I went along to the Tate Modern on Monday to see one of the current exhibitions, Capturing the Moment. It’s an exploration of the relationship between photography and painting in the 20^th century and beyond. I didn’t know much more than that – I hadn’t read any reviews of the exhibition beforehand. Generally I find that’s the best way to go about it, to avoid either heightened expectations or being put off by a critical review. The art world is a fairly small one, I imagine, and no doubt the critics, the curators and indeed the artists all know each other. Probably a lot of them went to the same art schools. And in some cases they may not like each other. That can colour a review at times, I’m sure. I like to read the reviews afterwards, to see if they chime with my own perceptions – or add insights, which they often do. And then I might go again, with a new perspective.

I enjoyed Capturing the Moment. There were plenty of artists familiar to me – it was a bit of a C20 greatest hits – and others I hadn’t come across. I found the themes, while a bit random in places, intriguing. The initial thesis was that the realism that photography brought to images, albeit in a split second, released painters from representative art and encouraged them to explore multiple perspectives. Cubism was the first example, with a number of Picassos to illustrate the point. Bacon and Freud also featured.

Likewise, the varying perspectives in painting encourage photographers to experiment and move away from simple representation. A room was devoted to the photographer Jeff Wall reinterpreting a C18/19 Japanese painter Katsushika Hokusai, while Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimotos’ Seascapes brought abstractions to the medium. In reverse, there were a couple of landscapes by Gerhard Richter that at first glance really looked like photos and Peter Doig took a scene from the movie Friday the 13^th for his vivid Canoe Lake.

Andreas Gursky’s grand scale photos, which I think I’d seen before, were endlessly fascinating. I spotted a couple of England football shirts in the one showing a May Day parade in Berlin, and nerdily wondered whether there’d been a World Cup or Euros at the time.  Inevitably David Hockney made an appearance, with one of his striking swimming pool paintings, this one being Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures). This was derived from a series of photos, apparently.

Another theme was the convergence of the two art forms, which was a good excuse to show a Warhol self-portrait – four images in this one, none revealing his inner being of course. And at the end the interface with digital technology was briefly explored. I was surprised that Hockney’s exhibition of digital paintings, Arrival of Spring, Normandy 2020, which I saw at the Royal Academy in 2022, didn’t feature here. Afterwards it occurred to me that perhaps the narrative was woven around the available paintings, rather than driving the selection. But I’m sure that’s often the case.

And then I read the reviews…

The Guardian declared: Capturing the Moment is not a serious exhibition. To draw connections of any sorts between the works feels ultimately specious. Some stuff we borrowed… some stuff we already owned. A more complacent exhibition cannot be imagined.

The Financial Times concluded that it was a lazy apology for an exhibition. The Evening Standard was kinder, more balanced: If you want real insight into the tensions between the two disciplines, you won’t get it here. But you will get dozens of out-and-out bangers, and that’s enough for now.

So there you go! Actually, that Guardian quote is so vitriolic you feel that there must be some personal animus. All exhibitions will comprise stuff you borrowed and stuff you already have, so making that a criticism is itself specious. Overall, there seemed to be disappointment that the exhibition didn’t go deeper into the relationship between photography and painting and wasn’t more comprehensive. Fair enough, but I feel that what you have in this exhibition is not only pretty amazing in its own right – those Evening Standard bangers – but it’s perfectly possible to take the themes outlined and apply your own imagination to make connections. You could say that what the Tate was doing was showing rather telling. I’m OK with that.

It’s worth mentioning that most of the collection was provided by the Taiwanese Yageo Foundation, founded by a billionaire called Pierre Chen, who made his money from electronic components. He bought the Hockney painting on display for over $90m in 2018, the most ever for a work by a living artist. So my impression that the narrative was shaped by the available artworks may have some validity. It might also be what inspired some of the negativity in the reviews. The Guardian critic was rather sniffy about Chen following the blue chip market.

Oh well, make what you will of this. If you haven’t seen the exhibition, go and see it for yourself and make your own mind up about it. Art, after all, means different things to all of us, with our individual perceptions. And to reiterate, I really enjoyed it and will certainly go again – it’s on until 28 January 2024.