and really rather clever too. I even liked his art deco sculptures. A fine exhibition all round.

 But while I was here I thought I would do the second exhibition running, A Bigger Splash. Unfortunately, Hockney's a Bigger Splash at the beginning was by far the best thing here  The rest was a pile of poo. Or to be fair, if it had been an actual pile of poo, it would have been an improvement. As with much modern art, reading the blurb is necessary not for information but just to provide the entertainment value. So, for example, there is the gallery of action painting, like filling sacks with paint, plastering over them and then shooting them so that the paint dribbles down the bumpy plaster surfaces. "The process of making was more important than the finished product". In this sentence, the term  "more important than" is used in its less familiar meaning of "as utterly trivial and pointless as." Here is the product. See what I mean?

The little film of Yves Klein's "work" in which 3 naked young women smear themselves in blue paint and then press their naked bits against canvas, in front of a classical orchestra, is obviously just really crap porn masquerading as even more crap art.

The exhibition subtitle of "Painting after performance" would have been less misleading if it had read "talentless tossers in search of grants from people with more money than sense, and getting naked and covering themselves in goo if possible while they are at it." However, that would still have made this exhibition sound more interesting than it was. Let me take as an example the room devoted to Polish artist Edward Krasinski, of whom I had never heard before (and whose obscurity is more than justified by his talent.) The gallery, and the odd object in it, ie some hanging mirrors, has a narrow band of blue scotch adhesive tape fixed horizontally around it. Now I know you are wondering what else, but no there is nothing else, except the odd photograph of his house and studio, with same adhesive tape applied to its walls. It is the staggering banality of this crap which I struggle with. And would so much prefer the extra sensory experience of an actual pile of poo.

I also pottered around the rest of Tate Modern which one can photograph, so I did. Some works are worth looking at, and of course the galleries do contain the works of Monet, Picasso, etc. But with so much its the stimulation that is so badly missing. Your eyes search around galleries in a desperate search for something worth staring at, but so often can find nothing more attractive or engaging than the floorboards.

Carl Andre's infamous bricks

And some more exciting bricks in a more interesting pile.

Luckily I completed the day by meeting a mate at the Edgar Wallace pub, a really lovely little boozer only yards from the local pub I had used for years to meet people in near the Royal Courts of Justice, followed by a curry. Now that's what I call entertainment.