The internet knows best

Engine Sheds, Kentish Town, London (1955 painting by Roy Bizley)

[Image source: https://artuk.org/visit/venues/swindon-museum-and-art-gallery-5267 . In the Swindon Museum and Art Gallery. Roy Bizley was born in Swindon in 1930, studied at the Slade and became an art teacher. He died in 1999.]


At the Swindon writer's groups I attend they've been telling me for ages that I ought to pop in to the Museum, it's fantastic. But I didn't take much notice, even though I often pass the building when I have reason to go up to Old Town. Though I'm in every way a provincial I have quite low expectations of provincial institutions and going to museums isn't something I often do. I salted away the recommendations but without much thought of following them up any time soon.

Until this morning, when I was clicking through the Guardian culture pages and came upon this fun art quiz based on some of the paintings held there:

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/jun/04/great-british-art-quiz-swindon-museum-art-gallery

And I was overwhelmed. Even more so, when I scanned through the 300 images you can see via the Art UK link given above. I realized, belatedly, that I'd been missing out on a fabulous collection of modern art right on my own doorstep. If the museum wasn't closed for lockdown, I'd be setting off to go there right now.

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It's common to many or perhaps most of us: we chat with our friends and the people we meet, but we take our information from the internet.

In a case like this the internet had obvious advantages; it could instantly show me images of what I was missing. What could words do to match that? Vague assurances the museum is very good, well worth a visit...? Unless we're specifically looking for guidance, aren't we apt to append a mental reservation to the things we're told in person, something like So that was your impression ... And we're perhaps apt to be more receptive to what the internet tells us for precisely the reason that it doesn't direct its words to us personally; it doesn't know who I am, is not seeking to make an impression on me.

I feel troubled by this observation. It's as if we're all starting to adopt the scrupulous mental attitude of academic researchers and we're applying this attitude to our real lives. We become more acutely aware, in our real-world contacts, of the slight inner resistance to being moulded, the inner resistance that's absent when we're just scrolling through web pages. In this matter of information, the internet downgrades the significance of real human contact to our lives, bringing a little closer the prophetic vision of E.M. Forster's remarkable 1909 short story "The Machine Stops" . We can get all the information from Google, we can get it more easily, more accurately and more comprehensively.

And yet there's a part of me that protests that e.g. information is not wisdom; that the important things in life mostly can't even be expressed as information; that what happens between us and real people is something crucial, a more profound kind of communication, or something more profound than communication.

Perhaps this is more a statement of faith than an argument. Whatever it is, how should it play out?

Burning the Leaves, watercolour by Mary Potter

[Image source: https://artuk.org/visit/venues/swindon-museum-and-art-gallery-5267 . In the Swindon Museum and Art Gallery. Mary Potter (1900 - 1981), born in Beckenham, studied at the Slade, lived in Aldeborough from 1951 (where she became a close friend of Benjamin Britten). Wikipedia. ]

Heinestrasse 60, 2011 painting by Robert Priseman

[Image source: https://artuk.org/visit/venues/swindon-museum-and-art-gallery-5267 . In the Swindon Museum and Art Gallery.  Robert Priseman was born in 1965 in Spondon, Derbyshire. Heinestrasse 60 is the house, near Vienna, to which the ten-year-old Natascha Kampusch was taken by her kidnapper Wolfgang Přiklopil, confined to a small cellar and tortured for eight years before escaping on 23 August 2006 (Her book 3,096 Days was later made into a film.) One of a series of views of ordinary houses that were scenes of atrocity, exemplifying Priseman's provocative art. Wikipedia.]

Ship Amid Tall Waves, painting by Alfred Wallis

[Image source: https://artuk.org/visit/venues/swindon-museum-and-art-gallery-5267 . In the Swindon Museum and Art Gallery. Alfred Wallis (1855 - 1942) was a Cornish deep-sea fisherman, later a marine stores dealer in St Ives. He took up painting after his wife's death in 1922, mostly on scraps of cardboard. His self-taught art was discovered by Ben Nicholson and Kit Wood in 1928 when they established their artists' colony at St Ives. Nicholson commented: "to Wallis, his paintings were never paintings but actual events". Wikipedia.]

Two Figures, drawing by Frank Brangwyn

[Image source: https://artuk.org/visit/venues/swindon-museum-and-art-gallery-5267 . In the Swindon Museum and Art Gallery. I couldn't resist including something by the prolific Frank Brangwyn (1867 - 1956), who has already featured in one recent post. Born in Bruges to Welsh parents, lived and worked in London. Wikipedia.]