Must be a Gavin Turk street installation or something. Maybe. Erm…

Yesterday I almost tripped up over a man named Ben painting the chewing gum splats on the pavements of Muswell Hill. He was right next to a pelican crossing, painting a little white street-blotch pink. It was dark and the weather was Baltic, so you can guess he was clearly devoted to his art. Apparently Ben paints chewing gum all over London, and has been doing so for years – I wonder if anyone else has noticed his tiny canvases literally dotted around the capital? I couldn’t wait around long enough to see what the finished product would be.

I’m glad that someone is doing something creative with these enduring articles of human waste. I remember once writing a short story where they featured, I shall have to dig it out and remind myself.

I am not sure if this is insanity, but it certainly is an interesting way of brightening up the grim pavements of London, even if it goes largely unnoticed.

p.s. Since writing this blog post I have done some searching and located a flickr group of Ben’s art, in case you are interested

We prepared for an amble round the Victoria and Albert museum with a beer and Lebanese food in South Kensington. This is the way to spend a Friday night. I think the V&A is amazing, personally. It is free, architecturally elegant, and groaning with actual treasure – such as the following:

Indian C18 painting of a “composite bull”, the work of some loopy Rajasthani Arcimboldo. I especially like the natty avian hooves.

This must be a sculpture of Achilles being dipped in the styx by his mother Thetis, rendering all his body except for his heel invincible. Also known as ‘Michael Jackson’s dangle gambit’.

A beautiful screen from a Mogul palace, finely carved from stone. Imagine that. Islamic artisans could not include figurative designs in their work for religious reasons. Thus they became masters of embellishing Qu’rans and palaces with decorative calligraphy and geometrical patterns. Shame they don’t do this in India any more. If someone one was knocking them out now they’d probably be all wonky and with lots of broken bits all stuck together with toothpaste.

Ai WeiWei’ s exhibit in the turbine hall is a vast carpet of porcelain replica sunflower seeds. He explains in the supplementary film that he wants people to interact with the exhibit as they walk over the seeds, to have new questions about the encounter provoked. He says he wants people to pick the seeds up and even put them in their mouths to see if they are really artificial. And he (and an army of chinese porcelain workers) have clearly gone to great pains to produce the millions of handmade, hand-painted replica seeds.

Today I was disappointed. It was quite shitty to find that the whole exhibit has been cordoned off. Apparently it is a health and safety concern about dust which was being ground up in to the air. Probably there were fears of [sorry I could not think of any justifiable safety concern. Please email any suggestions].

I intend to organize a protest march over the seeds. I always knew my life would amount to something.

To be honest, I have given this post its title only to see if someone will google that phrase. It will probably happy one rainy morning in 2015, and whoever it is will probably be bitterly disappointed he has not found the weird fetish porn for which he was searching.

My grandfather, Kurt Rowland was an artist, illustrator, and writer. He wrote books on visual education – instruction on how to educate one’s aesthetic and visual faculties. He had a load of strange and interesting titles published, like ‘The Shapes We Need’, ‘Sight and Insight’ to ‘Visual Education and Beyond’. Here is a taste of some of his work .

People go on wine-tasting courses to learn what makes a good tasting bottle of booze. I even had wine-tasting general studies  classes at school. But never did anyone suggest a class on the principles underlying good design; the relationship between the development of aesthetic principles and civilization; or the way design affects and guides the functioning of modern society.

In school art classes, I was never taught about Gombrich or Itten. Colour theory was never even mentioned. I do remember making a lot of sketches of masterpieces from postcards for some reason. But there was never any reference to the philosophy of colour combination or the mathematical foundations of composition and proportion.

At primary school, kids are taught to have fun and paint nice pictures of their parents, a gratifying exercise for artist and subject. It is about fun, getting the kids to be a little creative, perhaps breaking up the drudgery of the three R’s. There was once a time when Victorian schoolchildren were soundly beaten with an iron rod in case they even conceived of colour. So a bit of splashing paint around can’t be a bad thing for the littl’uns.

However, we seem to take certain misconceptions through to secondary, and perhaps even tertiary art education. We think that art, like poetry, is all about creative self-expression which takes precedence over technical or academic achievement. But I cannot think of single great artist or poet who has not been ruthlessly obsessed by perfecting their craft. It seems that the greater their attention to technical detail, the greater the human relevance of their creative output.

Poetry is metrical writing, nothing more. Otherwise it is prose, or doggerel. Art is the aesthetic application of visual media. Whether  in a bizarre arrangement of paints on canvas or an arrangement of slate in groups on a gallery floor, personal items scattered round a bed, or pharmaceutical bottles on the walls of a gallery room, great art represents fearsome obsession with the development and application of aesthetic principles.

On the subject of Damien Hirst and Tracy Emin: these  artists inspire resentment as well as admiration from the public. I am personally not worried about whether someone thinks Hirst is a genius or a media slag, I am concerned that you very really hear an organised, rationalised explanation of such opinions.

It is a concern that art education in Britain has a generational problem similar to that causing the gastronomic ignominy of our country. Until we sort it out, we shall lack the critical faculties to escape the loathsome tyranny of tv arts critics. Our kids will need to develop their own informed opinions about what makes a good painting as much as what constitutes a good environment for them to live in, or space to work in. We don’t want them getting all their ideas off some twat off BBC 4.