What’s the cure for everything, fans of the evening news want to know. Mostly it seems the cure for anything comes in the form of a pill, prescription or otherwise. Disease or unease, either way, ingest a chemical. On the other hand, it might not work for everything. The major malady of the day is shrinking attention-span, fractured thinking, and the creeping dread that the big drop on the digital roller coaster isn’t going to have a bottom, everyone starting to scream. The world speeds up, cascades of photographs flicker across the screen leaving a montage in afterimage, and every ad, every cause, every political agenda dive bombs the nervous system just to be heard -- it’s gotten brutal, people living in individual fortresses, with multiple locks and barbed wire over the door peeping out hardly seeing nothing at all.
Paintings, on the other hand, are slow. They can’t even be seen at the 1.5 second pace of average visitors to a museum, although they do provide benches for those who care to spend more time. Some paintings have more to say the longer you look, and simply slowing down to consider them can feel like meditation to the modern citizen. This effect becomes compounded when art is owned and seen each day, at home or in the office. As the 3-D printed, pressure extruded, recycled composite material reality we inhabit becomes more fluid, more uniform, more interchangeable, a made-by-hand object that remains unchanged for all the time you own it becomes increasingly unique, and can provide great comfort as time goes by.
Not all art will bring relief, quacks abound, but there are a few simple tests. For one thing, a copy of anything won’t have much potency, doesn’t matter how ‘accurate‘ it is. A vital component of an original work of art is the artist’s actual involvement, intention and execution, and technology can’t reproduce that part. Beyond that the artist has to invest their own life history, their vision, their total effort -- the reason it’s called art. Something funny happens. Those elements remain and radiate from the wall, becoming more noticed with passing time, more intimate and friendly with each decade. Your own life experience will guide you, and picking the right art is automatic.
The right art for you causes chemical interactions in your brain which you’ll experience as recognition, understanding, undifferentiated pleasure, you won’t know why. Your tastes may change, but the best guide will still be those sacred molecules ready to light up your cerebrum when the art you like comes into view. The art you eventually own will become your stepping stones across the digital tide washing around us, slowing you down, stretching your attention span, making you feel like a human again.
Paintings, on the other hand, are slow. They can’t even be seen at the 1.5 second pace of average visitors to a museum, although they do provide benches for those who care to spend more time. Some paintings have more to say the longer you look, and simply slowing down to consider them can feel like meditation to the modern citizen. This effect becomes compounded when art is owned and seen each day, at home or in the office. As the 3-D printed, pressure extruded, recycled composite material reality we inhabit becomes more fluid, more uniform, more interchangeable, a made-by-hand object that remains unchanged for all the time you own it becomes increasingly unique, and can provide great comfort as time goes by.
Not all art will bring relief, quacks abound, but there are a few simple tests. For one thing, a copy of anything won’t have much potency, doesn’t matter how ‘accurate‘ it is. A vital component of an original work of art is the artist’s actual involvement, intention and execution, and technology can’t reproduce that part. Beyond that the artist has to invest their own life history, their vision, their total effort -- the reason it’s called art. Something funny happens. Those elements remain and radiate from the wall, becoming more noticed with passing time, more intimate and friendly with each decade. Your own life experience will guide you, and picking the right art is automatic.
The right art for you causes chemical interactions in your brain which you’ll experience as recognition, understanding, undifferentiated pleasure, you won’t know why. Your tastes may change, but the best guide will still be those sacred molecules ready to light up your cerebrum when the art you like comes into view. The art you eventually own will become your stepping stones across the digital tide washing around us, slowing you down, stretching your attention span, making you feel like a human again.
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