visiting the zoo -- art in a museum

The difference between seeing art in the museum and art in someone’s home is similar to the difference between seeing wild animals at the zoo or roaming free, lions in an artificial habitat vs squirrels in the backyard. One informs the other, and it’s not difficult to imagine the caged cat would trade its fangs to be like the squirrel, living its authentic life. The art museum is also an instructional institution and should cover the gamut of what can be done with paint from the gothic up through the sudden rise of the renaissance, witness to rationality displacing the medieval mind, and forward to the non-objective irrationality of modern times. Drifting through the galleries it’s possible to let the gravity of your own interest guide you to the period and the style that most speaks to you.

This is information to take home and to look for among the artists who paint in your area. Anywhere up on a wall is the authentic home of art where it can participate in family life and recount it all years later when you’re old. Finding the appropriate art for your outlook and lifestyle is an automatic process and doesn’t require special knowledge. Just look at all the art you come across until a painting looks back at you, an eerie feeling at first and almost always a surprise. The piece you finally buy may or may not be tame, depends on the artist, but it’s probably willing to make friends for just a little attention now and then.

It will be a sad world when all of the wild animals have gone extinct except those bred in captivity, and when all the art worth having has been hung in museums. It’s good to remember that Rembrandt wouldn’t be happy in your humble house, and worth more than the entire neighborhood who could sleep at night, but the painting that was made in spite of having a full-time job just a few miles away could have just as much to say, maybe more, to someone like you.

There are three parties necessary for the practice of art. There are those who make it, those who buy and own it, and third are the fair-minded brokers who facilitate the exchange. Everyone else, all the administrators and experts along with the million dollar charade of stupidly extravagant wealth, aren’t really required. Somehow they’ve wedged themselves between the direct and universal expression of visual art and the appetite of average people for human connection and individual aspiration. Art as a vital component of daily living belongs up on the wall in houses where it can influence the lives of everyday people, and make the entire community more pleasant for everyone.

science and art -- are they compatible

Scientists claim they discovered the “gate of consciousness”
published tuesday in Cell Reports, “The findings reveal a gateway in the cortex where sensory information has to pass through in order to reach its destination (conscious access).” Co-author Zirui Huang is a research investigator at the University of Michigan Medical School. 

In summary, “Conscious access to sensory information is likely gated at a site intermediate between primary sensory and transmodal association cortices but the structure responsible remains unknown. We report results from functional neuroimaging performed to determine the neural correlates of conscious access using a volitional mental imagery task, a report paradigm not confounded by motor behavior.” 

They’re trying to say that out of all the stuff going on in front of you all the time you're only paying attention to some of it because something elevates it to consciousness. By some mechanism it crosses a threshold and you notice a ball bouncing into the street or the smell of coffee in a morning cafe. These scientists used a big magnetic resonancing machine to find out where in the brain that happens. No real application of course, pure science, but it’s interesting because artists have been searching for that same spot since way before what we consider knowable history.

Their technique is slightly different and it begins with a blank surface, flat and smooth. On it they create a design using colors in contrasts and intervals, and their purpose is to find that button in your head and push it. From all the way back to the beginning, the important thing about a work of art is its gravitation pull on the attention and awareness of the viewer, and its price at auction doesn’t enter in and even subject matter is secondary. I feel fairly confident the vast majority of all artists of all times, everywhere, would back me up on this assertion, we family.  

“The artist is someone who knows how to touch the pressure points in the humanistic mind.” I overheard that in a diner before the long dark road east out of kansas city, and he must have been talking about that spot.