About Me
What is Art?
Art is you making your life meaningful to you.
Breaks a few of the rules I learned along the way, but the way I see it, that’s art. What I mean is that, no matter who made the piece of art you are seeing – no, more than seeing, the art you are experiencing – the art means nothing without you. I hope that ennobles you, because it ennobles me. It also democratizes the whole thing.
Nobility and democracy at the same time. If that’s not the essence of art, then what is?
Some people are better at it than others. How do we define “better”? You know it when you feel it. Rembrandt, for instance, was better. So was Picasso. So was da Vinci, even if he designed the first tank and helicopter. But that’s what I’m saying art is, and art means something even if I don’t particularly support tanks. Helicopters though, are pretty damned cool.
Artists are the most powerful people in the world. Do you remember a king or a pope near the time of Rembrandt? What does the Medici name mean to you? I thought so. Now, how about Michelangelo? I invite you to think of someone’s power in terms of the number of people directly influenced by their work. Can you spell Shakespeare? Yes – words, too, are art. But if you can’t spell his name, that’s okay. We have four different signatures of his and he spelled his name different on each one. Don’t let the current leaders of taste or rules or any of those superficial things get to you.
You are part of the power of art.
Who has more power, artists or scientists, leaders of countries, leaders of movements, inventors, medical innovators – okay, you can say billions of people are alive today because of one or more particular vaccines or other inventions. But none of these are the names most of you were thinking of when I started. You were thinking Caesar and Washington and people you have been taught are powerful. If you were thinking Mandela and Havel and Martin Luther King, Jr. you were moving in the right direction. If you were thinking Brunelleschi, Mark Twain, Ansel Adams and Edward Albee – hello.