I LOVE Campbelltown Arts Centre. I don't always understand it, but I do love it.

My family and I wandered down on Sunday to check out the latest exhibition, What I Think About When I Think About Dancing, so I thought I'd have an amateur crack at being an art critic this week.

It is billed as a ``contemporary inter-disciplinary project that investigates the shifting boundaries of dance/visual art practices''. Sounds impressive.

But did I like it? Dunno.

Art is supposed to flow over you ... and I think it still must be flowing over me.

I try to catch every local exhibition. I love some of them, I'm left unmoved by others, and I'm left scratching my head over a few like this one.

(Maybe it's because my own experience of artistic dance interpretation is limited to the Peter Garrett impersonations I used to do at boozy backyard parties back in the '80s?)

Hopefully it's not that I'm too stodgy! I do have eclectic tastes in art, from Tom Roberts and Arthur Boyd to Tracey Moffatt, and I do strive to appreciate art that I don't fully understand.

How many of you remember the drama when Whitlam bought Blue Poles? When I saw it with my own eyes I thought the painting was great. I don't know exactly what was going on with Jackson Pollock but I'm sure that something was.

I guess with art I just want to see a journey, a spark, a pain, an exhilaration. I don't want to be left feeling ripped off because an Emperor in New Clothes tells me that a lazy blue square on a lazy blank canvas is a myriad of emotions worth $1.8 million. Bulldust.

Anyway, back to our local exibition. I did like some of it, particularly Kate Murphy's Count Me In digital video.

Maybe I just need to see it all for a second time. Why not check it out yourself?

We still might not ``get it'' second time around, but that's sort of nice. We're surrounded every day by the banality of US sitcom laugh tracks, the dopey knee-jerk reaction of talkback radio, and the rigid self-righteousness of ``do-as-I-say-or-else'' fundamentalists.

I love it that we can have something different, mysterious and difficult to understand in our gallery.

Long may we be challenged.

jmcgill@fairf axmedia.com.au