Print: Certain Indifference / Being arty-farty with John Cage

Certain Indifference, R.Tomens, 2018

Dress down Fridays at Work is usually an excuse for employees to commit sartorial crimes and go unpunished; for me it sometimes means being able to wear a jacket with one of Mark Pawson's badges pinned to the lapel (that's how radical I am!). A favourite is from the John Cage set he made. Nobody has ever commented on it, until today.

A woman who works close by stopped me and said 'What does that say?' I showed her and some explanation was necessary, obviously, so I said it related to an 'artist from the 50s (no, I wasn't about to give a rundown of the decades he actually operated in or all the disciplines he covered) who made a recording called Four minutes, thirty-three seconds, it was silent'. She half-smiled and walked away, saying to the air something including the term 'arty-farty'.

I went away and thought about the term 'arty-farty'. I wondered if an equivalent existed in other languages, or is the philistine put-down particular to Britain (and America?). Put-down? Well, it is, by it's very essence, which is to suggest that anything deeper, artistically, than an oil painting of the countryside, or a portrait, is...'arty-farty'. Or worse, it's used by completely ignorant folk for whom art is an alien concept. 

Is liking Ed Ruscha 'arty-farty'? Is making a print such as the one above 'arty-farty'? Is going to Tate Modern 'arty-farty'? I don't know. It's most likely to be used as a class weapon, perhaps, as in the 'arty-farty' crowd who, by the very nature of both class and culture (in the UK), will be middle-class. 

Whatever. Perhaps next week I'll wear the I Love John Cage one...and probably be considered gay.