Vision, the faculty you’re using at the moment, is a complex process. Ten percent is light through the eye and the rest is on file, ready with comparisons and associations to tell us what we’re seeing. The blank new-born stare sees everything but understands nothing – just two black dots, probably mommy’s eyes. Everything else is learned by biting, twisting, and pulling until we find out what’s in our crib, and we go on catalogueing all we come across until we grow up and understand everything. That’s how come what we see is heavily conditioned by where we’ve been and what we’ve seen before.
Art really isn’t about what you see. Art is about how you see it. Art operates in the back ninety percent, moving the furniture, polishing the mirrors. All those dusty, taken for granted old visions we hardly pay attention to any more – the different colors of cars in traffic, clouds in the sky, the worn spots on our favorite chair can all fade to grey and begin to disappear if we’re not careful. Familiarity isn’t the only enemy. Modern media chases our desensitized perceptual apparatus right back into our skulls with laser light shows and mind-blowing special effects, so that day to day life becomes a dim lit corridor through endless weeks of salacious advertisements and brutalizing entertainment.
Art is the antidote, the vitamins for our modern deficiencies, the home cooking in our franchised food existence. Original artwork already stands in contrast to a perfect world produced by robots, and its organic genesis makes it chocked full of nutrients inkjet printers can’t help but leave out. Owning a piece or two of original art and seeing them on the way out to work can make the idea of getting home seem better, and make the idea of owning a couple more, maybe from the same artist – maybe something completely different, seem more of a possibility.
