Never had any interest (at all!) in art as a kid. Was only interested in sound. The sound of electric light, TV static, shortwave radio scans, people’s accents, the cadences in the lines of Dr Seuss books, theme tunes, advertising jingles, ice cream van chimes, rain on pavements and windscreens and Dutch elm leaves, diesel car engines, the railway, disembodied tannoy voices, silence’s unsilence (mild tinnitus or a faded imprint of the creation of the universe?), TDK D90 experiments, echoes, etc.
Having zero art knowledge/interest of art until about the age of 24 was a good art education. These days I’m fascinated by art. It doesn’t need to be any good: it just needs to be honest. There is commercial artwork on breakfast cereal packets that will travel through centuries, while there are things hanging in your local city’s Kunst-cathedral that are basically just fucking tat and that will be forgotten about.
Today, I spent about 20 minutes staring at Sepolcro di Cecilia Metella, the Piranesi etching. One of the most interesting things about Piranesi is that you sometimes recognise things in the work that you have already seen in a dream. The same thing happens with de Chirico (and sometimes even Frits Thaulow). This isn’t oneiro-semiotics though, or science or criticism. We are just chimps after all, space chimps with access to a shared/shareable (collective) dream brain/consciousness. Piranesi may well have been a time traveller – the Sepolcro is full of broken circles, portals. The sepulchre looks like it’s about to revolve. In typical piranesi style, there is weird shit in the sky – a Rorschach-blot clown-phantom wearing the devil’s trilby. Fucking hell, did Piranesi watch Tarkovski’s Sacrifice? Or read Dr Seuss? No semiotics please – this is better than that. Even for them what knows fuck-all about art. Piranesi = fucking genius.