Why am I not surprised? Yet another attempt to sound intelligent without doing any actual work popped up in my weekend newspaper. I remember a book from the 60s that listed the ten things you should memorise about art and artists of note so that you could sound as though you knew what you were talking about at cocktail parties – but then again, there were such books on all sort of topics and even today Booktopia has a number for sale. Personally, I’ve never been to a cocktail party and would probably be appalled at the shallow approximation of communication and elucidation. But that’s me. The superficial veneer of education is all that is necessary it seems, and little has changed since cocktail parties were invented. Proust had a lot to say about the faux illiterati of his day and no doubt I could go back and find plenty of other examples of the puerile as well as the literary. Perhaps nothing is ever destined to change. There are those who think and write thick textbooks and there are those who believe that Reader’s Digest is the fount of all wisdom. Conversation, such as I experience it, largely consists of regurgitations of last might’s news [or at least one or two salient facts as chosen by the news station], the weather, or one line media offerings. Often these regurgitations simply reinforce memes with little recourse to anything more than salacious gossip.

Today it is Tik Tok reducing the world to the insignificant and inconsequential. Mary Mcgillvray’s journey through the art world attracts some 350,000 followers delighting in her approach to art history. She’s not alone. Even she recognises at least twenty other people venturing down the same path. The fact that she occupies a double page spread of my broadsheet this weekend says something though. The conservative, opinionated world of journalists [ageing, white, male] that she rails against, is being invaded by a younger battalion who did not have to spend a lifetime getting printer’s ink under their fingernails and in itself that isn’t a bad thing. Recognition that a younger generation even exists, let alone has the power to alter opinion, flies in the face of a newspaper industry for whom youth is no more than a ‘whipping boy’ for all that is wrong with society. Rebellious youth is hardly a news story at all. Youth paying attention to art is a story for today though – however long it lasts in the ever decreasing ‘news’ cycle of sound bites.

The cocktail party list simply continues under another name: Michaelangelo -gay, van Gogh – one ear, Pollock- drunk, Bansky- anonymous. Does it actually help anything to describe Cubism as your Tupperware draw, as Mcgillvray does? The innumerable anecdotes of the art world, sundry facts, romances, sins and defects of character become just another collection. Lists of the restrictive symbolic practises of Renaissance religious artists has more to do with a wholly defensive church than anything else. Artists have forever been the victims of their patrons. On another level, the storylines proposed by the ancient Greeks – lust and greed, fear and ambition, duty and affection, revenge masquerading as justice saturate the world of cinema and television just as much as they did the paintings of the Renaissance. Have we moved on as a society at all? Certainly there is timely debate about why there are so few black and women artists recognised in national art collections but as I have pointed out before, I would struggle to recognise art produced by either group unless it dealt specifically with social issues associated with them. Such art in my opinion has a limited shelf life.

While Mcgillvray is highly educated, lucid and personable, what we end up with is a hodge-podge of symbols, essentially uncoordinated ‘facts’ that demand to be taken seriously. Unfortunately, there is no substantive filter to separate these facts from all of the others demanding attention. So, what does deserve to be taken seriously? Democracy? One view is that it has become the byword for the unfettered right to prejudicial thinking. What was the saying, perpetuated by Hollywood legal minds about disagreeing entirely with what was being said but accepting the right of the person to say it? I’m not sure which is worse – the democratic right to spout any prejudicial nonsense or the suppression of legitimate voices. We may never find out given our history. Both prejudicial voices and the suppression of said voices inevitably lead to war.

But, where does all of this leave Art? Mary Mcgillvary can concoct all the pretty, throwaway assessments she likes and have Tik Tok content-consumers baying for more, but soon enough it will be someone else and something else that garners mass attention and Art will go back to the museums from which it was temporarily released with just as little understanding as a topic of serious intent as it previously had. Does this matter? No doubt Mcgillvay will get her wish and take a different path down the road to serious art study on the back of all this media success [non-profit as it stands, so, philanthropic] and the world will forget beyond recalling in some distant life that Michaelangelo was probably gay, Caravaggio was a murderer, Rembrandt died in poverty and Gustave Courbet had either a monstrous worm crawl out his rectum at point of death or that many pints of fluid were drained off from his bloated legs. That he painted highly detailed vaginas for the boudoirs of his many successful male supporters is probably something not worth remembering but then again, it might not be something that Mary Mcgillvray would care to share with a teenage audience. Some facts are less palatable than others. Cubism resembling your Tupperware draw is at least innocuous and on the verge of humour and who knows, a bit of humour is rarely an unnecessary addition to our current days as the world slips into oblivion on a pandemic and climactic front.

Now don’t get me wrong. Mary Mcgillvray is to be commended for making use of a much-maligned social medium [Trump wanted it banned] in Tik Tok and my granddaughters wouldn’t be without it in their lives. As someone who takes seriously Art, its understanding and place in the world, I’m always going to support such a venture to try and educate but as with all social media platforms, Tik Tok will be superceded and all of that content will vanish into the ether as yet another generation sinks into the depths of ignorance remembering only that Michelangelo took four years to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and his statue of David is 17ft tall. Leonardo da Vinci was of course famous for never finishing anything and giving the world the Mona Lisa. What more do you need to know?