The Natural History Museum Kensington Incident & Wade Guyton at the Serpentine Galleries.

Life in London is becoming more and more crazy, between terrorist attacks & weird incidents like the one I experienced this Saturday opposite the Natural History Museum in Kensington.

I had just come out of Kensington Station & I was walking up the main road when I got to the intersection where the Natural History Museum is and there was a pile of cars on the main road. At first I thought it was a robbery, one black car had crashed into a grey car and was facing the pavement with the driver trying to escape. I saw him being held down on the ground by three security guards, there was blood coming out of his nose, they were waiting for the police to arrive, I saw a pair of shoes behind him and the door of the black car wide open which made me think that he had tried to escape before he got caught. The official story in the papers yesterday from the Government was that this was a traffic accident. I am sorry but in traffic accidents you don't get people mown down by a car, nor do you get a guy being forcibly held down by security people, see the pic I took. 

                                                        Photo Copyright Mirta Imperatori

I saw a woman lying down on the floor next to the Museum helped by several people, she looked shocked. Then I read in the papers that 11 people were injured by a car. There is more to this story than meets the eye.  See how it has been reported in the media.
http://news.sky.com/story/kensington-crash-witnesses-tell-of-mass-panic-11071245
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/south-kensington-police-descend-on-area-outside-natural-history-museum-after-car-hits-pedestrians-a3652986.html
I quickly walked away from the scene because I could hear the police descending upon us so I decided to make a quick exit out of there before the whole area was put in lock down. I was just thinking that I had two near death experiences in the last couple of weeks. Just a couple of weeks ago I was walking on a road, I passed a rather large tree literally on my left hand side when suddenly I heard a huge thud behind me; I turned around and saw that the whole tree I just passed had come down and had crashed on top of a car that was parked there, causing considerable damage. It just missed me! 

Anyway I helped a Chinese couple redirecting them, I told them not to go where the incident had just happened, that the police were in the process of sealing off the area, I told them to go to High Street Kensington instead, they thanked me for my help and quickly moved on. So after all of this had happened I was really hoping to see a good exhibition at the Serpentine Galleries. Sadly this was not to be the case. 

                                                      Photo by Serpentine Gallery

The exhibition was of Wade Guyton see pic above and below.  His works are made using IPhones, cameras, and an inkjet printer. All the images were printed on canvas on linen, some images were blurred, he says they are a record of their own making. Yeah right, he is making them just using a machine, nothing new here. In the brochure it says that he analyses our relationship with digital media. I found the work in the exhibition outdated, not current, and a tautological exercise in blandness, the Gallery photographs of the exhibit actually look better than the originals. The original images don't give you anything back, just  accidental flatness.

                                                       Photo by Serpentine Gallery

This type of art is for corporates that want to buy this type of work to offset their taxes because there is really nothing else to the work, not the ones I have seen at the Serpentine Galleries on this occasion. What! You take pictures from your Iphone or inkjet printer, not even well taken and you just put them on a canvas.... how ground breaking! I mean there are loads of people online that do this and do it better, their work may not be bought by the big guns in the art world because maybe they don't know how to promote themselves, sell themselves with a clear package but that doesn't make it any less valuable. I have seen much better stuff inside Universities in the UK, more up to date with what is going on in digital media than this exhibition. The only interesting piece I found in this exhibition was of several canvases stacked together, the front was different from the sides, so it turned itself into a sculptural piece, most of the canvases were of  a standard size or large. There were also tables with more images inside printed on paper not on linen like the canvases, I find this pretentious, the images were of really poor quality, he could have left them out; by putting them inside the table as they are small and not of good quality it just didn't make me want to look at them. Why  would I want to look at something of poor quality inside a see through white table on poor quality paper at a lower level? The tables were smart tables like you see in pretentious establishments for wealthy people, bizarre! I find the concept of  this work poor. They call it conceptual paintings and that he goes against painting. He works with the machine but don't be fooled, he is no Gerhard Richter.  I have seen better work done online by strangers! It made me ponder the fact that if you finally get picked up by a big gallery you can really sell anything and pass it for innovative and then get more people to buy your work no matter what nonsense you give them - they will buy it because the big gallery has taken the work and given it value.. finally I just want to say that if a woman did this same work she would not be taken by the gallery.

I wasn't in a good mood when I came out of this exhibition.