So I am back in London. Dazed, tired, arguably a tad flat. I almost wept with gratitude for the blue sky that gallantly attempted a breakthrough this afternoon. After a soggy-style London welcome back (read: pissing down, dark and 5 degrees when I landed) staring into the sun today and re-considering my atheist stronghold, I couldn't help but wonder if dehydrated desert nomads ever drown, wandering as they do straight into those palm tree-lined oases because they refuse to believe they're actually real. It was a bona fide crazy lady moment. I see the sun. I feel the sun. But is it really sun?
While I still think flying into London the day school returned was the best idea (no time to mope) it has meant the first week back has been a little disorienting. And foggy. And a little bit stressful. Returning to a pile of readings two feet high and a suicidal flatmate certainly hasn't eased the transition back to London Life. Thankfully she's ok - well as ok as you can be - but it's left our little house feeling a bit fraught.
It's been a worrying sort of week generally really, which is just a pain in the arse. Wading through the jetlag and the weather-induced apathy towards London, the effort of returning to class and having to think intellectually about Stuff has been buffeted by well, just about everything else. Until yesterday. Yesterday we undertook a tour of some of the major commercial galleries in the East End, otherwise known as my part of the world. I don't think the postcode is to blame but really, how can anyone have anything BUT an existential crisis about their future career and chosen field when THIS is the sort of art being peddled as "contemporary" and "interesting" and, hilariously, "saleable"....
Apparently Jay Jopling is no longer dating Lily Allen - perhaps we can put this work by Andreas Golder down to a similar lapse in good sense? And shockingly this wasn't even the worst of it. In a desperate bid to reassure myself that good art exists, that meaningful art is possible, I am off tomorrow to the Barbican Centre, the Tate Modern and the Serpentine Gallery.
There's only one place I'm sadly not going....
No comments:
Post a Comment