one world -- separate planets

I proposed in a previous post that humans all inhabited different planets depending how they imprinted on the world as they found it, the world itself being open-ended and full of possibility. This time I offer examples of two different planets residing in exactly the same orbit as reflected in the points of view of two contemporary writers concerning the same subject, paintings in the western canon from hundreds of years ago. In this case it’s handy that the traditional linage of western art allows so direct a comparison, and when seen from this long perspective it turns out to be a telescope on our own times too.

One dispatch came from the CNN news wire and was titled, ‘One of the last privately-owned Botticelli portraits could sell for over $80M.’ In it the ‘head of Sotheby's Old Master painting department said that it could "very well be the next painting to surpass the rarified $100 million threshold." In doing so, "Young Man Holding a Roundel" would become the first painting to achieve a nine-figure sum at auction since Claude Monet's "Haystacks," which fetched over $110 million at Sotheby's New York last year.’ This report comes from a planet of avarice and greed where people are aggressive and mean, and where no matter what anyone has it’s never enough and art is just another thing to have.

The other, oddly enough side by side in the same media, came from the New York Times Magazine, 9-23, written by someone who had gone on a pilgrimage to visit the paintings of Caravaggio in the little churches up and down the coast of Italy where he traded his talent for board, beans, and sanctuary. The trip was summed up this way, ‘A painting made by someone in a distant country hundreds of years ago, an artist’s careful attention and turbulent experience sedimented onto a stretched canvas, leaps out of the past to call you — to call you — to attention in the present, to drive you to confusion by drawing from you both a sense of alarm and a feeling of consolation, to bring you to an awareness of your own self in the act of experiencing something that is well beyond the grasp of language, something that you wouldn’t wish to live without.’ This planet has more parks, and the people are friendlier and more humane.