The closer we get to the Turner Contemporary, the smaller it seems. From across the bay its modernist, factory-like form stands like a monument to industriousness next to Margate’s grungy-chic idling (Italy has a heel, but Kent’s Easternmost outpost is England’s toenail, complete with all the fluff and scuzz and bloom). As we walk towards the gallery, it slowly shrinks into a row of plasticky-looking sheds. Once inside, we wonder where it all is. There are just a few rooms of installations and miniatures, heavily themed – climate change, race, history, violence. Statement art.
The work is good, the messages land – but we leave a little undernourished. I find a book of essays by the American writer Susan Sontag in a small bookshop. The secret with dense, intellectual books about which one knows very little is to pick them up decisively, placing them upon the counter with an assured smile that says just what I was looking for. Leafing cautiously is a sure way to invite the PhD student sitting behind the till to dismantle this self-delusionary moment with a deft question – do you need any help…?
It turns out to be the perfect book for the day. “A work of art encountered as a work of art is an experience, not a statement or an answer to a question”, she writes. “Art is not only about something; it is something”. I read one of her best-known pieces: Notes On Camp. This is a word whose primary meaning has shifted over time, moon and planet having traded places such that its modern usage is un-untangleable from what were previously only orbital notions of sexuality. The original aesthetic, Sontag maintains, can be found in mannerist painting, the Art Nouveau, 19th century opera; places where the separation of content and style is essential, where the world is seen “not in terms of beauty, but in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylization”. Margate, which invites you to spend your winnings from the Dumbo slot machines in the Nordic homewares boutique next door, seems to fit the bill.
That evening we eat in a confidently-hip fish restaurant, the North Sea breeze carrying wisps of karaoke and decomposing seaweed through the narrow streets on the western side of the harbour. The cooking is serious, fine, full of relish. I look at the wines by the glass and order something that I am almost certain will not be very nice. It arrives, slightly pissy, all rapeseed and Muscat, sagging with fruit both genetically and climatically disadvantaged. My wife, a practised and merciless tormentor, is laughing. I find myself not minding too much – in fact I am almost enjoying the experience. I know the wine. I know the producer. I know the label. I have a certain affection towards the style – or what Sontag would call stylism – that is being referenced. “In naïve, or pure, Camp, the essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that…
