I bought a museum card earlier this year, so I’ve been using it actively. Museum card, in Finland, is pretty cheap at less than 90 euros annually (I don’t remember exactly how much) and it gives you access to hundreds of museums all over Finland. Thus far, I’ve visited 21 museums, so I’m paying less than 4.5 euros per visit. Many of these cost somewhere between 15-20 euros normally.

I wouldn’t visit as many museums without it, so I can’t just say that I’ve saved the difference in the actual ticket prices and what I paid for the card, but at the same time, I am happy to be able to visit different museums without having to think about the cost. This has lead me to visit museums I have really liked which I otherwise wouldn’t have, like the archaeology museum and the apothecary museum both in Turku. At the same time, I also end up visiting museums I really don’t find even worth the time, never mind the cost. These are usually places with modern art.

I don’t want to throw the exact museum under the bus, because it’s a small town and they don’t necessarily have many options, but I visited an art museum yesterday. It was shit. There was a small room with old porcelain figurines and another which was the old owner’s library, which were pretty cool, but the rest of the museum was just graphics from one artist. And it was so repetitive. Clearly, this artist had just tried out a specific technique with very uniform basic geometric shapes in various colors. There was something like 35 of these.

It was so boring. Gladly, I didn’t pay anything for it, and I didn’t even spend that much time there, so not much of a loss, but it still left me angry. Why am I being shown these tests? Why isn’t the artist making actual art? You know, something that evokes something in me. Well, besides annoyance. And it was all a sales exhibit. The artist was trying to sell these meaningless, boring pieces. Sure, there was expertise in the technique of making graphics like this behind it, but that in itself is not worth anything to anyone.

Here’s an example of something completely different I saw earlier this summer: a 40 minute short movie about a young man in Turkey discussing his interview with the army with his mom. They just sit on the balcony, going through how he should approach the thing to get out of mandatory service for being gay. Not much technique here. It’s just the two of them sitting on their balcony, smoking and going through various topics, with the mother slyly trying to figure out whether the son holds grudges against her for sending him to a boarding school where he was bullied (she felt she had to do it, because she lost her husband and had to work to maintain the family).

That was great. Someone fully committing and giving us something very personal. Sure, there might be a planned element here, and I think there were some cuts, so some editing had happened (I’m not actually quite sure if there were and I can’t really check), but it felt so true to the two people in front of the camera. This is what we want. Well, what I want.

Sometimes it feels like the artist just gets too wrapped up in the technique and the meaning gets forgotten in the process. For example, I was at an exhibit about whether technology can make our lives better. As someone who uses glasses to see, I would argue that yes. But because the artists didn’t actually put any thought into the topic, the whole thing was just garbage, both literally and figuratively. Most of the pieces were just scraps from electronic devices welded together. Just the most basic shit you could possibly do… and it had barely anything to do with the actual subject of the exhibit. Welding scrap together is not about the usefulness of tech, it’s about our inability to think about the actual costs of using tech.

I’m not interested in the technique. I’m interested in the result. Yes, the technique might be an important component in the result, but as just someone enjoying the art, I should not have to worry about that. Maybe if something really breaks through to me, I might be interested in how it was made, but – again – that should not be the assumption.

There is another side to this. People working in the field might be more interested in the technique than I am. Whatever. I hate it. I want meaning from the art. Even the game art I have on my walls holds more meaning than most of the pieces you see in art museums.

Which leads me to another angle on this: at some point we need to, as society, agree that we can never fully figure out what art is. This is gladly on a downswing, at least in my experience, but there was a point in time when it felt like all modern art was just about modern art itself. If all art is about contemplating the nature of art itself, what’s the point? I guess if we need to contemplate it a little more, we just don’t know. And sure, there is room to do this. Just not all the time. It feels almost masturbatory. “Look at how good I’m about thinking about whether this piece has any point to it!”

Like last year (I think), in Kiasma (which I feel very comfortable calling out, since they are a big institution in a big city with actual budgets to work with), I saw a work which was big iron slabs painted black laid on top of each other on the wall with old jackets in between them. The explanation for the piece was that the artist was criticizing how museums were spending money on these pieces that didn’t really have any value. Yet, Kiasma had bought this piece. So, Kiasma just admitted that they are full of shit and have no understanding of what they are doing.

And yes, I do believe artists should have the opportunity to make money, but if we, as the audience, are spending money on art, whether on exhibits or even buying art, maybe someone should actually put some thought into this.