Rant: Art galleries

Art galleries Visiting art galleries can be ghastly.

Accompanying a friend to the latest much-promoted exhibition is usually torture. At every picture, someone (often me) feels obliged to offer a remark so buttockclenchingly banal that it can’t even qualify as pretentious.

If this is your experience, you’re doing it wrong. The first rule of art galleries is: go

on your own. It’s no more a collective activity than reading.

Secondly, don’t start by going to big exhibitions. They’re oversold and overhyped. You’ll be disappointed, just as you would be with a £1,000 bottle of wine. Yes, it’s good, but for the casual drinker never that much better than your usual £10 plonk – and therefore fundamentally unsatisfying and, worse, off-putting.

Start with permanent collections. With some background reading on major artistic movements, you’ll quickly start to understand more about what you’re looking at.

Don’t read obscure aesthetic appreciations. Restrict yourself to learning about how, when and why

things were painted. Forget about whether or why A is better than B.

If you’ve had enough of saints, heroes and Greek gods, just follow your enthusiasms and knowledge. There is no field of human activity – gardening, design, fashion, music, cooking, sport, warfare, to name a random few – whose enjoyment and

understanding cannot be enriched by having some appreciation of its historical practice and development. Art galleries are a fantastic complement to books.

Finally, if you’re still not convinced, imagine a world without painting. Our visual knowledge of the world before photography would almost disappear. Humanity’s ability to mix powdered pigments with oil, water or egg yolk and smear them over canvas, plaster or wood to recreate pictures of ourselves and our surroundings is one of the summits of human ingenuity.

Before you enter another gallery, imagine you’ve never even heard of painting, let alone seen any. Prepare to be amazed. BENEDICT KING