They are ubiquitous at art galleries across the world: the audio guide telling shuffling visitors the full story of what they are looking at and occasionally how they should feel.
In the eyes of Sir Tony Cragg, one of the world’s leading sculptors, they are a “terrible” modern scourge that “mess up” the enjoyment of art. “I think they look sad,” he said. “It is a new world image that I really dislike and distrust intensely.”
Cragg is opening a major exhibition at Castle Howard, one of Britain’s most spectacular stately homes made even more famous by being a location for Brideshead Revisited and Bridgerton.
There are 28 sculptures across the house and gardens – most being seen in the UK for the first time – and there are definitely no audio guides for the exhibition.
“We’re happy,” said Castle Howard’s head curator, Christopher Ridgway. “We don’t want to be overly prescriptive.”
In Cragg’s eyes, audio guides spoil the experience of looking at art. “The way I have met art and become engaged with it is just standing in front of an artwork and having my own experience. That is what is so fantastic about looking at stuff.
“To have things formatted with the opinion of someone else … why? Why do that?
“When you come to an artwork you come to it with the sum of your education, your personality, your upbringing, your life experiences and you find in an artwork your relationship to those things.
“You don’t want anyone else interfering in it. I think it relativises the experience of the artwork.”
Cragg said he yearned for the days when “you would just walk into a gallery and there is whatever there is, Carl Andre and his bricks on the floor, say, and you just had to come to terms with it”.
He is fine with labels, as long as they stick to just the title, artist and materials. “That doesn’t mess up people’s experiences,” he said. “But not what the artist thought. Who cares what the artist thought?
“Do you listen to music and someone explains what you’re listening to? That’s ridiculous, isn’t it? Do you read another book about the book you’ve read? You read poetry because it’s poetry, not because someone is going to explain it to you.”
There are no exhibition audio guides at the new show, the first contemporary sculpture exhibition at the North Yorkshire estate.
Instead, visitors will have to decide for themselves how they feel about the glass bottles, vases and glasses precariously piled up in the Vanbrugh-designed Temple of the Four Winds.
It is a magical place. For some, it’s famous as Charles and Sebastian’s wine-tasting spot in the 1981 film Brideshead Revisited, the place they got drunk. For others it could be where Simon and Daphne got fruity on their honeymoon in Bridgerton.
Elsewhere on the estate there is a magnificent plinth in the middle of a small reservoir, which has had nothing placed on it since it was built in the late 18th century. Now it has a 5-metre-wide yellow-gold sculpture titled Over the Earth (2015).
Made from fibre-glass, it looks as if it should be outside the headquarters of a futuristic, probably evil world corporation. Or it could be relaxing, reminding people of floating clouds.
The point, says Cragg, is that we, the visitors, decide what we are looking at and how we feel.
Liverpool-born Cragg, 75, has been based in Wuppertal, Germany since 1977 and has a formidable international reputation. He represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1988 and his public sculptures can be found all over the world, whether outside the Bundestag building in Berlin or in the countryside near Consett in County Durham, an unexpected and brilliant surprise for cyclists going coast to coast.
Nicholas Howard, whose family has owned Castle Howard since it was built in 1699, said Cragg was the perfect person to begin “a new era of contemporary art” at the estate. “Having now lived with the works for a few weeks, it really feels as if they belong here,” he said.
“With his amazing eye Tony has placed the pieces so they don’t feel like interventions, but more something that has grown up organically.”
Cragg has strong views on the commodification of art, with audio guides being one terrible aspect of that. “My voice isn’t alone on this,” he said. “You hear it among artists and even among visitors – they don’t want it any more. It puts people off.
“But I do think it’s just a phase and we’ll get through it and we’ll grow up.”
Tony Cragg at Castle Howard opens on 3 May and runs until 22 September.
