‘Every major art exhibition is always the same.  The ticket holders go in with their expensive tickets, and with their guide-books and ear-phone sets, and they look and they stare, and then they shuffle along and look and stare again.’

When the lovely @davidallengreen posted about the dreary didacticism of London's expensive art gallery exhibitions yesterday I read with interest and thought hard.  I am exceptionally lucky: I live in central London and have the opportunity to attend the exhibitions which take my fancy.  Some are better than others, but I go for the ‘Art’ and to see what I think.  
 

When I go to an exhibition I get the audio guide.  Having spent my wallet-stabbing 10-15 Great British Pounds I might as well.  And let’s not beat about the bush: ‘Art’ in the drying brushstroke or the horrifically-expensively-insured-flesh has never been for people who cannot pay to see with either in money or patronage.  Vermeer’s domesticity was not for the people, but his patrons and sometimes his friends. Their viewing of his pictures was influenced by what they knew of his household, and their own comparable set-ups.  They knew about the troublesome wife, the money problems, even down to the exquisite light of Delft’s famously clean and minimalist interiors.  They did not need the caption.
 

Likewise, one of David’s favourite portraits, that of Cecilia Gallerini by Leonardo da Vinci.  Cecilia was the mistress of Ludovico Sforza, one of Leonardo’s patrons and Duke of Milan.  She was educated in law, politics and art and held salons for Italy’s elite with her lover, twenty years her senior.  She was fifteen when Ludovico asked Leonardo to paint this portrait.  She would have to make way for his career and spend much of her life shunted from pillar to post but the ermine represents her purity, her elegant hand art, her face intelligence and a conceived idea of beauty.  It was displayed in her household during her lifetime, long after the affair was over.  This is a picture of a girl, like Elizabeth I at the same age, who understood men of ‘much wit but little judgment’.   It never fails to make my heart ache.

This picture demonstrates why knowledge is the key.  David is a lawyer, steeped in years of learning and experience of what comprises the law but art is no different: talented artists are born but it takes years to become proficient at drawing and painting.  Modern art claims a moment in time caught in swathes of paint which our gut identifies as positive or negative, and one to which we are all entitled.  It is largely conceived by men and women who did not need but wanted art.  This mechanism is notionally selfish and so, as invited voyeurs we might take what we want from it.  But the art of the 'masters' is one which asks for knowledge of who they were and what they hoped to gain from their work.  Smudges of Leonardo's fingerprints have been identified in Cecilia's face and hair.  They cannot be seen by just gazing at the picture, nor can the heartbreak of her life been seen in her fifteen year old face.  Older art tells a story to which we are not entitled, but might catch a glimpse if we are told.  We need the captions. 
 

They might be written by dry, disconnected curators or earnest interns with no idea what we might want to see on the wall.  Often, they are.  The internal workings of museums can make chronic hiatus hernia look like a holiday.  Frequently, the headset drones on with the voice of a twenty-first century patron, dispersing monotone largesse to the grunts who file through in their obedient masses.  

When looked upon as such, these exhibitions and that headset are shit value for money; they are the rich and entitled establishment doing their bit.  But their bit involves liaising with the museums, curators, shippers, insurance companies, banks, trusts, porters, interns, guides and visitors.  It involves people who know the minutiae of what there is to know about Cecilia Gallerani’s life trying to write a caption for people with only the barest understanding of the Renaissance.  That 20 quid, give or take, lets you into another world for the few hours you want it.  Those captions might not provide an instant and visceral connection to the cracked and oil-daubed piece of canvas in front of you but our interior worlds are private and precious, and who is to say what the middle-aged shuffler in front of you gains from Cecilia’s face.

Which in turn leads to my other main bone of contention with David’s article: ‘Any artist who puts any effort whatsoever into writing the caption, or the catalogue or sales "explanation" of their work, has no business calling themselves an artist’.  Total horseshit.  Leonardo had to explain himself to Cesare Borgia and Raphael to the Pope.  On a slightly more recent note I have hugely enjoyed Grayson Perry’s exhibition at the BM, Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman to which he has contributed not only his own art but multi-media ‘captions’.  Artists who do not, or cannot explain themselves are usually of the most mediocre order.  

To decry these exhibitions, and those who pay their money and file around the course is to sneer at anyone who wants to learn, to understand why great art was made and why.  It’s like sneering at the girl who queued up to see the Mona Lisa twenty years ago, heart in her mouth, garbage translation of the Musée du Louvre's catalogue clutched tightly in her hand.