Talbot Rice Gallery, University of Edinburgh November 19th 2011-February 18th 2012 4 stars “Beauty,” according to that man David Hume, whose tercentenary year is almost up, “is no quality in things themselves: it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them.” So it goes in this bumper grab-bag of some fifty-odd works, each subjectively selected by a far-reaching network of artists, curators, movers, shakers and other organisers who populate Scotland’s fecund visual landscape. Their brief, as with Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, is to do it beautifully. The result is a gloriously disparate jumbled-up wonderland of art for art’s sake that’s a joy to wander through. Classicism and conceptualism rub up against each other, as do the institutions with the DIY pop-up spaces in an all too rare fit of democratic inclusivity in the best sense of both words. Beholder also speaks volumes about taste. So what’s an ugly-bugly portrait in the corner to some will have others in raptures.
An archive of arts writing by Neil Cooper. Effete No Obstacle.