Art Columns Dirt Baby by James Croak WHY JOHNNY CAN'T LOOK AT ART BUT CAN SHOOT A HOLE IN A STRANGER'S HEAD WITH HIS EYES CLOSED It's really not that damn difficult. You walk into a gallery or a museum and you stand in front of an artwork and you look at it. You look at it deeply, fully. Not for one minute but for ten minutes, fifteen, twenty. If you're the kind of person who is able to use your eyes and frontal lobe simultaneously, then you should feel something while looking. Excitement. Repulsion. Joy. Sadness. Nausea. Something. You should think about how the object in front of your eyes relates to your world — or the world of others. In both the former and latter cases, you must be conscious. And herein writhes the problem. Socrates said, "The unexamined life is not worth living."** Thoreau said, "Most men lead lives of quiet desperation." Hal David and Burt Bacharach said, "What's it all about, Alfie?" (POST-MILLENNIUM WRITER CHIC #22: Quote dead, white, male philosophers, et al. [POST-MILLENNIUM WRITER CHIC #68: Use latin abbreviations, e.g., et al., often, i.e., as frequent as the word "terrorism" on Fox TV.]) Their point is: You can't know who you are unless you give yourself up. To what? To the world. That means taking a good look at what's out there — all of what's out there — and realizing you're not separate from it, asshole. You are it. Television (well, except maybe The Sopranos) is a way of avoiding yourself and, consequently, the world. Sooner than you believe, you're going to be dead and all those moments of clarity you might have experienced... all those acts of generosity and kindness you might have performed... all the magnificent extraordinariness of the world... You will have missed it all. Kaput! There is no single meaning to a work of art. It means what you bring to it. The less you have to bring, the less it will mean. So, to you shits who think art has no meaning: You have some serious catching up to do. Get thyself to a gallery, a symphony, a poetry slam, a play... and get conscious. ------------------- **And then Socrates killed himself by drinking hemlock. |
A wide variety of articles and interviews on art artists, and galleries, ranging from topics as diverse as suburban sprawl, racism, graffiti and the environment. |
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