Bad enough without the audio-babble...
Detail from Omai by Sir Joshua Reynolds
The exhibition that seemed designed to position Joshua Reynolds as the Mario Testino of his time -capturing the celebs and the great and the good on canvas rather than camera and putting their best image forward - to me did quite a lot to ruin Reynolds's own image.
I'd never been a fan, but now I'm an out-and-out hater; he came across as a bit of a self-promoting idiot and so many of those portraits are just plain-old badly painted. Give me Hogarth or Gainsborough any day.
Anyway, that aside, my annoyance was considerably increased by some of the other punters' inconsiderate use of what for me is the curse of the modern art exhibition: the audioguide.
For several reasons: One, why would anyone want to listen to somebody distractingly chattering at them when the whole point (or am I mistaken?) is to look at pictures? Is there anything wrong with, perhaps, reading the catalogue later in the comfort of your own home after you have actually spent a bit of time thinking about the pictures using your own native intelligence?
Two - more importantly - why do so many exhibition-goers hold the damn things an inch from their ear so that people like me are forced to hear their irritating patter? It's actually worse than someone else's leaking iPod on the bus because there's little background noise to smother it.
Plus, you just know that the retired-colonel types marching around Tate Britain with their bad audioguide habits would be the first to harrumph at the youth-of-today's lack of courtesy in relation to iPod use on public transport.
