Beer and Loafing in LS11

Last week I wrote a review of an arty event in Leeds. Great event and my review was positively glowing. It was a week long extravaganza and I couldn't get to everything and the organisers wouldn't have wanted me to. Each day had different shows and each drew in a particular audience, that was part of the point. My review picked out my own highlights, admittedly personal and apologetic to anyone I didn't mention. One particular event I said was "rivetting," the art work was "weird and wonderful" and some of the pieces "were genuinely disturbing." My only slight caveat was that I "didn't understand what he was on about on his website." It was a genuine confusion. If I review something I say exactly what I think, there's no point being all polite and politic. I liked the guys art, but his writing didn't do the work justice. I didn't say he was an illiterate oaf who should not be allowed near word processing software until he'd learned how to put together a decent sentence, I just said I didn't get what he was talking about.

The following day the guy responded. Here's the text with incriminating details removed:

The reason P. Kirby can not understand what I am trying to express on my website and is limited to describe my work as weird and wacky, is he is an idiot. I had the misfortune to meet this individual during the ***** exhibition and find him deluded in his importance and two faced.

Avoid ***** at all cost, couldn’t organise a p*ss up in a brewery if you want my opinion. All credit to ***** (the other exhibition I'd seen the guys work) goes to ***** and the rest of the *****. 

Now I'm fine with the personal invective. Though I don't remember exchanging more than two words with the guy at the other exhibition he was involved with and our only contact was when I took a picture of his work in progress and put it up on the website. Still, his insights into my personality flaws, failings and foibles stand. Obviously he has preternatural insights into the human soul that I'm just too obtuse to be a party to. I'm not an artist. Perhaps that's it. And I never would take credit for anyone elses exhibitions. I was there almost every day during the exhibition he mentions, and he and his mates were fully responsible for setting up, marketing, marshalling and managing the event. I wouldn't want to claim any credit at all, and I'm sure the handful of penurious students and assorted scruffs and scallies who turned up really enjoyed themselves. Hopefully they can all copper up and make enough between them to buy a print. That would be nice. And maybe he's right about me being an idiot and not able to organise a piss up in a brewery (and fuck I hate the middle class delicacy of erasing the vowels. It's PISS UP fuck it, just come out and have the balls to say it you middle class soft shit . . . ahem.) So when the several hundred people with money enough to buy the guys stuff have been through the place recently, and some have asked about his work, well, shucks what an idiot I am! I forget who did it. Dopey me. And let's face it, he wouldn't want an idiot marketing his stuff to paying punters now would he? This idiots opinion that his work was "rivetting, weird and wonderful" must be turned on its head. In reality the work is dull, bland and anodyne . . . what other conclusion can be reached? That's the artist's own self estimation after all. It would be two faced of me to carry on with my over-estimation of the work on show.

What really bugged me wasn't the insult. It was his inability to grasp what I had written and his complete disregard of plain Englsh. I don't mind insults but get the facts right and don't come across as if you've spent too much time in remedial class. I never said the work was "wacky" because that's a word I haven't used since I was just out of nappies. I said his work was "wonderful" . . . but I'm an idiot, ignore me. All I was asking for was some simple clarification, some clue about what the work meant, which I wasn't really getting from his website. For instance, this:

This imagery is framed within our ornate world, diverse and subversive these unique paradox moments form a body of work that questions the onlookers visual representation and ideals towards the every day task of being