After we finished visiting the galleries of the first and second floors of the Tate Modern art museum, Symone paused and asked, “Now what exactly is ‘modern’? Because I really like it!”
I had a suspicion that Symone would like the Tate but hadn’t set my hopes too high.
I mustered up an explanation that I knew she would connect to and be mostly accurate, “The modern movement was a rejection of painting pleasing fruit and fat ladies. Artist wanted to press the bounds of what aren’t meant and often tried to use their art to evoke feelings and thoughts that challenged the viewer to alter the way they perceived the world. Sometimes the art could be very confrontational”
She spent a lot of time looking and talking about the pieces she saw. She grokked it. She was super curious why certain pieces ‘worked’. We talked about how words were employed in odd ways to evoke feelings, we talked about size, repetition and pattern being used to create awe, and we talked about performance artists being confrontational and breaking social rules.
She was really struck with one piece that was a tower of audio devices that started with a base of old radios and ended a the top with bluetooth speakers. As she walked away she said, “..it kind of freaks me out when I look at it, but I like it.”
The museum itself was a huge austere place perfect to house such a collection.
Come to find out, Kaety does not love the modern art. By the time we left the Tate, we were hitting the exhaustion wall….
