15 November - Cards & Art

Am looking for a birthday present and as we either have everything by now or can’t afford what we don’t have, I turn to the website of the Royal College of Art, for their ‘Secret’ postcards section. You know, for £35 you can buy either a postcard or something which will turn out to have been created by a famous artist and therefore will be of a value exceeding the £35. You can view on line and register to buy though on the actual day you have to schlep it to the RCA. No doubt there will be a queue of those usual people that stay up the night before the Horrids sale or the night before Take That tix go on sale so I doubt I’ll use this for a gift but no harm in looking. Stone me they have 2,500 cards. Serious overload. But I have time. Though if I had to try and identify the Emins and so on, I'd have to look again? Surely she wouldn't want to make it that simple to guess.
After a while…it’s all a bit boring or repetitive this modern art subject. There’s the same old, same old themes, there’s swimmer, there’s some clouds, someone representing dogs, someone drawing shoes, or nudes or lots of textual stuff. Where’s my beloved Jenny Holzer ripped off to death. But you know a postcard with ‘love’ written on it or ‘infinity’ doesn’t seem much better than something they sell at Clintons cards. Then there’s another swimmer, another dog, another nude and so on.
I don’t care if it’s a Hockney I could get for £35, it’s boring. In the end after scrolling through the 2,500 – twice – I have about a dozen under consideration. None screams buy me. I may go… 9am on a Saturday… am kidding myself. How sad. And yet there will be a scramble no doubt, bit like the (avoided so far) Stella at H&H or Mouret at Gap and so on. Don’t care if you can re-sell it on Ebay for a large profit. It’s like a jumble sale and you got a bargain. So what?