I work for an org that publishes a magazine and runs a gallery, and fairly often the former runs articles on work featured in the latter. Maybe it’s just because I love magazines so so so much that I quite often find I prefer the (yes v.high-standard) photograph to the work itself – which just seems clunky or pointless or just the wrong size, in a way that the picture of it didn’t. I expect there’s all sorts of stuff been written about how such a preference is essentially an outgrowth of bourgeois idealism, and how modern taste is corrupted and distorted by the commodification of the image blah blah blah. The fact is, the photos in a magazine are yours to interract with, they’ve entered your house: above all, mass reproduction undermines intimidation – the shut-up-and-show-awe factor is defanged (with big expensive well-researched and comprehensively illustrated catalogues it’s ramped back up again, of course – the purpose of deep scholarship is broadened utility, but at £150 a time that’s easily lost). Basically, unless you regularly visit galleries with people who aren’t afraid to bring themselves and their world in with them – I absolutely don’t mean brashly or rudely, but def.not fraidycat mute either – these spaces can seem a thousand times as forbidding or distorting, and where’s your so-called de-idealised human reaction then? On my own, to be honest, I usually just get bored: “What do you want of me? What’s my role here?” But I wouldn’t be a writer at all if I wasn’t such a compulsive charming showboater hem hem.