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Thursday, February 28, 2013

in the end -- what's real

Is your new pickup real? Seems real now. Ten years from now some teenager will be tearing it up, some fast food worker won’t be able to afford oil changes, it’ll be recycled into toasters -- you won’t have it. On down the road how about your couch, your house, your tattoo that you’ll still have but won’t look the same somehow? Lives churn -- jobs, friends, financial conditions move up and down come and go. What doesn’t change, anything?

There’s that little painting you saw a long time ago in a gallery, in a studio, in a restaurant for sale, and it seemed expensive at the time but you liked it. Over the years it’s occupied different walls in different cities, heard happy and sad conversations, seen your family grow and all that while it’s become more familiar, more intimate, and an anytime tunnel back to all those places.

In whatever decades you have left invest in art now, money spent on your own future, and chances are you’ll never check to see if the price has gone up. No scientific studies have been done, but antidotal evidence, uncounted testimonials, and a world dissolving into digital makes the case that art is real, or will be the only thing real someday.

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