The Tamesis
The world likes to tell us what art is, what it should be, and how it should be performed.
In 1508, Pope Julius told Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel in Rome, but Michelangelo only wanted to make sculptures. This classic piece of anti-art criticism came recently from Mayor Giuliani, who was upset over a 1999 painting by Chris Ofili. “If I could do that,” Giuliani said at the time, “then it wouldn’t be art, because I’m not much of an artist, but I could figure out how to express it.” [painting] Together. “
I heard this quote recently at Dia:Beacon, near a painting by Robert Ryman—an abstract white work that, until that moment, had quietly guided my thoughts about landscape and emotion. “I mean, I I can do this,” the person next to me said, and I remember feeling ashamed and afraid of being overheard by the painting.
I remember feeling sad, a sadness that had to do with the artist and all the social pressures surrounding the artwork—how it was made, who the artist was or had been, who could see it and understand it. This particular kind of grief is captured in Megan O’Grady’s ” how does it feel to be alivea beautiful book that traces O’Grady’s own life as an artist and artist—from her first visits as a child to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo., not far from her childhood home in Kansas; to her introduction to the work of contemporary artists for magazines; to her life in Boulder, where she is a professor of art and art history at the University of Colorado.
Photo: Torsten Trimpop
Early on, O’Grady tells a story that unequivocally sets the stage for thinking deeply about where art—or the creation of art, as we call it—can take us if we allow it, or if we use a very human tool called empathy.
O’Grady writes: “Whenever I see a review of a novel or exhibition claiming that the work is irrelevant or irrelevant, I think of the couple who used to live next door to my parents in California. They told me they had been reading timea novel by Michael Cunningham, for their book club, but with “unrelatable” characters: men and women, most of them queer, all struggling with feelings of alienation or impending death. It feels like it has nothing to do with their lives. It’s too “niche” and “about a subculture”. A year later, the wife died of breast cancer and the husband hanged himself in the kitchen. Of course, finding things to relate to is subjective, but the ability to recognize ourselves in each other, and the burst of compassion we feel when we recognize ourselves, is what makes us human. “
