I had a migraine this week when I first heard about the Van Gogh Museum’s forthcoming collaboration with Pokémon. I saw a Sunflora grinning beneath corduroy skies – this wasn’t part of the migraine – and I thought: really? The Sunflora looked delighted. I wondered: wasn’t van Gogh amongst the unhappiest people to ever hold a brush? Is that match-up particularly harmonious? Something something crass? Art and commerce! Then I grumped off for a lie-down.
That was my first thought. Luckily I had others later on. I am increasingly wary of gatekeeping, particularly when I find myself settling into it. I am sure all of what follows is obvious for you, but it helped me, at least, to pick my way through it.
My next thoughts, anyway: actually, might Pokémon and van Gogh make for an interesting combination? And haven’t art and commerce lived close together for most of their separate histories? More important, is there such a thing as a bad way of connecting with art?
🖌 Pokémon × @vangoghmuseum, Amsterdam
🎨 From 28 September 2023
🖼 More information coming soon! pic.twitter.com/B9hKPH4hGB— Pokémon @ Lumiose City 🥐 (@Pokemon) September 12, 2023
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I think about the last question quite a lot. My mum did an art history degree when I was very young, and I have loads of memories of being dragged around art galleries with my sister. I was very much the child who sees a room labeled “Raphael’s Cartoons” and emerges moments later confused and disappointed. At the time, I don’t think much of the art I saw was going in, but looking back what I got from mum and her art obsession was her particular fierceness about the things she loved. When it came to art and artists she was wildly partisan. She loved Constable, for example, and absolutely hated Turner. (We once went into the Clore and, faced with the studious calm and a rippling selection of Turner seascapes, she couldn’t help herself yelling out, “Well, this is a load of SHIT,” before turning and walking out again. Good times, ma.)
(She has actually been more embarrassing in an art gallery than this. Years later, at Edward Hopper, she tried to huffily move away from whoever’s mobile phone was going off piercingly loudly, only to discover it was her phone.)
At the time I was confused by this, but now I sort of love it. If you’re going to be into art, cleave to it. Love the things you love and love them ferociously. A few years passed, and when I read Ellen Raskin novels that namechecked people like Piero della Fransceca and Malevich – two artists who do not often end up shuffled together – I found I was ready for them. I was ready to have thoughts, to be partisan in my own way. Days of being bored in the National Gallery while my mum argued with curators had given way to something else. Now, thirty years later, I take my own kid to the National Gallery!