I am sitting in a café in the oldest art space in the UK feeling spent. The Bluecoat’s current exhibition ‘Just Browsing’ has been on for five months and I’ve caught it in its final week, though I don’t think I should have bothered. I am not sure the gallery was that bothered when they put it together; I don’t know if half the artists were arsed either — and now two teenagers have sat down behind me on their Easter holidays and I hear one of them say to the other, ‘I’m sure there is a point in modern art but going in there hurt me. That hurt me a little when that space could be used for so many things.’

I get it. The exhibition is a shop. Stripped back with gaps on shelves like a closing down sale, David Shrigley’s got scarves hanging up for £25. Lou Miller and Felicity Rowley are selling minimal cushions for £120 and £150 a pop. There are t-shirts by Bruce Asbestos, Chester Tenneson and Ben Saunders. The press release is calling them ‘worn artworks.’ Ffion Evans has made a pile of ‘holdables’ at 18 quid each that resemble felted Christmas decorations you’d buy in Anthropologie. It puts me in such a bad mood that I think those teenagers looking for something free to do on a Friday afternoon don’t sound melodramatic at all.

I am close to apologising to them on the gallery’s behalf. We should leave exhibitions with heads full of culture, not that dropped-shoulder, drained feeling of leaving a department store. I am tired because I saw products, not art. Art is ideas. Art is something someone made because they wanted to; because there’s an instinct, an urge, a real interest, a need for creative relief. If you are psychically driven to sell objects, go on The Apprentice. Dragon’s Den. Go to all the commercial galleries London is made of. Bluecoat is a Liverpool city centre art space in the middle of monoliths like Primark, Tesco, Sports Direct and Lush. I need it to be an oasis from a world that makes me think about money every second of the day but instead it pushed me further towards it.

And this feeling is dragging me off my chair when a friend walks through the foyer and stops for a chat, and I learn it’s not just me and the teenagers who feel cheated. But we’re catching up and she says she’s studying Marketing, and at the moment she’s trying to get her head around commodification. I physically point back at the gallery, where we’ve been given a five month exhibition that could have been a pop-up, feeling like a five hour meeting that could have been an email.

Listen, I hope £18 is a huge mark-up on whatever a holdable actually is, even if it looks like the bean bag you’d throw at your mate’s head in primary school, but put it in a gift shop. I reckon I’d be putting 10% less pressure on the Bluecoat if Liverpool still had a trail of independent spaces where I could roll through the funny wilderness artists grow when they’re left to act on their urges; where a show like this would make more sense, but the prices even less. Marketing Friend tells me this exhibition isn’t Bluecoat’s brand. She’s right. Bluecoat has a legacy of radical programming but there’s nothing radical about roleplaying Oliver Bonas.

Between the products, there were a few bits that weren’t for sale, but that were allowed to be touched. I am convinced making it a tactile experience is actually just conceptual framing to excuse staging a shop in one of the country’s funded National Portfolio Organisations. When I started this review by saying it felt like everyone was phoning it in: there were scraps of fabric sewn together with some stuffing by Sufea Mohamad Noor titled ‘Squishies for my Cats.’ They were so far from anything I would expect to be shown in a major art gallery, I had to wonder if the artist’s fee had been a smack.

There was also a film by Ivy Kalungi, whose sculptural work I have felt stunned by in the past, but I watched her 17 minute film on Black hair salons waiting for it to go in, wanting it to get sculptural in the editing even, but it never did. Plus, footage dropped in was blurry; the digital artefacting got distracting; microphones were too far away or too close and blowing out the sound. The conversation was so surface-level, it was another artist film in the ‘look, I found her, she exists!’ trend of recent art history, packaged for a gallery who can’t even be trusted with that. This is why I said it seemed the curation didn’t care either. Curation should have cared for this work better until it felt done.

But man, I still can’t believe they made the Bluecoat into a shop. Paving over paradise and all that. My friend said goodbye, and when she left, I realised the teenagers behind were sat in silence. After a while, one of them apologised to the other and said she felt out of it. When we were their age, we ran into these spaces every weekend and then slowed down because we were so confused and overwhelmed and giddy with the art we ran into, we had to stop to make sense of it. We left not able to talk about anything else. But we all know shopping. There’s nothing to make sense of here.

In the last days of this exhibition, I hate how much this feels like a closing down sale for the Bluecoat itself. I just hope it isn’t a sign of things to come.

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