Questions of universal size
in a short blog post
Oh, ye angels dancing on the head of a pin,
Went to visit Manchild at college this weekend. Saw the above statue. Wondered who created it. Engendered some deep conversations.
Manchild thinks the universe is art.
I think that art requires a viewer. (This is controversial. Feel free to discuss this.)
Any great artist shows reality to an audience in a new way. But if no one ever sees the resultant work - is it art?
Let’s say you braid hair clippings into strange animal shapes. No one ever knows this. No one sees you do it. You tell people you are going to the small studio behind your house to nap. You come out refreshed and say you were napping. Before you die you burn them all. Then after a day of this you clean up all the residue and air the smell out of the house. You tell no one and never make another animal from hair. Are you an artist? A former artist? What are you?
What if you did this for sixty two years? But no one ever saw or suspected and the work was destroyed without a soul knowing about its existence. Artist?
However: if you braid hair clippings into strange animal shapes and do NOT destroy them, and only after your death shelves and shelves of your animal menagerie are discovered, then - LO! - you are still quite a strange person but now suddenly you are an artist. An artist who worked in secret. Because on one level, the audience is what makes you an artist. Even if it’s just your cousin Bob who wants to redo the house. He’s still going to say “my cousin was a weirdo,” when he describes the house he just cleaned up, but there’s a likelihood he will also add something about “wanted to be an artist” or “was an artist” or “never knew…”
When talking about artists who no one knew were artists, Emily Dickinson frequently comes up, since Emily Dickinson could have been remembered as a housewife, but her sister decided after Emily’s death that the poetry should be shared outside of “the small circle of family and friends that knew she was a poet.”
My point? She was always a poet, she was just a poet with limited reach, and then her sister fixed that.
All of us are secretly creators, aren’t we? Are we all therefore artists?
THINGS TO READ BY ME:
I went to the movies at a new movie theater and wrote about the actual theater, not the movie. It was that good. How I fell in love with the movies again. The article got picked up by the Medium publication “Life & the Performing Arts.”
They also picked up this article (which I also wrote) called Theater is Reawakening in NYC.
Silver Webb’s All Hallows' Eve: The Thinning Veil (13 Tales of Halloween) is now available on Amazon through this link. And if you like to taste it first, here’s an excerpt of “Checking Out” that they published online (trigger warning: denial of serious health issues and the excerpt ends rather abruptly!)
