We’ve all done it before. You walk into a museum, see a red square and say: “I could have made that.” But the person who does that isn’t making an error in judgement. They’re thinking that the work of art is the red square, when it isn’t at all. The work of art is getting that red square to hang somewhere in the first place. And chances are, you could not have done that.
Or would not, more likely. Coming out of college I’m realizing that there’s two kinds of people out there, when it comes to my interests. There’s the people who make things, and are willing to do whatever it takes (or make whatever it takes) in order to get something out there. And there’s the people who spend more time in the process of creating than getting it out there. They’re the people who worry about their work getting sullied by a dirty game and a dirty world.
I used to be like this, and hell in many ways I still am. And that’s why I’m learning to admire that red square on the wall.
If only in art museums there were panels next to each painting saying how it got there. Not saying “Jackson Pollock here is playing with the dichotomy of yadda yadda” but that said “Jackson Pollock dropped out of art school and met this chick at a party.” In order to start thinking this way you have to stop thinking about art as being divine, but only once art is relegated to the human world can you become an artist. And the artist is, as Nabokov always said, a great magician. And magicians admire a trick more once they understand it.
I hear people saying shit about creators all the time. “She just slept with so and so” or “he was born to rich parents.” But I know people born rich who still don’t know how to use their opportunities, or who have all the strings but never have the gaul to pull. Art isn’t ephemeral, Platonic and metaphysical: it’s about survival. Like any good virus your work has to propagate itself. It has to go viral, you might say.
History makes everything seem like destiny, because that’s the historian’s art. But if Shakespeare were alive today, he’d be selling scripts in Hollywood, and sucking up to whoever he needed to suck up to just like he sucked up to royalty in the past. But great artists can answer the political needs as well as the artistic ones: these are in alignment if only look the right way.
So I’m saying it now: come turn my milk to gall, you goddamn demonic spirits of Twitter and Instagram. If I have to write a million click-baiting travel articles before I get to write a real thought I’ll do it. It’s all well and good keeping art pure, but that’s an aristocratic trick as far as I can tell. I can’t say I see much in red squares, but hell if I’m gonna criticize.
this is real this is fiction 