OCAD GradEx100

My school day today was spent downtown on a field trip to the Ontario College of Art and Design's 100th graduate exhibition. I was there with my 'media arts' class (a course I am only a part of because I dropped out of physics at the beginning of the semester and it was the only class left that I could take) which meant that three of the four hours I spent there were taken up by visits to two different art technology labs within the vicinity of OCAD. Without going into too much detail, one of them involved a guy who showed us a 3D hologram he had made of his own brain (don't ask), and the other involved a lot of waiting around while my teacher talked excitedly about interactive projections, and I really, really, really had to go to the bathroom. Suffice to say, by the end of it I was bored out of my mind and questioning why I had decided that going on this field trip was a good idea.

The best part of the day, though -- and what really made the whole thing worthwhile -- was the half hour I spent trying to see as much of the OCAD art as I could. After shovelling down a mushroom vegetable pie at the food court across the street (which was actually excellent), I ran over to the gallery building and started looking around. I'd never been in any kind of art gallery type situation alone before, so I had a crazy sense of freedom to look at whatever I personally wanted to for as long as I wanted to (as long as I got back to the bus by 1:40). I took the elevator up to the sixth floor because I had no idea where I was going and that's where the one other person in the elevator with me got off. The actual gallery spaces were large rooms branching off a couple of central hallways, some of which were scattered with high school type lockers that were a kind of stark reminder that all of this was taking place inside of a school. Given my limited time frame  I wasn't even able to see everything on the one floor I went through, but I loved what I did see.

At one point I ran into a class of seventh-graders, so that was interesting. They were all giggling about the nude pictures and daring each other to touch the sculptures they weren't allowed to. A ton of them were taking pictures with their phones of pretty much every piece of art there, too, to which my immediate reaction was one of disdain that I quickly realized was hypocritical seeing as the only difference between them and me was that I had a DSLR camera and a superiority complex. Which brings up the issue of whether or not you should be taking pictures of art. I think you can, but the problem comes in when you have to figure out where to draw the line between taking the pictures for so-called "good" reasons, like wanting to remember the pieces you liked or to share them with people who otherwise wouldn't be able to see them; and just taking pictures so that you can get likes on instagram or whatever, and whether or not taking pictures of art because of that is a "bad" reason. It's hard to say, really, because then you can get into the whole "art for pure aesthetic value vs. art that's saying something" debacle, and what the merits of each are or how you can define what's good or bad in art. I really don't know, but I took pictures of some of my favourite pieces and now I'm posting them on here, and on instagram, and on tumblr so that maybe people will like them and follow my blog or whatever and although my main reason for doing this writing certainly isn't based in that (as of right now nobody's following me, and this post is really long too so it's probably all just a shout into the void so does it matter?) but I've done it anyway. So I think it's mostly for a good reason. Or at least that's how I'm justifying it to myself.