Another entry ending in self-exile

Dear diary,

What is the difference between a finished artwork and a preliminary sketch? Can a doodle be a masterpiece? These questions strike me as having to do with the concepts of time and intention. What’s your opinion? Or perhaps I should ask: Does it even matter what you or I think about this? Yes and no. Explain. No. Well does it at least matter that you refused to explain? Yes. How so? It made me seem elusive; so you intensified your focus upon my mysteriousness and ended up falling in love with me – now, twenty years after your having questioned me in your entry’s initial paragraph, you and I remain happily married: we bore a child together who shares my elusiveness and your artistic bent. Do you predict that our babe will become the next Minimax Dadamax? No. How come? Tho he loves creating art, he sucks at it. But if, as they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then isn’t your dismissal of him simply your “two cents” on the matter, with which futurity might disagree? Sure, but who died and made futurity king? Hmmmmm. Futurity is ever-changing; moreover: have you ever seen it agree with its own darn self? I get your point: If futurity is not the present as well as the past, then futurity never arrives; therefore: to hell with it. That’s not my point at all, but I must now leave you – I need to paint our bedroom, then cut and install the baseboards – I can’t just sit here lollygagging all day in imaginary conversation with you bloggers. Alright, thanks for chatting; I guess I’ll return to writing my uninspired entry. Sayonara [kiss] . . .

OK, now where was I? Ah, that’s it: I was asking stupid questions. Do the Sistine Chapel ceiling and the Mona Lisa portrait possess more value than your child’s crayon colorings? If yes OR no: why!? It’s a cliché now, to point at a work of abstract art from the modern era and remark: “My kid could do that!” insinuating that the work was not invested with sufficient blank. Is it positive or negative criticism, to note such innocence or unsophistication? Why doesn’t your child create artworks that rival the creations of, say, Paul Klee, whose stuff I’ve heard described as primitive and childlike. (I’m a great admirer of Klee, for the record.) Now that two-pronged adage from Oscar Wilde comes to mind – it’s always worth repeating:

The nineteenth-century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.

The nineteenth-century dislike of Romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.

For “Romanticism”, could we swap the term “Abstract art”? But what’s funny is that, today, about a century after Wilde, people have grown so familiar with abstractions (or rather art as mere decor, as accent pieces subservient to the surrounding furniture) that some prefer it to anything even vaguely representational. The thought seems to be: the less thought, the better. One guy I know, a successful businessman and art collector, went so far as to prohibit anything other than abstract art in his workhouse – his employee handbook reads:

Thou shalt not make any likeness of any thing. (Exodus 20:4)

Also I recall flipping thru an Art History book, one rainy day when I was younger, and I came to a place where there were drippy paintings displayed on the right page, and surrealist works on the left; and my sister came by and looked on, and I asked her if she liked anything that she saw, and she said “This one and that one are good,” (the abstract works) “but I don’t like any of the pictures that resemble real things.” My sister is decidedly not a fan of surrealism. She explained later that she doesn’t like how those artists take images from reality and tweak them, stylize them, position them in a new background, or make things float. So maybe we could call this: the rage of Caliban seeing his own dream in a glass.

So those two cents are from my biological sister. Now allow me to mention my sister-in-law. My sister-in-law (that is, my sweetheart’s bio-sibling) attended Baptist Christian Fundamentalist College. And what was her major? Her major was art. This fascinates me. You should talk with her: she’ll tell you that they didn’t study anything abstract, no dada no surrealism, nothing modern or postmodern – she has zero knowledge of Picasso or Matisse, let alone Duchamp (to this day, she cannot see why I’m in love with this holy trinity) – no, but the students at the Baptist Christian Fundamentalist College were instructed exclusively in representational art (the only kind of art prohibited by the above-quoted Second Commandment), and, in the textbooks, all the nudes had black bars superimposed over their grace notes.

And they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons. (Genesis 3:7)

And those members of the body, which we think to be less honourable, upon these we bestow more abundant honour; and our uncomely parts have more abundant comeliness. (1 Corinthians 12:23)

At this point in my wandering (as usual, I’m letting my thoughts meander without any plan, just to pass the time), having mentioned the notion of the nude, I realize that I was moved to muse along these lines after reading my author-friend M.P. Powers’ account of his experience in taking an art class. That’s what writing should do: trigger further thoughts. When you’re sitting alone and your mind is relaxed, one thought leads to another; and it’s the same with weblog entries: one spawns the next — because each individual mind, which contains endless impulses of its own, is itself an impulse in the super-mind of ETERNITY. Or feel free to trade that last term for God/Luck/Doom . . . could we even say: ART? I’ve always suspected that we living creatures are artworks within artworks. That’s why artistic creation thrills me, and I assume that’s also why the priests claimed that God forbade it (in his Command Number Two). Any act of creation is an echo of divinity.

He created man in his own image . . . Yahweh God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. (Genesis 1:27 & 2:7)

So God was, at once, the first sculptor and the first nude model. And the resultant humans were the first artworks: moving statues. Actually, according to the story, Adam was the initial draft, and Eve was the first revision: “she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” (2:23) Now I want to think about the modern art world’s notions of copies and originals, but first, here’s a quote from Ruin the Sacred Truths by Harold Bloom, regarding the above tale from Genesis:

. . . what was Adam, what were we, when the image was still unbreathed, when the wet clay still did not have the breath of Yahweh living in it? The first violator of the Second Commandment was Yahweh himself, so that the Commandment says: “Do not presume to be too much like me.” But this is inevitably ironic, since Yahweh molded Adam in his own image, a molding which says implicitly: “Be like me” and then adds: “Breathe with my breath.” Yahweh himself wanders here between truth and meaning.

In the modern art marketplace, there is this concept of ownership: one doesn’t simply behold art and allow one’s thoughts to be augmented, enflamed, inspired by the act of attending to the idea – no, one desires to possess the physical object itself: the canvas on which the image is painted. (This, by the way, is why TEXT, my preferred medium, is undervalued by the commercial marketplace – literature is almost wholly mental, spiritual, that is: non-physical: only certain bindings or printings of books, when rare enough, can be sold for high prices; but, to the market, the words and ideas within such books remain unimportant.) So, when you’re bidding millions, billions, or trillions of dollars for a painted canvas, you’re supposed to ask “Is this the original artwork, or is it a copy?” For instance, Sheila, the armed guard at our local museum, assured me that an original painting by Leonardo da Vinci will be worth more than a copy of that same work by some lesser-known journeyman. I guess there’s always the exception, like: if da Vinci were to make a copy of the journeyman’s original, then the copy might attain a higher value (things are only worth what people are willing to pay for them); but the general rule seems to be: “Originals are good; copies are bad.” I don’t mean to harp on this concept too heavily; I only mention it to shine its light (or cast its shade) on the biblical account of God’s molding of his self-portrait Man-Woman. We’ve already established that Adam and Eve are artworks; now I ask: Is Adam an “original” or is he a “copy”? Technically, he’s a copy of God, so God is the original. Then is Eve just a copy of a copy? or should we consider her the “final draft”, the “director’s cut”, which satisfies the author’s intentions and is therefore superior? Eve, the improved original, the perfected masterpiece: God’s presentation of himself as he wishes he were, without blemish. Like a scar-faced mobster using a photo-edit app to apply the “soft skin” filter to his selfie.

Art and ownership. Since we’ve arrived at the crux, here’s a passage from “Nottingham and the Mining Countryside” by D.H. Lawrence:

Now the love of flowers is a very misleading thing. Most women love flowers as possessions, and as trimmings. They can’t look at a flower, and wonder a moment, and pass on. If they see a flower that arrests their attention, they must at once pick it, pluck it. Possession! A possession! Something added on to me! And most of the so-called love of flowers today is merely this reaching out of possession and egoism: something I’ve got: something that embellishes me. Yet I’ve seen many a collier stand in his back garden looking down at a flower with that odd, remote sort of contemplation which shows a real awareness of the presence of beauty. It would not even be admiration, or joy, or delight, or any of those things which so often have a root in the possessive instinct. It would be a sort of contemplation: which shows the incipient artist.

Contemplation . . . the awareness of beauty – this I call harmonious existence: this is what we should be striving for and incentivizing. But instead we live in that same old chaos of the sun, the nothing-new mania of ownership. That’s why it’s hard for people to distinguish sublime art from the mundane, or revolutionary works from what is merely shocking – especially among the so-called avant-garde. The swine can’t sense it, the pearl of great price. For in this market-mad system of possession, everything is relegated to the level of baubles and trinkets: if it sells, it succeeds, and that is all. How is artistic value determined? Forget genius: Ye shall know the worth of a film by its box-office returns. If a movie makes a lot of money on its opening weekend, it’s a success. If a painting can be exchanged for bigtime lucre, it is therefore “fine art”. Before a given creation sells, it’s only a squandering of energy, a curious diversion, some eccentric’s obsession – not one bit useful.

Returning to Eden: if an artwork’s worth is defined as however much Scrooge is willing to pay for it, then, to discover the worth of Adam, we must look to the slave market. This will answer the question that’s burning in everyone’s mind now: Was God a successful artist? For the answer, simply check the retail manual. (There’s a book that contains the recommended price for all noble attempts.) And it turns out that the first human beings were evicted from paradise:

So God banishes his masterwork, the animated sculptures Adam & Eve, and positions at the border of the garden fierce terrifying Cherubs—strange, uncreated beings that predate mankind—plus a flaming sword that spirals in every direction, to block the way to the Tree of Life. (Genesis 3:24)