Cultural tourist

The disingenuously gormless television presenter, ?  la Louis Theroux or Matthew Collings, has come to look like one of Britain's more versatile cultural inventions. The latest incarnation of this type, on Art Safari, BBC Four's extremely watchable new series of programmes on contemporary artists, is presenter Ben Lewis, who darts back and forth between the gardens of the Venice Biennale, the commercial galleries of New York and artists' studios in Germany. Lewis has the kind of face which you feel obliged to pity even as you giggle. His fall-back expression-an enthusiastic but dumb grin-appears on camera during interviews while he awaits answers to his half-silly questions. Art Safari (which Lewis directs as well as presents) never shrinks from showing us this expression.
The message is subtle but clear: you can be stupid in the face of the obscurities of contemporary art, you can ask questions so daft that it pains the artist to respond, you can cook up far-fetched theories about what it all means, and... everything will be OK.
The most astonishing moments occur when Lewis asks the German artist Gregor Schneider about his work. Answers simply don't come. Instead, the camera lingers on Schneider's faraway face, making for some of the longest and most excruciating seconds in the history of art television-and the funniest. The programme makers have also refrained from editing out several embarrassing moments in the show devoted to the equally awkward Matthew Barney. Barney has a daunting, passive-aggressive charisma, and Lewis just keeps tossing in new questions to fill the awkward pauses. Barney keeps his dignity only by waiting in silence for the rain of interrogation to pass.
What are we to make of all this? It is an approach to arts programming that seems, at first glance, guilty of the kind of dumbing down lamented by David Herman in his essay on arts television (Prospect, May 2003). But Lewis is cleverer than he appears. We see him chatting about contemporary art in fluent Italian, German and French. His knowledge is solid, and his ability to place the weirder inventions of difficult artists, such as Maurizio Cattelan, in the context of recent art history is admirable. The film about Barney includes well-chosen clips by early video artists who influenced him (clips which cannot have been easy to track down) and the programme on "relational art" does a good job of fleshing out and vivifying a dull sounding subject.
If there is a problem, it lies in Lewis's lack of what Herman called "an uncynical faith in the value of the individual artist." Lewis does seem to love contemporary art, but he expresses his love through the prism of a faux-naif irony, so as not to alienate anyone by appearing to have too much conviction. This stuff may be pretentious, his manner says, it may seem like a zoo at times (Art Safari's opening credits show wild animals inside Tate Modern), but the ride is fun.
The issue of faith may have less to do with trends in art television than just trends in art. Lewis rightly judges that bewilderment and a degree of piss taking are indispensable to his subject. The silly-serious fulcrum is the first thing people coming to contemporary art have to get their heads around.
What other approach can there be to a figure like Maurizio Cattelan, a reclusive Italian who employs impersonators to be interviewed in his place? Lewis himself later impersonates Cattelan, wearing an oversized papier-m?ch? outfit to the Venice Biennale. This piques Cattelan's interest sufficiently for him to meet Lewis for real.
Cattelan made the infamous sculpture of the Pope struck by lightning. He also suspended a dead horse from a gallery ceiling, had a police report made for the theft from his girlfriend's car of a work that had never existed, and almost killed his overweight dealer by putting him in an exhibition, naked and taped to the wall.
"To me, these were brilliant works of art about what nonsense art had become," says Lewis. It is a virtue of his Art Safari programmes that they face up to the nonsense, while conveying a truthful impression of the genuine talent behind some of it.
Art Safari begins 28th September