Appreciating Art

I began this as a comment to Rachel's last post, but what began as a comment grew long and unwieldy, and I decided to post it as an independent entry instead.

I wish I were more sensitive to music. Despite spending about half of my life playing one instrument or another (four years on the accordion; seven on the violin), I have only the faintest notion of pitch and rhythm, and my version of reading music mostly involves breaking concertos down to mathematical patterns.

For that matter, are we capable of appreciating more than one artistic endeavor with equal passion? Or is the very phrase "equal passion" a paradox that undermines the commitment implied by the word "passion"? I, myself, prize the visual far above the aural. I like the petulant whine and the joyful staccato of the violin, and I like the sounds of well-written prose rolling off my tongue, but neither can compete with the orgasmic pleasure of clean lines and bold colors.

I have never come across a more powerful commentary than Pablo Picasso's Guernica. As for functional art, Louis I. Khan's Jatiyo Sangsad Bhaban (Dhaka, 1982), which houses the Bangladesh Parliament, is astounding in its geometry. Commercial art? The silhouettes of Chanel and Lamborghini inspire lust.

Guernica
Picasso, 1937

Jatiyo Sangsad Bhaban
Khan, 1982

For several years when I was younger, my hopes and ambitions were all wrapped up into one: I wanted, desperately, to go to the Rhode Island School of Design after high school. I even began preparing a portfolio. In the years since, I gradually became convinced that being an artist was a marginal occupation that would allow me to make only limited contributions to society, that I would spend the rest of my life in a French atelier, impoverished and neurotic, and most devastating of all, that I lacked sufficient talent. I sold my paintings and gave most of my drawings away. (Friends asked for them thoughtlessly; I don't think they realized how hard it is to part with a work. Time spent aside, it was like giving away pieces of myself, intimate and irretrievable.)

I don't paint anymore. It is too expansive an undertaking to do for a hobby. And while I still have my Prismacolor sets with me, I don't draw much either. Being a spectator, however, revives the joy of performing -- art reminds me of possibilities.