art | David Fekete

When Art Tries to Be Art

When art tries to be art it fails and offends. Novels should be a good story, film should be good drama, music should be rhythmic and melodious, poetry should be the marriage of sound and sense, paintings should be about space, figure, and form, and beauty is important, as is passion in all this.

I saw a movie that began with a woman walking in a graveyard, in the autumn. “Here we go,” I thought. Where could the movie go from there? As the story progressed, it kept cutting back to the woman walking in the graveyard. Something about death intruding into a quite ordinary story. Then there are films with odd camera angles. An odd camera angle that adds to the dramatic tension works. But there are too many films that show odd angles for their own sake, under the mistaken assumption that those camera angles make a mediocre movie into art.

I’ve heard musicians who add performance art into their songs, so that they will be artistic. I saw a singer wrap herself in a blanket with an image of the whole world on it, as she bowed. I wasn’t sure of her point, but I was sure she was trying to be artistic.

I’ve read poets who use precious words, poetic words, so that they would be making poetry. One such word is gossamer.

I saw an artwork that was a spiral cut of paper with great works of art reproduced on it. Something about art being about art.

A good story will be art. A good poem doesn’t need poetic words to be art. A riveting movie will be art. A song that touches the soul and bespeaks humanity’s pain, joy, and passion will be art. A painting you can’t take your eyes off will be art. Art doesn’t need to try to be art.

Discovering Art

Good art affects me like symphonies. Art moves my spirit and evokes states of mind in like manner as good music stimulates my feelings. Colours laid together to create an effect, shapes, background, objects. When I gaze on good art, I am lifted into a transcendental world and sacred space of the mind, heart, and soul. Art is made of sensual materials–paper, visual shapes, and colors–and yet its effect is inner, intangible, spiritual.

I finally brought the fine art print I spent a lot of my liquid monthly income on (more than twice my monthly rent) into my home. It’s a massive limited-edition print that covers almost half the wall from the ground to the ceiling. I came home from church today, and when I looked at the print, I realized that the service wasn’t over for the day. This work, “Spring Fed” by Andrew Wyeth, is both a realistic painting and not realistic at all. It’s not really a painting of anything. It is a painting of a square cistern in the foreground with a square window behind it. You can see the square cistern in the foreground and look at the square window behind it, and the square window panes of the window, then look through the window at some cattle and a hill with patches of snow. Is it a painting of a cistern? Of a window? Of cattle and a hill? I don’t know how to consider the painting as a whole. It is a magical complexity that is not an image of anything. Then there are the colors. The painting is almost a monochromatic. The cistern is dark brown, the hill is brownish green, the cattle are brown, the walls are grey-green-off-white. The complexity of the multiple layers of imagery and the color combinations create a wonderful effect that no photograph could.

Artists know that their work will end up on a wall, and that people will look at it day-in-and-day-out. And yet the monochromatic color choices render the painting something that is even room decoration, too, and can be looked at again and again without tiring the eye and mind. I say this with no deprecation of the greatness of it’s artistry. Unlike a piece of music, which one can’t listen to over and over again without getting sick of it.

I have always enjoyed visiting museums and viewing art. I’ve never owned a consummate work of this quality–even though it is a limited-edition print and not the original. I don’t know of a purchase I have been happier with. The cost is of no consequence. My living room is transformed by this work of art, as I am, and will continue to be.