Museum of Contemporary Art

Firstly, I've got opinionated views on what is good art. Good art should be moving, it should play to the senses, it should make you think and inspire you. At the very least, it should convey some technical skill and be aethestically pleasing. There were a few extremes of this on show at the MCA the other rainy Sunday.

Nothing better than coming to the art gallery for a bit of culture. It started off quite well, Shahzia Sikander's paintings covering the 1st floor... with one particular acrylic painting painted directly on the gallery wall. Being such a large scale work, this takes some skill, and she managed to make it all work beautifully, with a perfect balance of light and shade, and composition. Some of her pencilled drawings were on a small scale as well, delicate black and white etchings invoking natural forms. She made me wish I could draw so finely and with such detail, with barely a mistake to be found. One work was particularly memorable, a painting that was like a story line, using materials like gauche and tea out of all things to create a stained, parchment-like effect. Whilst most of her works I enjoyed, there were some that I thought were just experimentations, and they didn't appeal to me as much. But overall, I could appreciate the time it took to do those works.

She certainly demonstrated a lot of skill, as opposed to the other artists that we encountered. I mean, for the love of god. We walked into this room with a few large paintings of dark coloured patches of squares and rectangles. They were done by an "acclaimed" Scottish artist named Callum Innes. Never 'eard of 'im, using a variety of paint applications and removal techniques. Boring. And my god, there was this large plain black one! PLAIN BLACK. On closer inspection, you could sort of see these fine lines of stripped-back paint or something on the canvas. But overall, it was just a black painted canvas. Where's the bloody originality in that? Geez, I could've done that in my lunch hour. Nothing drew me in, it was just something I could imagine seeing some company reproducing as carpet rug patterns. It reminded me of this other artist that showed this plain white canvas, that was "ruined" when some crazed woman planted a lipstick-red kiss on it. I don't have a repulsion against abstract art, but when the abstract is so abstract that it's lost all sense of meaning, well it's just a bit of a waste. The artist even goes on to say that his works should speak for themselves. For fuck's sake man, I'll tell you what they're saying. A whole lotta crap, is what.

But there was this one last "artist" of the day that the crapola award goes to. A Los Angeles based Tim Hawkinson. Sigh. I paid to get into his exhibit, expecting to be blown away in awestruck wonder. But no. It wasn't to be, and I was left feeling rather disappointed and ripped off to be honest. He had a variety of annoying-sounding sculptures (one which dripped water onto an aluminium bucket) and others made from cardboard boxes, plastic bags and other assorted junk. The only one I was vaguely interested in was the Moebius Ship, which reminded me in way of Gulliver's Travels. It was also made from stuff you can get down at a craft store, but it looked plausible and I thought it was quite imaginative in that way.

But despite that one saviour, I wanted to warn people lining up for tickets what a disgrace that was, and to do themselves a favour and get the fuck out of there while they still can.

Marge: I just can't believe people are paying millions of dollars for something some hillbilly dug out of the trash.
Cletus: Hey, I done studied for years in getting over that junkyard fence! Then I learnt the gate was open.
Astrid Weller: Your husband's work is what we call "outsider art." It could be by a mental patient, a hillbilly or a chimpanzee.
Homer: In high school I was voted most likely to be a mental patient, hillbilly or chimpanzee.