I’ve never seen this work, which is a video by the British artist Gillian Wearing of herself silently dancing in a very exposed public place. She did it before she was enormously famous and successful, and the most important thing about it to my mind is not covered in that Guardian page I just linked to: it is that she found it difficult to make, because she is a self-professed “shy” person. Wearing’s work is a lot about people exposing their inner selves from behind disguises and the like. She actually came up with the idea of getting people to write their inner thoughts on boards and then photographing them holding the words in front of themselves. This idea has since been used in a million advertising campaigns. It had zeitgeisty relevance and still does. She also filmed people revealing secrets from behind masks.

And now the second most popular blog in the world, according to Technorati, is this place, where people send in postcards with their secrets written on.

Like I said, I’ve never seen “Dancing in Peckham”, but I used to shop at the same little place Wearing filmed it, on my way home from working at this place, to my South London flat opposite these two artistic establishments, and it’s hard to think of anywhere more excruciating for an introverted person to make a public idiot of herself, without even the luxury of a gorilla mask to hide behind.

This kind of modern art is a lot about concepts, and concepts are easy to steal. I suppose a lot of people could make all sorts of versions of ideas that an artist had first, and maybe do them even better. It’s not always the inventor of an idea that executes it best, in art or elsewhere, and I think that’s a real problem for what we call conceptual art. The traditional art brigades argue that there should be technical accomplishment and/or beauty as well, and I think that argument has a lot of merit. It can be interesting to look at purely conceptual art, which can have a kind of beauty even without much technique, but building a career out of that is possibly more about marketing than solid achievement. I’m not entirely sure what this all means. Must think more.