The best place to see art? Twitter of course

We hear a lot these days about how social media causes many of our ills. You may have heard some of that from me. And I was right. But I’ve recently realised that there’s one thing where the socials – in particular, Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) – score a positive triumph. They are the best medium for the appreciation of paintings.

I know, I know, that sounds loopy. I can hardly believe I’m saying it myself. But hear me out. The purely visual arts have always been a bit of a problem area for me. Until my revelation, I’d never been quite sure how to react to paintings. I thought that my own lack of artistic skill meant that I just couldn’t, at a very deep level, get a handle on art. I can be quite toffee-nosed about all kinds of music and literature but my taste in visual art seemed very Philistine, even to me. Orson Welles’s dictum ‘I don’t know anything about art but I know what I like’ struck a chord, but I felt embarrassed by what I liked.

A few years ago, there was a mini-craze at the very bottom end of the market for quite horribly gaudy nature scenes ­– sylvan glades and tropical Edens – that incorporated moving LED waterfalls. Some of them even came with the sounds of babbling brooks or fluttering fauna. I found myself oohing and aahing at them in shop windows to the shock and horror of friends. The law was very firmly laid down – ‘You are not going to get one of those’.

In contrast, I found that the wonders of the Renaissance left me cold. I would shrug at Titian or van Eyck, but a mass-produced print of a forest on the wall of a Travelodge would hold me captive. Now yes, there was probably something of a pose going on there, but it was a pose that came from a genuine place; I was trying to make the best of my lot.

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But now, thanks to Facebook and X, I’m all over painting like your actual connoisseur. It took me a while to puzzle out why. The key thing about paintings in the medium of social media is surprise. You can be – in fact, you will be – deep in the morass of bad takes and banter and outrage and crudity. All good dirty fun, but dirty. And then, with no warning, something beautiful appears. You don’t have time to think, or even to prepare. It’s just suddenly and randomly there, so you get the hit of it pure. Your reaction is all gut. The contrast with the toxic twitter fumes makes a good painting a sight for sore eyes, a refreshing squirt of Optrex.

And you can save the pictures for your own little collection. My taste has become much less chocolate box – I can now look at the Ghent altarpiece and think corrr, where my eyes used to just bounce off it. The townscapes of John Atkinson Grimshaw, the Catalan modernism of Ramon Casas – it’s all new to me, and it all bowled me over.

That key element of surprise is why I don’t include Pinterest or Instagram here. Those are places you visit for the specific purpose of seeing pleasing images, or at least someone’s posh tea. You expect to see nice pictures there, which makes them predictable.

Instagram, particularly if you follow accounts dedicated to visual art, is a bit too much like an art gallery. I like art galleries not because of the art but because of their atmosphere. They are that rarest of things in the twenty-first century, quiet public places, at least if Just Stop Oil aren’t lurking behind a pillar with tins of Baxters. But the art itself never stuck with me. Oversupply is an issue; I’ve always found the National Gallery dizzying, like trying to listen to a thousand different symphonies at the same time.

There is also an element here of age. Like most of us, I was corralled around museums and galleries as a child. But expecting children ­­– or worse still, teenagers – to have a sense of awe and patience is very silly; lobbing great dollops of culture at them in the hope that something might stick. How can the young, for whom everything is new, have any appreciation or even understanding of aesthetics? I couldn’t understand what the big deal was with nice views until my twenties, which is when some of the wear of life gets in to the grain of you. I spent a lot of time as a kid in Oxford, where my grandparents lived. I had no idea the city was beautiful until I was about 30. ‘Why are there all these endless shots of old buildings?’ I wondered during every episode of Inspector Morse. Even as I got older, the finer points of visual art were lost on me. 

But thanks to the socials, I’m catching up now, and in a wonderfully arbitrary and uncoordinated way. I’ve followed a small and reliable clutch of X painting accounts such as @ahistoryinart, @DrLivGibbs, @PaintingsLondon, @artinsociety etc (you may have your own favourites) that post every so often ­– it’s important that they don’t swamp you, or tweet to a timetable. Social media may be destroying western civilisation, but in one way it has opened my eyes.