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Sometimes only a particular piece of music will do. Perhaps you want to murder your colleagues, dismember your clients or throw a chair through a window. Maybe your designer has just returned from a two week bender or an unscheduled lobotobmy…

Music is an intrinisic part of the creative process, it is tied very closely to memory but it can also be used to help the way we think, to manipulate our states of conciousness. Not all creativity is the same though - here are my personal preferences.

Music to code by

1. The Pixies
2. The Killers
3. Groove Armada
4. Cure
5. 2 Many DJs
6. Bowie

Music to make art by

1. Orbital
2. Curve
3. Cure
4. Radio 4

With the exception of the Cure there is very little crossover - but then the Cure are a pretty versatile band… there is plenty of music that will blow your creative processes right out of the water. The final list:

Music to unwind from work with

1. Radio 3
2. Arcade Fire
3. Pixies (in case of emergency break glass)

Strange but true - a rag bag of classical music is often the only way to silence unwanted thought processes and restore a sense of still tranquility to a fevered and code burned brain. It provides noise and interest but no lyrical distraction and no interfering beats. The trouble with silence is that it promotes thought and many of us think too much and do too little.

Several weeks ago now I went to Exeter with the little man to see an show at the Spacex Gallery. The show I went to see was by an artist called Jordan McKenzie.

It was so awful and I was so upset by this utter travesty of art that for several days I seriously considered just giving up on the whole fine art business.

Here is a bit of blurb that I just pinched from the exhibition press release:

Jordan McKenzie’s work explores drawing and other processes of mark making in relation to the human body.

On the opening night of the exhibition, Jordan McKenzie will set out on a 4-hour performance titled, At Arms Length. The performance will take place across the city of Exeter involving the artist manoeuvring a cube which is the length of his arm and drawing upon the surfaces with graphite. The performance will start from Exeter Cathedral Yard and the audience will be invited to follow the artist on his route to reach the final destination at Spacex and attend the preview of his exhibition. The cube will reside at Spacex for the duration of the exhibition as a trace of the action that took place.

I mean… what utter bollocks. The gallery was full of rubbish; piss poor sculpture of a foundation course level. Bad art is one thing, after all one mans masterpiece can always be made by another mans monkey (or small child and the work of Mr McKenzie is roughly equivalent to what my 1 year old little man could produce - although he would need a slightly smaller cube..)

As I was saying Bad or naive art is one thing, but my feeling of most of the work in the gallery was that it was so derivative as to be worthless. One of the galleries was filled with pieces of mirror arranged as the floor and two sides of a cube (apparently these related to the dimensions of various bits of the artists body (my how challenging) the trouble is they screamed one thing and one thing only - that thing was this exhibition is full of piss poor copies of Robert Smithson’s work, without even a mention of the late great artist that I could find.

What is it with performance art does it have an innate tendency to become same self indulgent? Is it inherently crap?

If you want to read unbiased an well written reviews, this is the wrong website to look at. However I can recommend the writing of my friend (an superb artist) Karl Musson he has just launched a small website www.karlmusson.com and he writes for http://www.londonlostandfound.com/