On Art: An Introduction

This piece is the introduction to a series of essays on art. I started writing a single commentary and realized there was far too much ground to cover, that I would have to break it down into smaller segments. In subsequent essays, I’ll attempt to address the questions raised here as well as some other thoughts that have come up over time. I want to publicly acknowledge “me, your god” for his invaluable assistance and inspiration. Thank you "me." You are one of kind.

Before what was left of her mind was gone, my grandmother, suffering from Alzheimer’s and a lifetime of too much drinking, went through a phase of compulsively writing. She’d write the same notes to herself, over and over again. She’d forget she’d written one the moment it was completed and so she would begin again. She’d scribble on every scrap of paper she could find, these reminders to herself that made no difference because her brain was no longer capable of remembering. But the act of writing gave her some comfort. I think there was something reassuring in the words forming on the paper. I think it was proof of her own existence, of being alive from one moment to the next. I live with the fear that one day my brain will remember what gene pool spawned it and begin its steady and inevitable decline until I can no longer write.

Maybe that’s all art is: proof to ourselves of our own existence. Frida Kahlo painted more than 100 self-portraits. Anais Nin kept two sets of diaries, the way some accountants keep two sets of books, keeping her best writing locked away for fear of discovery, but compelled to write just the same. In “Quiet Days in Clichy” Henry Miller writes about “Carl” but everyone seems to know “Carl” was Henry. Not every artist is intent on self-replication, but putting pen to paper or paint to canvas or creating sound waves from an instrument that carry out into the world tells someone we exist, even it is just us. At its most basic, art is the action of creating, unblurred by commerce, by higher purpose, by even the perception of audience.

But from the time the first men where drawing on the walls of a cave on the left bank of a swamp that became Paris (trust me, it had to be Paris), and another caveman came along and decided there was something about Caveman A’s drawing that Caveman B’s lacked, there has been art and Art. A select handful of critics, gallery owners, curators, and other artists usually make the call. That would seem a considerable power to be wielded by so few, if that power really matters. It does, or at least it should. That it may no longer be the case troubles me.

My daughter is upset about the paucity of art offerings at her school. I tried to explain to her that, yes, there is too little art and too little music being taught in schools these days, brought on by this hysteria over increasing test scores at all costs. She says to me, “What’s wrong with them?!? Don’t they want to see the next Picasso? The next Monet?” She was passionate. To her, this defies all logic and straddles the border between crazy and travesty of justice. I wonder how alone she is in this passion. Do parents care so long as test scores go up? Maybe they are willing to forego that next Picasso if it means higher SAT scores for their kids. Dan Brown sits on the bestsellers lists for months on end. Does the world need another James Joyce if people are content with the ill-spun yarns of a hack who makes them feel intellectual without having to put any work on it?

And what happens -- what society do we build -- if these things no longer matter? Is there a price to be paid? Are we already paying it? I think it means something that those cavemen were drawing on the walls way back when; it says something about humanity and maybe we are losing that. What do we become if we lose the urge to create, to seek out others’ perceptions of the world, to shout at the universe that we exist?

The day came when my grandmother stopped scribbling her notes. She lost her battle with that clinging fog inside her mind. The veil closed over her thoughts, over her memories, over her identity. It took a painfully long time from that day until the day her physical form could no longer function and so stopped and breathed its last. But the truth is that everything that was my grandmother died the day she stopped writing. Everything she was, everything that made her uniquely human, no longer existed. I think about the genetic time bomb that is very likely ticking inside my head and I write. Je me crée donc suis.



Woman with a Guitar by Pablo Picasso, 1913, from the Norton Simon Museum of Art website: www.nortonsimon.org