
I don’t know about you, but I find it’s becoming increasingly hard to keep up in this brave new art world of ours, fly as I might. Perhaps it’s just my tired old wings, but I have a horrid feeling it might be rather more than that, even if I do manage to catch up with whatever it is for half a furlong. Taking in air significantly as I heave alongside, yet still peering keenly through the misted specs, it’s ten-to-one on I’ll still make neither head nor tail of what it is I’ve actually caught up with. All that effort spent and innocent curiosity frustrated: it is a shade dispiriting don’t you feel: but anno domini I suppose, as we used to say.
I mean here we all are, doing as we’re told, still masked-up beak and wattle, soaping the talons at every turn and dutifully keeping our distance, stuck in Zoom-space and desperate for release and something to look forward to. So when a note came pinging through the aether from the chap at the Pace Gallery – you know: tradesman’s entrance at the back of the Academy, up the stairs and off to the right, the old servants’ quarters, chambres de bonnes – announcing its reopening in September with a show entitled Bloom, ahaa, ahaa, I said to myself a couple of times, ahaa ahaa; at last, something to look forward to. I rather like pictures of flowers.
But how soon the heart