Today I had the great opportunity to visit the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan. A friend of mine worked for a corporate sponsor of the museum and could get a few extra tickets. The building itself is rather unusual, built by Frank Lloyd Wright sometime in the interwar period. It is primarily a large spiral which widens as it departs from the earth. The exhibits are organized along the procession of the spiral, and the floor is nearly perpetually slanted. I found this to be somewhat irritating after a while in the museum, but the content of the museum was somewhat spectacular.
I use the word “spectacular” in its literal sense, i.e. to relay the fact that I found the contents of the museum to contain a quality of spectacle. There were pieces with great variety in origin, medium, style, and era, as one would expect from a museum with the reputation of the Guggenheim. Because my brain is irritatingly categorial, I found myself misguidedly embarking on the folly that is trying to figure out what it is that is characteristic of these pieces. I found myself wondering what it is that held these pieces together, what they have in common. In short, I found myself wondering what it is that makes art art.
Certain things are almost certainly art. For instance, if someone stretches canvas over a wooden frame and slathers it with a fluid that is pigmented as to (ideally) take the outline or figure of something recognizable or even appreciable, it is rather undeniable considered art. Even when this sort of thing is done poorly, it’s still considered art. While there were many of these, including wonderful pieces by Manet, Picasso, Degas, Klee, and many other famous and notable artists, it is not these pieces that make me wonder what art indeed is. It was the weird sculptures, the scribbles on notebook paper, the photographs that don’t seem to depict anything, that make me wonder. And I’m sure that everyone has had this experience. They’ve been in a museum, and they’ll run across something that is so simplistic or so moronic that they’ll have that moment of wondering that surely, this is not art.
This is where I’d present an answer to this question, if not for a small problem, which is that I don’t have one. The idea I’m currently fooling around in the backseat with is that art is somewhat spectral. Everything has artistic qualities, and the applicability of those qualities is what determines whether or not something is considered to be art. For instance, I know someone who I consider to be a very beautiful human being. I often find myself talking note of the placement of their steps, the sweep of their legs, the rhythm of their gait. These are certainly things that have artistic qualities, but I think it would be offensively reductionistic to label them as art. They’re far more than that. They’re a human being that experiences laughter and frustration, who has snarky comments to make and opinions on religion and politics. To simply reduce them into the kind of interactive spectacle that art often is would be a akin to pirate only using his gold as a ballast. Because they are so much more than art. Indeed, I believe that everything is more than art, even things that are considered to be, well, art. One could use the Mona Lisa as a frisbee if they really wanted to, or the Starry Night cut from its frame could be a cape for a child. These are not only things that it could be, it is things that they are. The Mona Lisa, in its current state, IS a poor frisbee. Michelangelo's Pieta IS an unwieldy paperweight. I think that instead of focusing on sorting things, as I tried to, we ought to go through life looking for art as it manifests in the things that we see every day. The sunlight streaking through the clouds, the excited zoomies of a dog, the gentle wave of a blade of grass as cars rush by on the interstate. Art is not something that is categorized, or presented. Art is something that is found. I had a maxim in high school, which may and or may not explain my poor decisions to those of you who knew me back then. The maxim was that “every pizza is a personal pizza if you believe in yourself”, and I think that this embodies the spirit of potentiality. The potentiality of art is something that is already fulfilled. All that remains is for us to see it.
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