Why we need it, what it does for us (brings us bliss), now is the time for it.
When was the last time you looked at the art on your walls? If not recently, perhaps you should mix it up - move things, add a new piece so the others look different in relation to the new one.
And look more intensely. As one gallery member says: “Many times my day has been enhanced considerably by seeing something new in the same work of art that I pass by everyday.”
Art connects us to the world, to other people, to ideas. This is a hugely complex process that can also seem simple: it comes down to seeing as keenly as possible and with as much intelligence as we can muster.
Through art, we learn more about the world. Art suggests a kind of understanding, of play, of dream. We often need the timeless entity of an artwork to maintain a resting place - a place for contemplation - a place that is part of the outside world but that originated in one human being’s consciousness. All an artist can do is suggest - but a good artist can evoke feeling and emotion through his/her art.
If you’re in a state of visual awareness, your life is like, big-time different. To dwell in seeing and revel in sunny days and cloudy ones too is equally revelatory when we really look and see. Art sensitizes a large number of cells in the visual cortex of our brains (this is my speculation on how art-bliss works). As we develop our seeing and love of art all these visual thought-memories can be accessible to us, bringing us visual joy and a state of existential pleasure. This is precious and priceless and personal in the response it brings; it doesn’t matter what the market place is doing or what the “artworld” thinks. What matters is how much you love the work. Individual viewers put the value on individual artworks.
Of course, art has an economic side as does any human product of work that moves from one person to another in a marketplace. (See the recent Feb16, 2009 article, “Making the Case for Culture as an Economic Force,” in The New York Times and future blogs here.)
The word “artwork” or the phrase “work of art” implies energy and labor. The basic material is the awareness of the artist and viewer joined together. Here’s an example of “connection.” As a friend puts it: “Art conveys the unsaid, and when the artist skillfully guides the viewer’s mind into the artist’s mystery, that beautiful connection happens.”
Which is not to say all is sweetness and light. To appreciate the peace, calm, and serenity of art, you have to acknowledge the savagery and terror. As Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in the Duino Elegies “...for beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror... Every angel is terrifying.
Martha Rock Keller
27 February, 2009
"Among seekers of truth, painters perhaps come closest to discovering the secret of the balance of forces in the universe, and hence of man's fulfillment. That is why they are so important in modern life...Painters know that material needs are relative, and that the satisfactions of the mind are absolute"
-Jean Renoir, Renoir, My Father, p.395
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