WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING AT?
a possible introduction to a future project

It's November 2001 and I'm sitting in the offices of Tiger Aspect in London, discussing a pitch for a TV series for Channel Four. I don't really know what I'm doing there, but whatever the reasons, I know that it's fuelled by some sort of anger. I'm angry, I'm fucked off and it's led me here, to this little office in the middle of television production madness.

I'm angry for a few reasons - firstly, I feel as if I have invested a great deal of time and mental energy towards 'art' and have had precious little reward or recognition for that fact and, secondly, how can art ever hope to shed itself of the accusations of being elite if it can't even acknowledge the involvement of people who actively interact with it. 'Art' is The Big Bad - it's pissing me right off and, goddamit, I'm going to make a television programme about it. That will sort things out once and for all.

But something is far from right. I'm angry enough to have a tasty reserve of energy, but instead I'm starting to drift, to calm down and I realise it's because I'm confused. I'm torn betwen polarities. One side tells me that I'm a charlatan, that I can't hope to carry it off, that actually I don't know what I'm talking about - the other tells me that I'm a genius, that I am and have always been right, and that my agenda is even now being hijacked and diluted, that my opinions are being 'taken away from me'. Perhaps neither side was telling me the whole truth, but either way I walked away from those offices never to return.

"Why would people watch a programme about art? Why would they care? There has to be a programme in there, something worth watching." That was their agenda, "why would it make good television?". Sadly, we were in a paradoxical cul-de-sac. They were riding the crest of my precise point - "Why would people watch a programme about art?", or more accurately, "Why are people not watching programmes about art?". So there was the pitch (and it's easy to see why we never 'got into bed together') - let's make a programme about why people never watch programmes about art, which, of course, no one will watch.

We could argue that they (i.e. the inferred 'people') shouldn't be watching programmes about art anyway, they should be getting off the sofa and into the galleries and venues across the land. But there we have it - should, should, should. People should be doing this, people should be doing that ... Another glitch - who got together and voted me God for a day?

Tiger Aspect, rightly, couldn't put their hands on their crotches and sell a pitch that was confused, unfocused and unfinished. They wanted me to come out and make a stand, right there in front of them, that said either 'art is shit' or 'art is great' and here's three thirty minute programmes about it. Instead, I had a mess of ideas about art's function, its role, its effect - it was as much to do with 'art' as it was to do with the people that interacted with it. I wanted to know why art got such a bad press? Why are attendences falling? What does art actually mean to any of us? Or more specifically, what does it mean to me?

It now seems laughable and a little arrogant to assume that I could have made a programme about what art 'means' to the outside world when actually I have no idea what it means to me. So much so that I now feel that the time has come to make that stand, to once and for all decide and answer that question - what does art actually mean to me? I'm surrounded by it, I'm addicted to it, my job revolves in the industry that binds it - I simultaneously love art and despise it. Yet I've never studied it or, more importantly, never really practiced it either.

The anger that fuelled that less than explosive TV meeting is generated from this position: Here I stand, willing to embrace and nuzzle to my bosom, yet I'm not allowed to play. I still feel excluded from the club. Time and time again, I'm reminded of my place as an outsider. When in the company of artists, I feel my presence is tolerated rather than desired. I am merely 'the audience'. And I have a catalogue the length of the bible of instances where I hear artists tell of how the audience is 'not important'. If the audience is not important, then surely my opinions are not important and therefore - why the hell do I bother? If this my pay off? Years of visiting and viewing, of running internal dialogues, of feeling the hair stand up on the back of my neck - none of that is matters? None of that is important? So what the fuck is important?

I'll admit that, in my experience, not all artists think the same way, but they will all (either consciously or unconsciously) set themselves apart. After all, don't they, like me, want to feel as if their years of involvement have led them somewhere? But if that somewhere is an intellectual elite, aloof and detached from the concerns of the very people who are attracted to their work - is that such a good place to be?

I'm just a few hundred words in and already I've made such an appalling sweep of assumptions. Yet I cannot deny how I feel. Something has taken me all the way to this point and has angered me so much that I have generated these emotions. Maybe all of the above is pure fantasy? Basic paranoia? Self-regarding bullshit? One way or another I need to find out.


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