Vivienne Pratfall visits an exhibition about celebrity shrines and finds it says more about her own coping mechanisms than she was prepared for
I’ll be honest with you, I went to Holy Pop at Somerset House this week expecting to write something dry and clever about the absurdity of grown adults building actual shrines to celebrities, the kind of piece where I get to be superior for eight hundred words and everyone nods along. That is not the piece I’m writing. I stood in front of a genuinely elaborate assemblage some stranger had built to Kate Bush, candles, ticket stubs, a handwritten letter she’d apparently never sent, and I had to leave the room for a minute because I was, inconveniently, crying in a public gallery on a Tuesday afternoon.
What The Exhibition Actually Contains
It’s the last week to catch it, closing the ninth, and it’s exactly what it says on the tin, a Somerset House exhibition dedicated to the world of modern shrines and collections of objects people build to honour their celebrity heroes. I’d assumed, going in, that this would be a slightly anthropological, slightly mocking look at fan culture, the kind of thing that lets you feel clever about other people’s earnestness. Instead it’s a genuinely careful, generous documentation of how people process grief and devotion when they don’t have another obvious outlet for either.
Why This Particular Piece Actually Undid Me
The Kate Bush shrine belonged, according to the little card beside it, to a woman who’d built it gradually over years following her mother’s death, because her mother had loved Kate Bush, and the shrine wasn’t really about the singer at all once you understood that. It was a mother’s absence rendered in candle wax and ticket stubs because that’s the vocabulary the woman had available to her. I write comic pieces for a living, I make fun of London property prices and terrible Tinder dates for money, and I was not remotely prepared to be ambushed by another woman’s genuine grief architecture on a Tuesday when I’d popped in mostly to have something to write about.
The Part Where I Actually Talk About Myself, Since This Is My Diary
I have, if I’m honest with you the way this column apparently now requires, my own small shrine, though I’ve never called it that. A shelf with my dad’s old records on it, the ones he actually owned, not replacements, the physical copies with his handwriting on the sleeves. I don’t light candles in front of it. I don’t think of it as devotional. But standing in that gallery I had to admit it’s doing exactly the same work as the stranger’s Kate Bush wall, it’s just wearing a slightly less honest disguise, pretending to be casual décor rather than what it actually is, which is a place I go to feel close to someone who isn’t here anymore.
What This Actually Says About London Right Now
There’s something specific about doing this kind of grief-processing in a city this expensive and this fast, where you often can’t afford the actual therapy and definitely can’t afford the actual time off work to process things properly, so you build a small shrine instead because it’s free and it fits in a corner of a flat you’re already struggling to pay for. I think that’s genuinely part of why this exhibition landed the way it did with the crowd I was standing among, a lot of quiet, unglamorous London grief compressed into small personal altars because nobody had the bandwidth for anything more formal.
What Else Is On If You Want A Less Emotionally Devastating Afternoon
If you’d rather not have your Tuesday ruined the way mine was, the Barbican’s got its Pan-Africanism season running all summer, thirty-odd events across art, cinema, music and talks, which sounds considerably more manageable emotionally than what I just described. There’s also the pinhole camera obscura up at Alexandra Palace giving you an upside-down live view of the Shard and the BT Tower, which is the kind of purely delightful, low-stakes London weirdness I usually write about, no crying required, just a nice bit of Victorian optical trickery on a terrace.
Why I’m Recommending You Go Anyway, Despite The Warning
Go to Holy Pop before it closes this weekend. Bring tissues, genuinely, I’m not being cute about that. And maybe, while you’re there, have a proper look at whatever small shrine you’ve built yourself and never quite admitted to, the shelf, the drawer, the folder of photos you don’t open often. I went in expecting to be superior about other people’s earnestness and came out having to be honest about my own instead. That’s not the column I meant to write this week, but apparently it’s the one that showed up.
One Last Thing Before I Go And Have A Very Large Glass Of Wine
I keep thinking about the woman who built that Kate Bush shrine, whoever she is, wherever she’s living now with her own version of my flat and my own version of my rent. I hope somebody sits in front of her actual grief one day, the way I sat in front of hers, and doesn’t turn it into a witty eight hundred words for a Tuesday deadline. Though, apparently, that’s exactly what I’ve just done, so perhaps the lesson hasn’t fully landed yet. I’m working on it. London’s not really built for that kind of working on things, but I’m trying anyway, one small shelf of records at a time.