There are many things I have come to accept I will never properly understand. Cryptocurrency. TikTok dances. Why we invented trousers with fake pockets. But towering above all of these modern mysteries is the grand, glittering enigma of art.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I love a nice painting as much as the next bewildered museum-goer. Give me a rolling landscape with a slightly brooding sky, a few trees leaning wistfully to one side, perhaps a sheep or two in the distance, and I will happily stand there nodding sagely and muttering, “Lovely brushwork” like I know what I’m talking about. That, to me, is art. Something that looks like something. Something that, if pressed, you could reasonably point at and say, “That’s a hill, that’s a tree, that’s the farmer’s slightly disappointed dog.”
It’s fair to say I am, at heart, much more of a Bob Ross man than a Damien Hirst devotee. I like my art friendly, reassuring, and mildly encouraging — not suspended in formaldehyde or aggressively daring me to feel things I don’t really want to feel before my morning coffee. If Bob Ross offered “happy little clouds” and comforting affirmations about how mistakes are just “happy accidents,” Damien Hirst offers a glass case full of existential dread and a hefty invoice. And while there’s undoubtedly room for both in the great sprawling mess of human creativity, I know very firmly which side I feel more at home with.
The Landscape of My Understanding (and the Swamp of Modern Art)
I like my art like I like my countryside walks: scenic, slightly melancholy, and without anyone trying to shock me by gluing a traffic cone to a microwave and calling it ‘Societal Collapse #4’. A well-painted landscape is a thing of quiet magic. You can lose yourself in the soft folds of distant hills, the careful dabs of colour that suggest a setting sun, the gentle illusion of depth and distance created by a clever hand and an eye for the beautiful. You don’t need a pamphlet to explain it to you. You don’t need to stand there squinting at a small white card trying to decipher whether ‘Untitled, 2022’ is supposed to be a commentary on consumerism or just what happens when someone spills a tin of Dulux.
Modern art, on the other hand, feels less like a conversation and more like being shouted at by a stranger who insists their point is very deep while wearing a traffic cone as a hat. I want to appreciate it, I really do. I have stood earnestly in front of twisted metal sculptures that look like angry coathangers. I have nodded thoughtfully at giant blank canvases because everyone else was nodding and I didn’t want to look uncultured. I have smiled politely at installations involving dripping taps, abandoned bicycles, and an inexplicable quantity of concrete blocks. But deep down, I am thinking the same thing every time: “Is it just me, or has everyone else gone mad?”
The Great Suspicion That Art Might Be Laughing at Us
There is a creeping suspicion, whenever I step into a gallery, that some of this is a colossal joke. That somewhere, behind a velvet curtain, a group of mischievous curators are doubled over laughing, having successfully convinced an entire generation that a pile of old newspapers stapled to a broken fence post represents “the futility of ambition.” The Emperor’s New Clothes, but now it’s a papier-mâché swan covered in glitter, and you’re supposed to weep openly at its fragile beauty.
It’s not that I think art needs to be obvious or easy. A good painting should make you feel something beyond mild admiration for whoever remembered to pack the right number of legs onto the horse. But when the feeling it provokes is mostly confusion, slight resentment, and the overwhelming urge to say “you what, mate?” — I can’t help feeling that something might have gone wrong somewhere.
Art for the Rest of Us
For me, art will always be a landscape hanging slightly askew in a dusty frame. It will be a portrait of someone looking faintly uncomfortable but dignified in heavy, itchy clothing. It will be the sort of painting where you can at least hazard a guess at what’s going on without needing a postgraduate degree in Post-Postmodern Contextual Studies. Art should not require a manual, or a glossary of terms. It should not need a performance artist in a leotard standing next to it explaining how it represents the fleeting nature of time using only interpretive eyebrow movements.
Art should, at the very least, allow a person to stand in front of it, sigh a little, and say, “Isn’t that lovely?” without fear of being told they’ve missed the point entirely.
Maybe I am a dinosaur. Maybe I simply lack the imagination required to see a pile of bricks and feel moved to tears. But I can live with that. I’ll be over here, admiring a painting of a slightly windswept tree next to a river, while the rest of the world ponders whether the stack of old ironing boards covered in jam represents capitalism, sadness, or just a Tuesday morning gone horribly wrong.
And frankly, that seems like a perfectly reasonable trade.
Dwight Warner is the quintessential oddball Brit, with a weirdly American-sounding name, who has a knack for turning the mundane into the extraordinary. Hailing originally from London, now living in the sleepy depths of Lincolnshire but claiming an allegiance to the absurd, Dwight has perfected the art of finding the surreal in real life. Whether it’s a spirited rant about the philosophical implications of queueing or a deep dive into why tea tastes better in a mug older than you, his blogs blur the line between the abstract and the everyday.
With an irreverent wit and a penchant for tangents that somehow come full circle, Dwight Warner doesn’t just write; he performs on the page. His humour is both sharp and delightfully nonsensical, like Monty Python met your nosiest neighbour and they decided to co-write a diary.
Known for being gregarious, Dwight is the life of any (real or metaphorical) party, whether he’s deconstructing the existential crisis of mismatched socks or sharing his inexplicable theories about why pigeons are secretly running the economy.
A larger-than-life personality with a laugh as loud as his opinions, Dwight Warner invites readers to step into a world where everything’s slightly askew—and that’s exactly how he likes it.
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