Doom: The Gallery Experience, Filippo Meozzi and Liam Stone, 2017 (via newgrounds)
Going to a private viewing feels like gatecrashing a party. Maybe it’s because I’m in my early twenties, still fumbling with the social codes of the art world. Maybe it’s because every time I approach a gallery - where impeccably dressed, Vogue-cigarette-wielding attendees gate-keep the doorway - I feel like an interloper. I shrivel into myself and regret every sartorial decision I’ve ever made.
Inside the PV, the scene fractures into a rigid social taxonomy - a bizarre, quasi-playground. There are the art students lured in by the promise of a free glass of red. Then there’s the entourage - the artist’s family, friends, various hanger-ons - glowing in their proximity to ‘creative genius’. Industry professionals orbit just beyond reach, their eyes darting over shoulders for someone more important to talk to. The thought of identifying myself as a ‘professional’ within this ecosystem is laughable, not because I question my own expertise, but because the room itself refutes my legitimacy. Here, professional standing is not conferred by knowledge alone, but by an intricate, unstated lexicon of belonging - one I have yet to master. Instead, I perform a tragic pantomime of that legitimacy: skimming the exhibition guide, nodding thoughtfully at the wall, lurking in corners like a socially stunted ghost.
Having always been quiet (in a weird and not mysterious way), engaging the artist in conversation is a distinct form of social torment. It’s a performance in which both parties are keenly aware of the script: an exchange laden with overwrought praise that is neither sincere nor necessary. I feel like one Mr. Collins: “What a superbly featured room and what excellent boiled potatoes! Many years since I've had such an exemplary vegetable”. The artist knows it's small-talk, I know I’m lying, and behind me a procession of others are poised to recite their own variation of the same hollow pleasantries.
This is not always the case, of course - there are many artists who I genuinely love talking to. But lately, I seem trapped in a cycle of uninspiring encounters, wading through a bog of tepid artwork - and the real struggle is figuring out how to write about it without feigning enthusiasm or resorting to empty critique. I toy with the idea of telling artists I’m a writer - it carries an authoritative weight and maybe I just need to feel important. But my real objective is more mercenary: trying to get their contact details (without coming across stalkerish), so I may later bombard them with questions, distanced from the immediacy of social performance.
Simon Quadrat, The Private View
Last night, it was as such. The gallery was swollen with bodies, and I was already sweating in the wool coat I thought made me look more serious. In one corner, a man wearing a flamboyant scarf tells his new acquaintance it's from a “lovely little artist called so-and-so” and reminisces about his days at Central St Martins. In another, an underpaid gallery assistant recites the exhibition catalogue to half-listening ears. Attendees swirl their drinks and murmur the familiar vocab of institutional legitimacy: dialogic practice…spatial interrogation…materiality. Walking around I began to regret the tube fare I paid to get there (I had actually travelled to the wrong venue at first, so it was technically two journeys). There were some aspects I enjoyed. Yet, the artist’s central piece, which seems to be the focal point in the gallery’s marketing of the event, was a still-life of various fruits riding a wave. I think it would be easy to put together an elaborate analysis, invoking vanitas traditions, seafaring iconographies and the semiotics of domestic abundance - but…the urge dissipates. When all is said and done, art is either good or bad - yes, subjective, but still - no density of theoretical overlay will alter that fundamental truth. A painting can be technically impressive, but without conceptual clarity in its curation, it remains just that - an isolated success. There’s an absurdity in trying to intellectualise something you know, deep down, is a half-baked conceptual mess.
Predictably, I sought refuge in the press release - a prop. As expected, it was ridden with artspeak: tableaux, trompe-l’oeil, fresco secco - a litany of borrowed gravitas attempting to scaffold an otherwise unremarkable practice. Maybe it’s the underlying stress of performing “the art critic”, but in these situations my reading comprehension disintegrates. The words - that have no business describing art so mediocre - swim before me, and I’m left grasping at an opinion I can’t quite form. And the most perverse thing of all? I turn up every time, again and again.
Rixens Jean Andre, An Opening Day at the Palais of Champs Elysees, 1890
I’ll talk briefly on the history of the private view. The vernissage - from the French “varnishing” - originates as a final opportunity for artists to apply their finishing touches before a work’s formal unveiling, a tradition reportedly instituted by the Royal Academy of Arts as early as 1809. Turner was especially known for making last-minute alterations to his paintings on the day. Over time, this pragmatic function morphed into a performance of exclusivity - for those deemed worthy of witnessing the art before the undiscriminating ‘rest’. By the 20th century, the PV had morphed again, more focused on social choreography, a stage for transaction where cultural and economic capital circulated - less vernissage and more viognier.
French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu wrote in 1984 that 'aste classifies, and it classifies the classifier'. Not only does taste sort objects into hierarchies of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, but it also reflects back onto the person making the judgment. Your tastes do not just define what you like; they define who you are in relation to social class and cultural capital. I’m not making any waves here by stating that art appreciation signifies status - but my envy of those who have the ability to navigate these spaces, understand codes and wield the ‘correct’ vocabulary, both disgusts and seduces me. The PV is a gorgeous case-study of cultural capital: affectations, exclusionary choreography, and arcane lexicon - all operating as social currency. Those that ‘belong’ need no explanation, while those that don’t scramble to decode the ‘rules’. And so the hierarchy is preserved, unquestioned, and reinforced by the silent consensus of those within it.
In Barthesian terms, the PV is a myth - an exclusive ritual that functions as a coded reaffirmation of social stratification. Both fashion and gesture are as much a part of the system of meaning as language itself. These semiotic cues, and your ability to demarcate them, confirm your status as ‘insider’ or ‘outsider’ - cultural capital both exclusionary and self-replicating. Bourdieu really would have a field day.
In theory, the PV is a space for dialogue and engagement, a place to see art in its rawest, most ‘authentic’ form, untouched by the ‘masses’. In practice? It’s a hot mess of status-signalling and name-dropping. We all know the dance and we’ve all played our parts - it’s a spectacle that we all engage in, whether we want to or not, as part of the performance of professional legitimacy. The work might be uninspiring, and the atmosphere suffocating - but the show must go on!
I don’t mean to be overly cynical (okay, maybe just a little). We show up - not because the art is good - but because enacting the performance of the PV is its own peculiar form of belonging. At the end of the day, it’s a farce – one that’s as shallow as it is seductive - but we always come back for more.
Ruby Mitchell is a London-based art writer and historian.
