As Warhol exits the Hugh Lane Gallery Dublin & tumbleweeds enter, what does the art critic mean by “Not to be missed”, or the Instagrammer by “Sorry my bad photographs don’t do the artwork justice”? The critic’s line “Not to be missed” (yuk) follows a Babel’s tower of words vacillating between the work & its context, obviously made by someone who experienced the exhibition ‘in-person’, that orphaned phrase adopted from the pandemic. But can ‘in-person’ exist on your phone in this world that forms a flat ontology of real & virtual? My first experience of art was in a book. So, is the copy enough, or do we need the real thing? Maybe the physical can just exist in homes & mandalorian domes, mediated into our hands as images. If I were to claim that the words of the art critic do the artwork justice, that the words (or grams) are not secondary or fugitive, but equal & even better than the real thing, is that crossing the line? I remember I had a habit of redescribing episodes of a weekly TV series to friends & family. I enjoyed being an unreliable narrator because, as Adam Phillips puts it: “redescription is analysis” (perhaps self-analysis). Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams is not the what or why of your dreams, but the how. Sometimes my redescriptions would be remembered as being better than the real thing after the person got around to watching the real thing. I return to my Instagrammer & their weak apology, “Sorry my bad photography doesn’t do the artwork justice”. Does the Instagrammer believe their photographs are really that bad, or are they just vacuously reciting what they think is expected without thinking about what they really mean? Is their self-criticism based on the sense that their photographs don’t live up to the real experience? There is the explicit apology of the ‘bad’ photograph, but there is also an implicit apology, one hidden under the explicit one, the apology of taking & then posting a photograph on Instagram, knowing that the photograph will condition the future real-life experience implied in the “Don’t miss it” hashtag, or failing that, convince the public of not going at all. To be, or not to be…missed…

📸The Last Picture Show (1971)