Niru Ratnam
Earlier this summer, the curator Francesco Bonami dished out some advice in an Instagram post to a number of art-world professionals, myself included, who had signed a letter telling him off: ‘Please do not take yourself too seriously.’ This was a second response on Instagram to an article in the Art Newspaper that had pointed out the trend of Chinese museums appointing white chaps of a certain age as directors, and dared to suggest that this might not be ideal. Bonami’s first response to the article had included the comment that he sometimes identified as a 35-year-old Iranian lesbian, so the observation that he was a white man was invalid, as was the whole article.
I normally don’t get involved with this sort of thing – at least not since an unfortunate episode in which I may have (completely wrongly) accused the Hepworth Wakefield of being indirectly responsible for home-grown terrorism in the Spectator (sorry, Hepworth!). But I was at Lord’s and had imbibed perhaps too much hospitality when I was alerted to an open letter arguing that Bonami had trivialised the issue – undermining critical theory around identity and gender – by basically taking the piss. Bonami was further fired up by the letter, or at least he saw an opportunity to attract more Instagram followers. He acknowledged that there were serious issues around cultural and gender identity (no shit, Sherlock) before telling us we should all lighten up.
This seemed unfair – in my mind, I have a sense of humour. In my younger days I acted as an occasional adviser to the satirical artworld blog ‘Cathedral of Shit’, which, while uneven in quality, made an occasional stab at humour. It also ran agenda-setting stories such as ‘Antony Gormley’s Giant Knackers’, and revealed that Munira Mirza (now one of Boris Johnson’s key advisers) spent £10 in Old Street on lunch with Matthew Slotover and Ed Vaizey in 1998, and speculated that this might have been enough for a couple of small kebabs.
Yet this spat made me wonder: does the art world have a sense of humour problem? Have we all become humourless woke warriors spoiling the sense of play and fun that Bonami and his generation embodied? Am I getting old and humourless? Determined to prove that humour still has a place in the art world I decided to look into the matter, despite being on holiday and having to file this from next to the pool.
I figured that the arena in which Bonami now expresses himself, Instagram, would be the place to look. I was happy to see that accounts such as @jerrygogosian and @freeze_magazine have followings of coming up for 100k.
The feeds are pleasantly comedic, using what I believe are referred to as ‘memes’ to make points about the art world being a generally bad place. Yet to be honest, both are a bit rubbish. @freeze_magazine recently captioned a photo of Pablo Picasso with the text ‘Imagine being named after a family car’, which more than 2,000 followers apparently thought profound or funny. Recent posts on @jerrygogosian seem a bit more incisive, including ‘Guys sending unsolicited art career advice on Instagram is the new dick pic’ and a post featuring Prince Harry shrugging at Barack Obama with an observation about commercial galleries that commit to climate change before tripling their gallery space and attending more art fairs. Pretty good points, but pretty vacuous without naming names. Try it, it’s easy.
My 20 minutes of research were perhaps in vain. I have little idea if the art world has less of a sense of humour than it once did. I suspect that this might be the case. It might have something to do with a generation of readers (swipers?) who are generally a bit angry about the art world, but perhaps have no specific idea what they are angry about. But this sounds old and patronising. Bonami’s humour, however, seems to be that of the supposedly renegade old white guy. He was the future once, but then again, so was I.