writing about art -- missing the moon

The finger pointing at the moon is not the moon, and endless yakking about art isn’t art. If the subject is actual experience of any kind, talking just won’t get you there. Someone with a precise vocabulary, who uses the best word, constructs the most transparent similes, and who also possesses the most insight, the greatest depth of knowledge, can only infer, drop fat hints, offer sideways suggestions. If the listener hasn’t personally had the experience in question, or anything even similar, no amount of talk, books and lectures, college course work is going to inform their understanding, and as a bald-faced irony, may in fact make the experience in question more difficult to comprehend when it comes along. 

It’s a whole other field, writing about art, with its own competitive standards. The art itself represents only the raw ingredients for their smarmy stew of cross-referenced, name-dropping, historically contextual associations, so erudite, so clever. Most of it is fairly thick, offering little mental rewards for every wink and nod untwisted, but it won’t get you any closer to the art if you aren’t there, standing in front of it, deciding for yourself. At that point, a new process takes over, anyway. Art goes straight into your brain, doesn’t wait for translation, and four paragraphs in an art magazine will probably seem inadequate to convey the experience.

Of course, not everyone sees the same, and isn’t that revealing? Do you see what’s actually there, what some expert has told you is there, or maybe what all the people all around you seem to be seeing, don’t leave me out. Art will help you find yourself, and you do it by looking at original art every chance, only reading the paragraph on the wall as an afterthought. Images online are at best just abbreviations, and won’t be part of the survey, since many paintings have attributes that can only be perceived in person. This isn’t tedious scholarship, looking is all that’s necessary, and it could be fun. Art can prove friendly to the mildly interested, becoming more intimate and revealing as looking at everything becomes habit, refrigerator door to sistine chapel.

We meet here, at this written word, about the experience of art, and not about art itself. Billions of dollars move world wide for the monogramed fetishes of social status, and that’s not our concern. Art, even reasonably priced neighborhood art, is experienced best, first of all, by looking with an uncluttered eye, and ultimately by owning art that becomes more valuable with time simply because you wouldn’t want to sell it. The system is simple. Look at enough art to begin to recognize yourself slowly coming to the surface, like someone calling your name in your inner ear. For all the farmers and business types, as well as rank upon rank of art professionals, who have never thought of art this way, just these words can never convince you -- go look at art.