Something peculiar happens to my feet when I enter an art gallery anywhere. I should be attending these things every other day – after all I’m an Art graduate. But a leaden feeling generally comes over me as I struggle inside, invite in hand. It takes all my strength not to skip the exhibition altogether and go for a drink instead.
“No one will ever know,” a devilish Jack Nicholson sort of voice whispers in my ear. I force myself not to look for the bar. “Which would you rather have?” he whispers. “High culture or a Margarita?”
Hyperventilating a little, I just about make it to the first room of the exhibition. There are people everywhere, trying to look cultured and serious. The only sounds are whispers and a muffled shuffle of sensible shoes accompanied by the clicking of stilettos. Half of these people don’t even know what they are looking at and the other half are pretending… Meanwhile, I feel as though I’ve been injected with buffalo tranquillizer, and start looking for a seat – anywhere I might lie down for three hours until it’s acceptable to go home again.
It’s then that I remember why the last time I “did” art was at an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London. At least there you don’t have to spend your time with a bunch of boring people pretending to like whatever has been hung on the wall.
There is a halcyon period in your twenties when you ignore any pretensions to clever stuff. You’re past the university project stage, and life is a merry-go-round between the pub and the wine bar. You’re too busy falling in love, falling into debt or falling over to care about the latest retrospective at the Tate. Then you become settled. You’ve got the partner, the mortgage, the job. The kitchen extension is finished. You’re all grown-up. Suddenly, spare time is for self-improvement.
There is an assumption that people actually want to visit obscure old churches while on holiday in the south of France, watch video BBC documentaries about global warming or book tickets for the latest Sam Beckett revival at the Barbican when in London. Being older and wiser means turning off the television when your favorite soap opera comes on, and retiring to the sofa or the bedroom to read a book instead. In Grown-up World, the thirty-something should have passed seamlessly through the “Let’s just get a cheap last-minute deal to Barcelona” phase and taken up picture-framing holidays in Tuscany instead. Not wishing to appear a complete dimwit, though, I do love doing many so-called cultured things, but there’s a time and a place for everything. I just wish some people would let their hair down and stop pretending once in a while.
My father for one, although socially educated and well-travelled, wouldn’t be seen dead at the opera. I once took him with me to Covent Garden. He fell asleep half way through act one, woke up just before the interval and missed the second bit trying to find the bar. His philosophy is simple: “Why spend your life pretending to know stuff you don’t?”
I agree. Grown-up parties – as opposed to drinking copious bottles of wine and talking about nothing in particular parties – can be terrifying. You have to spend the whole time feigning knowledge about politics when all you really want to talk about is who’s bonking who.
Entire areas of chitchat – the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, French grapes, the films of Ingmar Bergman – can be saved for more appropriate places such as funerals. I have been to too many a “do” where I would have preferred to have spent the night in the loo clutching a bottle of Tattinger instead.
Don’t get me wrong – I don’t actually want to be friends with some of these people. I’ve made that mistake in the past, most memorably with a guy who liked jazz. You know the type – builds his own turntable and flatly refuses to use his CD covers as beer mats. I do like jazz, but there’s love and there’s luurrve. He once forced me to go to a jazz gig and spent the entire night with his eyes closed in a semi-orgasmic state while tapping his fingers on the table top. Meanwhile, I spent my time wondering when the hell each tune might end. Jazz, in my opinion, would be greatly improved if each piece was limited to precisely four minutes.
The jazz fan told me on the way home that the trio were improvising – in other words they were making it up as they went along. But I’d already figured out that one for myself. I never saw him again.
Admit it: where would you rather be if you had the choice? Sitting on a wooden bench watching a modern dance workshop about the deforestation of South America or sitting in a hot bath with your partner drinking ice cold G&Ts?
Why do you think Stephen Hawking’s philosophical tour de force, “A Brief History of Time”, remains one of the greatest unread blockbusters in living memory? Or why annual membership of a Film Institute is like joining the gym? All those good intentions of watching obscure foreign films with subtitles soon evaporate, and before you know it, you’re back to buying pirated blockbusters from your local ‘peripteron’!
Sometimes I’m too exhausted after a day’s work to read the instructions on the side of a packet of pasta, let alone tackle a one-man rendition of “Under Milk Wood”. Surely I can’t be the only one?
Of course, if my parents hadn’t had to work so hard and late when I was growing up in London and I had more time to listen to classical music and go on watercolor courses in north Devon, maybe all this cultural stuff would have seemed more important to me. I would have known before the age of seven that “Le Nozze di Figaro” is not, in fact, a new ice cream with caramel topping and dark chocolate, and when I reached 30 all the highbrow stuff would have come back to me – in the same way that I can recite all the actors in “The Godfather”, except the good-looking one whose name I can never remember…
I’m not a complete culture-phobe, I just wish some people would relax a bit at “arty” events and not pretend to like things that they obviously don’t. I did hear of an American psychologist who discovered that for most people the urge to try anything new stalls at the age of 24. By the time we reach our mid-twenties, he argued, we think we know what we like and what we don’t, and are disinclined to budge. This makes perfect sense to me, and explains why you never see old people in sushi bars.
Personally, I think there should be a self-help group for people with culture phobia. People could meet in each others’ houses, drink gin and confess – “My name is Lulu and last night I watched ‘House series 4’ on satellite. The repeats. And yes I found it funny...
“No one will ever know,” a devilish Jack Nicholson sort of voice whispers in my ear. I force myself not to look for the bar. “Which would you rather have?” he whispers. “High culture or a Margarita?”
Hyperventilating a little, I just about make it to the first room of the exhibition. There are people everywhere, trying to look cultured and serious. The only sounds are whispers and a muffled shuffle of sensible shoes accompanied by the clicking of stilettos. Half of these people don’t even know what they are looking at and the other half are pretending… Meanwhile, I feel as though I’ve been injected with buffalo tranquillizer, and start looking for a seat – anywhere I might lie down for three hours until it’s acceptable to go home again.
It’s then that I remember why the last time I “did” art was at an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London. At least there you don’t have to spend your time with a bunch of boring people pretending to like whatever has been hung on the wall.
There is a halcyon period in your twenties when you ignore any pretensions to clever stuff. You’re past the university project stage, and life is a merry-go-round between the pub and the wine bar. You’re too busy falling in love, falling into debt or falling over to care about the latest retrospective at the Tate. Then you become settled. You’ve got the partner, the mortgage, the job. The kitchen extension is finished. You’re all grown-up. Suddenly, spare time is for self-improvement.
There is an assumption that people actually want to visit obscure old churches while on holiday in the south of France, watch video BBC documentaries about global warming or book tickets for the latest Sam Beckett revival at the Barbican when in London. Being older and wiser means turning off the television when your favorite soap opera comes on, and retiring to the sofa or the bedroom to read a book instead. In Grown-up World, the thirty-something should have passed seamlessly through the “Let’s just get a cheap last-minute deal to Barcelona” phase and taken up picture-framing holidays in Tuscany instead. Not wishing to appear a complete dimwit, though, I do love doing many so-called cultured things, but there’s a time and a place for everything. I just wish some people would let their hair down and stop pretending once in a while.
My father for one, although socially educated and well-travelled, wouldn’t be seen dead at the opera. I once took him with me to Covent Garden. He fell asleep half way through act one, woke up just before the interval and missed the second bit trying to find the bar. His philosophy is simple: “Why spend your life pretending to know stuff you don’t?”
I agree. Grown-up parties – as opposed to drinking copious bottles of wine and talking about nothing in particular parties – can be terrifying. You have to spend the whole time feigning knowledge about politics when all you really want to talk about is who’s bonking who.
Entire areas of chitchat – the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, French grapes, the films of Ingmar Bergman – can be saved for more appropriate places such as funerals. I have been to too many a “do” where I would have preferred to have spent the night in the loo clutching a bottle of Tattinger instead.
Don’t get me wrong – I don’t actually want to be friends with some of these people. I’ve made that mistake in the past, most memorably with a guy who liked jazz. You know the type – builds his own turntable and flatly refuses to use his CD covers as beer mats. I do like jazz, but there’s love and there’s luurrve. He once forced me to go to a jazz gig and spent the entire night with his eyes closed in a semi-orgasmic state while tapping his fingers on the table top. Meanwhile, I spent my time wondering when the hell each tune might end. Jazz, in my opinion, would be greatly improved if each piece was limited to precisely four minutes.
The jazz fan told me on the way home that the trio were improvising – in other words they were making it up as they went along. But I’d already figured out that one for myself. I never saw him again.
Admit it: where would you rather be if you had the choice? Sitting on a wooden bench watching a modern dance workshop about the deforestation of South America or sitting in a hot bath with your partner drinking ice cold G&Ts?
Why do you think Stephen Hawking’s philosophical tour de force, “A Brief History of Time”, remains one of the greatest unread blockbusters in living memory? Or why annual membership of a Film Institute is like joining the gym? All those good intentions of watching obscure foreign films with subtitles soon evaporate, and before you know it, you’re back to buying pirated blockbusters from your local ‘peripteron’!
Sometimes I’m too exhausted after a day’s work to read the instructions on the side of a packet of pasta, let alone tackle a one-man rendition of “Under Milk Wood”. Surely I can’t be the only one?
Of course, if my parents hadn’t had to work so hard and late when I was growing up in London and I had more time to listen to classical music and go on watercolor courses in north Devon, maybe all this cultural stuff would have seemed more important to me. I would have known before the age of seven that “Le Nozze di Figaro” is not, in fact, a new ice cream with caramel topping and dark chocolate, and when I reached 30 all the highbrow stuff would have come back to me – in the same way that I can recite all the actors in “The Godfather”, except the good-looking one whose name I can never remember…
I’m not a complete culture-phobe, I just wish some people would relax a bit at “arty” events and not pretend to like things that they obviously don’t. I did hear of an American psychologist who discovered that for most people the urge to try anything new stalls at the age of 24. By the time we reach our mid-twenties, he argued, we think we know what we like and what we don’t, and are disinclined to budge. This makes perfect sense to me, and explains why you never see old people in sushi bars.
Personally, I think there should be a self-help group for people with culture phobia. People could meet in each others’ houses, drink gin and confess – “My name is Lulu and last night I watched ‘House series 4’ on satellite. The repeats. And yes I found it funny...
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