The Glasgow Boys audio tour

The Royal Academy is really doing a good audio tour these days and this one was no exception, making much use of Scottish artist Barbara Rae, essentially ensuring one Scottish voice at least to disquiet the London gallery goers. What really sets a good audio tour apart is the use of music and sound effects. Music, I think, would be a particularly good way to make that other reason to visit galleries - cruising for potential new boyfriend/girlfriend material - a lot easier, if one were to key in the appropriate number for the painting and then dance to the music that precedes the commentary. Like birds or badgers, nothing gives a signal about the suitability of a mate more than how you throw some shapes.

As good as music is, sound effects are the new must have for audio tours, to make it a completely immersive experience. The tennis paintings was glorious opportunity to exploit this. It could really have benefited not from the grunts and whooshes that one associates with the modern day game but with the 'pock', 'pock' of a genteel rally and the gurgle gurgle of Pimms splashing into a glass full of ice and hedgerow, not to mention the swish of crinoline and crease of linen

There should, though, be something on the audio tour for every painting, although I realise that this might result in a long tour. It would be good if the owners of the paintings on loan from a private collection had sixty seconds to explain why they bought the painting in question. With luck it would be a little more interesting than 'an investment' or 'the shade of blue really goes with an armchair I have'.

These small deficiencies, especially the idea of composing a score to visit the gallery to, or even something I experienced in the Whitney in New York City, where a composer had produced a 'sound response' to a painting, makes me wonder if it is not time that the audio guide market was opened up. With the ubiquity of the iPod and iTunes podcasts, might it not be simple enough for early visitors to the exhibition to go, get the catalog and put together a podcast, each chapter either an explanation of the painting (resisting the temptation to just make everything up and also resisting the temptation to pretend to be the owner of a piece on private loan who explains that he bought the piece because he likes to 'self pollute' when looking at it, not just when at home but especially when he visits it on public display and he sees somebody listening to a bootleg audio tour on their iPod turning round with a growing sense of suspicion and alarm) or, better yet, a soundtrack to the thing. Oh, and some banging tunes to groove to.

The Glasgow Boys

You may have assumed, quite reasonably, that the Glasgow Boys, capitalised, is a reference to a collection of Scottish blokes who hang about in pubs drinking pints of heavy and subsist mostly on a diet of scotch pies, Irn Bru and chips. Not so.

The Glasgow Boys were instead a school of painters that worked around the turn of the century, who shared a couple of characteristics. The first was that the art establishment of the time would not accept them, leading them to establish their own school, the second was that they congregated in a city in Scotland that, without wishing to give too much away, wasn't Edinburgh.


Looking round the recent exhibition at the Royal Academy, there's precious little to suggest that they actually spent much time in Glasgow. This is fair enough, it's not a city known for it's rolling vistas and dazzling available light. This is why many of the paintings were done in the highlands or, that favourite location of many a Scotsman, abroad.

The audio guide was at great pains to point out that the Glasgow Boys were not impressionists (impressionists in this context meaning a school of painters working at the turn of the last century rather than folk who can do a passable Cary Grant impersonation). Right. So. Just to check, they are painting at the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth century, were influenced by the Japanese woodcuts that were available in Europe for the first time, romanticising the rural poor, doing portraits of ordinary people rather than commissions of wealthy worthies and capturing the emergence of the middle class. But they are not impressionists, despite producing more images of gardens than you find in a lawnmower catalog? Sorry, but they were clearly impressionists, or at least shared 99% of their DNA with impressionists. You don't have to be French to be an impressionist, although it plainly helps.


There were some extraordinary works on show. 'A Highland funeral' depicts a collection of dour looking Scottish agricultural labourers huddled round the front door of a cottage in the gloaming, the only daylight a brilliant slash of golden sunset high in the sky. Then you notice the wee coffin supported by a couple of kitchen chairs and your next breath catches in your throat. Of all the works on display this was the one that seemed to provoke the strongest reaction, the little crowd that was always in front of it a reflection of the grim little gathering depicted. Intrusion into private grief is something that newspapers have made commonplace, long lens shots of funerals of celebrities or the victims of tragedy or malice being the sad staple of the tabloids, but this is not an image to be glanced at before you turn over to be confronted by an ad for sat navs, the painting was huge and daunting and, like grief, filled the room.

Although hugely impressive, the exhibition was about an awful lot more than dead bairns and weeping celts. There was a fabulous wee portrait called 'Hard at it' depicting the artist on the beach, shaded by an umbrella and labouring at his easel. There were also many pictures of Scottish landscapes, sharing the common characteristic of sporting a coo somewhere in the landscape. Scottish folk love a coo in their landscapes and if you were to have even a chance of selling your depiction of hills or fields or streams or trees, it better have a coo somewhere in it.

Like every successful Scot, the key decision in attaining that success was to get the hell out of Scotland. Hence there are dazzling pictures of Europe and of the Mediterranean. These excursions must have had the Boys sending out for fresh paint, light blue not previously having been a colour they had any call to use.

The boys tackled what are now traditional subjects on the familiar curve of moving from challenging the establishment to become the establishment. Influenced by French painters, they painted farm labourers. Now of course galleries are full of folk in smocks passing round the scrumpy, pulling up sprouts and shaking the sod from their boots, but back then it was avaunt guard to paint a portrait of anyone that wasn't paying you good money to do so.

As well as folk toiling in fields, the Boys painted folk toiling in their gardens, both sweating over shovels and, more importantly, sweating over a service as they played tennis matches. The painting of the tennis match is astonishing, and not just because watching a woman play tennis in what is, essentially, a ball gown is fascinating. Suffused with light (it depicts a garden in France, not Govan), it shows a young woman and a bloke having a knock up while the rest of the gather party sit idly by and watch. You can almost smell the wine and cheese. Best of all the ball boy, dressed in a suit and sporting some rather fetching knickerbockers, is smoking. Now that I'd like to see at Wimbledon.

One minor annoyance was that the catalog had sold out. Luckily, the Kelvinhall Galleries in Scotland, where the exhibition had originated, still had some of theirs left so thanks to the wonders of mail order, I have my catalog. In this case, it was more important than usual to get one, as it is about the only way that you'll get time to enjoy an uninstructed view of the paintings. The gallery was packed to the rafters, it made the Summer Exhibition look depopulated. There were no incidents of gallery rage that I could see (gallery rage being when somebody is so upset that they tut audibly), but I was affected by that precursor to a tut; unkind thoughts about the raincoat of the chap who had just obscured my view.

Finally, the last gallery is worth a mention. The entire room was painted gold. I'm not sure whose idea it was to decorate a gallery like a hip hop superstar's toilet, but the effect was amazing, the whole room looked like one enormous gilded frame. Fantastic idea.

X rated – we rate it and review so you don’t actually have to go

There’s probably scope for a publication full of nothing but critical reviews. While wicked reviews are fun to read, it would perhaps lead to a dearth of quotable review soundbites for movie posters. There are already signs of desperation with some posters, if your quote is ‘loved it’ but comes from Zoo, Nuts or Heat rather than Tattler, then you have to wonder about the quality of the movie.

Of course, if your movie is so shit that you can’t even get a decent quote from Heat, you need to start trawling the niche publications, making sure you have ‘loved it!’ in very big print and ‘Hedge Worrier Quarterly’ in very small print. Because the more specialist the magazine, the less natural authority it will have – ask anyone who would rather read about a new miracle diet pill in ‘Heat’ rather than the article in the ‘Lancet’ that advises that the same pill has the unfortunate side-effect of making you sexually irresistible to bears.

If you’re reduced to the local press; ‘They sure use some fancy words in this movie!’ – Cotswold Advertiser, then you’re in real trouble. And the day you see a quote on a movie poster for an explicit erotic thriller along the lines of ‘it made me feel funny in my tummy *****’ – Thatford Junior School Newsletter, you know things have gone too far.

As for the audience for a publication of wholly negative, bitter and wickedly cruel and uninformed reviews, that’s easy, it’s lazy men who would rather spend their weekends and evenings on the sofa than dragging round some art gallery or counting down the moments to their intermission gin infusion at some ghastly theatre. A terrible review, in print, has far greater authority than any internet review and, properly wielded, can secure that all-important boozy night on the sofa.

The perfect title, of course, for any collection of reviews about disparate matters is: ‘X rated’. Not only does this allow for ‘X’ to stand for anything at all, so it can be pot noodle rated, sandwich spreads related, biscuits related and so on, it also has the smutty association and just the right nostalgic touch to make it a natural go-to site on the internet, not to mention all the blokes that will find it by mistake because they have Googled ‘X Rated birds’ and the first return is a review about custard. Having said that, there’s no reason smut can’t be rated and reviewed too.

Overall, criticism has a role to play. One of the great things about the internet, along with being able to order stuff without having to leave the house and being able to look porn from many lands, is that just about everything is reviewed and I love the idea that just about anything and everything can be reviewed. It used to be that the only things that were reviewed were films and plays, art exhibitions and restaurants in the city where the paper was based. But now everything from hotels to instant mashed potatoes are reviewed. OK, so it’s sometimes by somebody with more opinion than talent, but occasionally it’s by someone with a real passion for what they are reviewing. If you’ve reviewed a dozen types of instant mash potato, chances are you are going to be an enthusiast. And single.

There must be more scope for reviewing everyday stuff and there must really be an audience for stuff that others find fascinatingly awful and a little bit common, like cider, or caravans.

(Full disclosure, I’ve eaten instant mashed potatoes and enjoyed them greatly. Used to eat them with fish fingers and canned creamed mushrooms. Naturally I’d not dream of doing that now. I’d use fresh mushrooms.) (No I wouldn't, I'd use tinned, cite nostalgia as an excuse and then hop on line and find a tinned creamed mushrooms forum to share my profound opinions, and pictures.)

Criticism

What purpose does criticism serve? If you’re a child then the criticism you encounter is likely to be fairly unsophisticated; for instance a playground of kids chanting ‘Janet smells! Janet smells!’. Later in life you might start to encounter criticism of your creative efforts, as your work is branded ‘bland and lacking the essential element of whimsy prevalent in many of his contemporaries’, which is a bit fucking harsh given it was the first time you used finger paints and you were only five. Still later and one gets used to the knocks of opinion, which is useful for when you develop romantic feelings for somebody, go out with them and suddenly find yourself on the wrong end of a ‘it’s not me, it’s you’ conversation during which your insensitivity is mentioned no fewer than seven times before you realise you are being dumped. But don’t worry, you will eventually find somebody to settle down with who will criticise you but not leave.

There is a danger that criticism sometimes just seems like an excuse for the critic to show how clever they are by being both cruel and amusing, all the while demonstrating that they are not as talented as the person they are criticising and making a pretty good case for the argument that critics are just frustrated artists.

But people like to read reviews, because tickets are expensive and going to the theatre is time consuming. So you don’t want to waste your time and money seeing something that is crap only to discover afterwards that every critic was united in their opinion of its crapness. Of course worse still is coming out of a show thinking it was crap and not understanding the rave reviews. This is especially true of foreign films, which reviewers invariably praise because they are worried that if they say that a three hour documentary about an Armenian orphanage lacks even one decent car chase, they may be accused of being shallow.