Thursday’s visit to Margate I have to admit to having a burger and chips at BeBeached (click on the link for their website http://www.bebeached.co.uk/ ) while she who must be obeyed went shopping.BeBeached offers good quality food, drink, Wi Fi connection and is situated on Margate Harbour Arm, I am afraid that most of the shops that I used to visit in Margate have long since closed.
Where the harbour arm also scores over and above most of the reasonable costal eateries with a good view is the absence of traffic combined with the view across Margate Harbour to the town.
Sitting in the sun overlooking the town it is hard to imagine how things could have gone so badly wrong for Margate but a mixture of losing Dreamland and gaining Westwood Cross seems to have pretty much finished it off.
Apart from Tracey Emins recollections of teenage sex something I had just been made only to aware of see http://thanetonline.blogspot.com/2010/05/turner-contemporary-tracey-emin.html , the only other thing to mar the day was the increasing smell of rotting seaweed as the tide went out, perhaps it had been left to rot as a further assault on the senses related to some bizarre aspect of modern art that I didn’t understand.
Anyway I reflected on what our Tracey was trying to achive with her reminiscences of sex at 13, was it supposed to provide art though shock due to her age? I concluded that this was unlikely in view of Romeo and Juliet, Juliet’s age is as specified by the Nurse and Lady Capulet in Juliet's first scene as not-quite-fourteen.
Well I suppose if one was going to name the world’s most famous lovers she would come fairly near the top of the list, so this is hardly something that is likely to shock as we have had the last 400 years to get used to the idea.
While I am certain that Shakespeare’s play is art I wasn’t quite so certain about the video that Tracey had produced and by the nature of the Turner Contemporary’s funding I had had to part pay for without being consulted.
The Turner Contemporary appears to have pushed Margate Lifeboat into a somewhat difficult position, so in view of what happened to my car when I visited Margate recently see http://thanetonline.blogspot.com/2009/11/go-to-margate-to-see-turner.html I thought that this important item looked somewhat vulnerable.
There are very few rubbish bins on the harbour arm the two I found were situated next to each other, this also seemed to be a bit bizarre and I wondered if it had some sort of artistic significance.
In view of Margate’s aspirations to modern art and philistines like me having some difficulty identifying some of the artistic works, perhaps some sort of labelling scheme ought to be adopted.
Before leaving Margate I should warn you that what looks in the pictures like a traditional sweetshop, is actually an empty shop that used to be one with a picture of a sweetshop window display stuck to the window.
I believe this concept is known as inverse surrealism, and would be double inverse surrealism if the picture was entitled, “This is not a Sweetshop.”
Such is the nature of Margate at the moment that one feels it ought to have warning signs saying, “Do Not Adjust Your Mind Reality is at Fault.”
In case any of you are curious I gave the shell lady a light tap and she went boing suggesting that it's made of cast bronze.
Click here for the pictures of Margate
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