There are many forms of art, and many ways for art to enter our lives.
Of the forms, to name a few, there is visual art including drawing and painting, sculpture, prose, music, poetry... the list of art forms is surprisingly long.
And then, to increase my fascination, in each of the many forms, there are many genres.
"Genre" is itself complex.
Genre is a word of French origin, and in French it means kind, type or sort, and in that way it has a broader meaning in French than it does in English where its meaning is limited to kinds of art. It's a term we don't hear everyday so it isn't commonly heard. Since it only defines forms of art, to use a modern expression, saying "genre" can seem a little bougie. Just saying "genre" is a tad difficult for English speakers. Speaking only of my own experience, even though I am fluently bilingual, there is always a moment's hesitation before I utter the word in English. It's one of those pronunciation challenges.
Narrowing the focus to visual art, there are many ways that art enters our lives.
We see it constantly. It's on billboards, in commercials, in graffiti. Logos are visual art. Clothing often displays art.
We buy it, directly and indirectly. When we buy actual art, we typically display it by hanging it on our walls. We come to collect it in that way.
We also collect it by photographing the art we see. Sometimes the photographed art shows up in our screensavers. My art screensaver currently displays close to 900 works of art. If I owned all those works, the aggregate value would be millions, and millions and millions of dollars.
But, at least in my case, it's not about the money.
So what is it about art?
Today I came across a couple of long articles in the New York Times. The articles were about art shows currently offered in New York City. One show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is titled "Krasner and Pollock" and it focuses on the abstract expressionism genre made famous by Jackson Pollock back in the 1940's and 50's. Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock's wife, also a renowned artist, was for a number of years overshadowed by her husband. The other article is about a show at the Javits Center for New York City's Art Week and that show features works by 12 contemporary artists.
The long-standing joke that I have heard more times than I can count, that is usually told when people see an abstract expressionist work is "oh, I could do that!"
That's a photo of Autumn Rhythm: Number 30, a work done by Jackson Pollock in 1950. It's the kind of art that can often trigger that joke. Fair enough, I get it.
And yet... I would love to have that work hanging in our home. Not because it might be worth over a hundred million dollars, but because it's complex, its colours are complex. Though it's just static paint on a flat canvas, it's full of complex motion. The complexity invites me to stare and stare and stare. in that way it comes to spark emotion.
And there you have it. Visual art can inspire us. It often offers sights and scenes that, but for the particular work, we would not have experienced. In a way, it is constantly opening windows and doors in our minds. Every day the hundreds of works of art in my screensaver cycle randomly on my computer monitors. I pay attention. Not always, but often. Every now and then I see an aspect of a work that I am seeing for the first time. The works are expressions of many genres, produced by artists of many schools, from 18th and 19th century portraiture, to impressionism, to abstract expressionism, and funky Pop Art that I have seen in forms ranging from paintings, to prints, to statues. Almost all the walls of our home display art. It's not about the value of the collection, it's about the beauty and variety of the work. The works speak to me in the same way as those in my screensaver speak to me. But there's more, much more. Each work on our walls has a context, a space in my memory: where I was when I acquired the work; where I was when our parents acquired a work. A number of works we own were inherited from our parents. Some of those works cast my mind back decades and decades and summon deeply meaningful memories. I look at a work, and I see and hear family members who are no longer with us, and yet I hear the words they spoke and the unique tones of their voices. It's as if 1966 was yesterday.
That work has a place in my life that is unique and full of meaning. It's 1987. I am leaving a job where I am unhappy, and returning to a law firm I know will be a great fit. That shift involved a number of walks back and forth from one office to the other. Along the way there was a building under construction surrounded by hoarding. That work of art was graffiti on the fence wall. It caught my eye time, and time again. It seemed to express precisely what I was experiencing in that space and time. As I approached the graffiti on a Friday, I saw that someone had stapled a whole bunch of posters on it, completely obscuring it. The next day, I grabbed my camera and a pair of pliers and hopped on my bike. I took great care in extracting the staples and discarding the posters. I took a bunch of pictures of the graffiti. When I told my father the story and showed him the pictures he reached out to Arnold, a close friend of his who managed an important graphic art studio. Arnold took my modest photo and blew it up to the original size of the graffiti. I was blown away. That work of art has had a prominent place on my office walls over time, and to this day. In that way it is likely the most prominent art I own. It is the most prominent work in part because it is the one I see most often. As you can see it even physically dominates the hundreds of works in my screensaver. Oddly, it only occurred to me as I wrote this, that since it is also in my screensaver, from time to time it even dominates itself. I am certain that the original work was obliterated not that long after I took the picture when the construction was completed and the hoarding was taken down. I often wonder how the artist would react if he or she knew their work had been preserved and honoured in this way.
