Hello!
Many words today. Big essay! No words left for introduction. Too many words already. Good bye.
A column
“I kept meaning to send you a message about it”, a friend told me a few weeks ago, “but I thought it’d come across as weird, so here goes”. The friend in question, an artist, then proceeded to tell me - I was quite worried at that point, I have to admit - that she really liked the extent to which art clearly brought me joy.
Phew. That was fine. It was both a nice and a reasonable thing for her to say. She follows me on Instagram, which means that she often gets subjected to my endless posts about this or that exhibition, and this or that new gallery. Everyone will have their own use for Instagram; for the most part, I like posting either about my clothes or about art.
I thought about her point for a while then I told her that the two months I’d spent in Venice were probably to blame. I was largely aimless there, with all the time in the world on my hands, and I was surrounded by people who took life seriously. They weren’t like Brits, always coating everything in a thick layer of irony or faux disdain: they liked the things they liked, in a way that didn’t feel jarring or pretentious.
I still remember going to a private view at the Peggy Guggenheim when I was there, and being horrified to find that there was no free fizz on offer. What was the point of having a private view in that case? Why was anyone there? The answer, I shamefully found out, was that people just wanted to look at some really good art.
They could have drinks beforehand and afterwards but the private view itself was about the work, not about the opportunity to neck seven little glasses of cheap champagne in a row. What a puzzling way to live your life! I spent the rest of that evening grumpy and confused, but the earnestness of it all eventually ended up getting to me.
By the time I came back to London, I’d been able to peel some layers off my soul and, as a result, art spoke to me in a more direct and profound way. That’s what I explained to my friend. It was the truth, or at least I thought it was when I said it. Still, our conversation stayed with me, in the way that unfinished stories often do.
I glanced at the puzzle for a while, eager to spot the missing piece, then realised why it felt like such an uncomfortable exercise. The real reason why art started mattering to me so much in Venice, I eventually concluded, is that I had nothing else when I was there. The city was charming and the canals beautiful but, really, I was achingly lonely.
It was the spring of 2022 and I was yet to recover from the horror of spending the lockdowns living alone. I had some friends in town but, for a number of reasons, did not end up seeing them nearly as often as I thought I would. In the end, I spent a lot of my time in Venice alone, walking the same streets again and again, sitting on terraces in silence, not entirely sure what to do with myself.
Days felt endless and the lagoon felt suffocating; before long, I ended up resenting the quaintness of the place, and its refusal to function like a real, living city. Perhaps unexpectedly, my salvation came from the Biennale, which opened a few weeks before I left. I’d essentially run out of money by then so couldn’t visit the actual site in Arsenale, but was still able to go to the free pavilions elsewhere in the city, as well as the exhibitions now dotted around the place. I finally had something to do! I treated it like homework: I had a list of places on Google Maps and I ticked them off one by one.
Some of the art was dreadful but some of it was deeply moving. On one memorable occasion, I sat in a little chapel, by myself, and watched a 20-minute video of Angolan women moving and slowly dancing, narrated by a Portuguese poet and subtitled in English. It made me cry. If I’m honest I found that really embarrassing, that something so disgustingly artsy could elicit such a strong emotional reaction in me.
Still, some parts of it are still with me to this day. “There is longing here, like a current of air” is a line that will, I suspect, stay with me forever. It was probably better in context, but I’ve forgotten the rest. I still remember the longing, and the current of air.
I also remember a moment about a year later, back in London, which I’ve never mentioned to anyone, because it is mortifying. I was in a gallery looking at some sculptures and I was feeling especially forlorn, and I stopped by the beautiful, life-size head of a quiet and kind-seeming man. I looked at it from every angle then eventually I was face to face with it, and I looked into its eyes and realised I couldn’t look away.
I stayed there for a while and I could feel - really feel - some good and happy chemicals flooding my brain. The head was realistic and it looked at me with its loving and benevolent eyes, and I couldn’t remember the last time someone had truly looked at me like that, with such intent and for so long. My monkey brain clearly couldn’t tell the difference between a real face and a fake one and so it drank it all in, and for the rest of the afternoon I felt both ashamed and more at peace with myself than I had in a while.
That is the fuller answer I should have given to my friend a few weeks ago: art brings me joy and solace because I am often lonely, and sometimes art is the closest thing you can get to genuine and profound human contact. It makes you feel alive because it reminds you both that you’re not entirely alone and that many others have been lonely before you, and it is just part of the human experience.
This isn’t meant to be a sob story, by the way. I know why I’m lonely. Having a job would make me less lonely, but most journalism jobs currently available would have me work more than I currently do, in order to earn less money than I currently make. I do not want that. Living in a flatshare again would make me less lonely, but I am messy and most people are irked by messy people, and I just enjoy prancing about in my pants too much to live with friends and strangers.
I could have stayed in one of my previous relationships, or decided to embark on a new one with an unsuitable partner, but I would rather wait for a person I truly want to be with. I could move back to France, where my family lives, but unfortunately all the other French people are there as well.
Of course, I do have friends I see often, but London is big and we’re all busy, and while spending two to three hours in the pub several times a week is often pleasant, it isn’t quite enough to satiate my social hunger. I could go out more often and for longer, as I used to do when I was younger, but my hangovers are worse now, and I’d rather spend my money on things that are not shots.
In short: life is about choices and compromises, and while I do not regret any of the choices and compromises I have made over the past few years, the unfortunate truth is that they have, as a group, coalesced into what is quite a lonely life. It’s fine. It happens. I doubt it’ll last forever.
In the meantime, however, I have to work with what I have, and somehow that has come to mean going to museums and galleries at least once a week, more if I can find the time. It is quite an odd life, and not something I ever expected would happen. Still, if it works, it works.
Every Saturday or Sunday I’ll go stand in front of some paintings and really take the time to look at them, think about what the artist wanted to convey, how it makes me feel, and whether the two can and do converge. It’s an intellectual exercise but also a deeply emotional one.
It often brings me back to a spirited debate I had with my grandparents a few years ago. To one side, my grandfather and I argued that most great art aimed to reach out to the world, establish an unkillable link between the artist and their audience, wherever and whenever they may be. My grandmother, a painter herself, argued instead that creating art was about trying to work through internal conflict, and the only world that mattered was between the person painting and the canvas in front of them.
In hindsight, I believe all of us were right. Getting to know someone, romantically or otherwise, is exhilarating because getting under a person’s skin feels incredibly rewarding. Intimacy brings us closer to one another but it also makes us bigger and richer. By seeking to understand you, I get to dig deeper inside myself.
Burrowing inside a real, live person’s soul isn’t always possible, for the reasons outlined above and many others. Really looking at a painting feels like the next best thing, because art is, by definition, often deeply intimate. What you’re standing in front of is the person’s entrails, their bones, even if what they painted looks abstract, or is a portrait of some person long lost to history.
There will always be something in a brushstroke, in the way the light hits the skin just above the clavicle, in the clothes, the colours, the rhythm of it all, that will reveal more about the artist than they probably intended. You can read them the way you would read a book, if it’s what you really want to do, and if it’s what your heart is craving.
Realising this changed my life, I think, and I was only able to see it because it came to me when I needed it most. I didn’t study art at school, and most of the time I couldn’t tell you who inspired whom, or whether something is drab and derivative. The people who do this probably receive some form of pleasure from looking at installations and sculptures and paintings, but I’m not sure it is as physical, as carnal as what I get from it. It’s the difference between nibbling on a darling tasting menu and devouring a mound of pasta because you’re starving. Both can be joyous, but only one feels filling in the way that only necessary things do.
This is why I wonder if I’ll always feel this way about art. I spent many happy years looking at beautiful things and broadly enjoying looking at them, then I had an epiphany and everything changed. Who’s to say everything won’t change again, when more of my emotional and psychological needs are met? Will art feel as poignant when I no longer have this void yearning to be filled by something, anything? Again, it’s all about the trade-offs.
My one hope is to one day look back to those days with quiet fondness. “I was lonely in my early thirties”, I’ll say, “but I found ways around it, and it forced me to look for life elsewhere, and for a while it was pretty good”. By then I’ll have gone back to glancing at pretty pictures then moving on, my heart already bursting with other things, but I’ll remember the starvation and the art, in the way that you think back about relationships that changed you for the better. We can only hope, can’t we?