Art Salon (part 1)

Tonight Virginie is hosting the first official Art Salon at the Canal Street Loft (although, every time Virginie holds a party, it pretty much is an art salon!)

She asked us all to write a little something on what we expect from Art. Kind of a complicated question (especial to answer in one page and under) but below is what I wrote:

What do I expect from Art?
I was sitting at a sidewalk café in the West Village on the first warm day of this spring. A man that I was seeing at the time and a group of his friends joined me at the café. As we sipped our Pilsner beers and Bloody Mary’s we ended up on the topic of art shows and galleries in New York City. There were four of us talking, “Big K”, “B” and “Blue Eyes” (as I like to call him) and me. Blue Eyes is a blue-collar worker, who works very hard for his father’s construction business. He seems very at ease with himself.
He leans back in his chair, pulls out and lights a cigarette from his pack. He inhales it deeply and says, “I never really got anything out of Art.”
Usually when someone says something like that to me I wince thinking- that’s like saying you never really got into music, or you really don’t like to eat food.
But even thought I have just met him, I like Blue Eyes; he seems to be a genuine person, not one to make a frivolous generalized statement. Blue Eyes continued, “But I saw this show the other day downtown…and it was really cool. If all Art was like that, I would like it.”
I asked him, “Why did Art never really appeal to you?”
He mentioned that the people he met in the Art world seemed pretentious; that they made it intimidating- is if Art only belonged to a certain class of people, mostly those with money. Sometimes it was simply that he did not understand the work, or he just did not understand what the big deal was about.
I absolutely understood why he would think that, especially if he didn’t know what went into some creative work.
I come from a family of artists, of people creating with their hands. I saw the work in that creation, the thought process, the end result. I watched, as people would interpret my grandfather’s wall size metal structures, or his religious theme paintings. I sat for him impatiently while he would paint me in sombreros all the while me whining, “How long is this going to take Abuelo?”
I asked Blue Eyes what he liked about the installation that he had just seen.
He said he liked the way it made him feel. He liked what he saw, he understood it, and he felt connected to it.
These are some of the things I expect from art: connection, a feeling, and that most importantly that it inspires me, that it saves me.
After a dark day- that fact that I know, someone has taken a chance to put themselves out there, nakedly, only because they wanted to connect with others, to show another way of communicating with one another, this to me is very holy, sacred, because it frightening to put your voice out there and hope that another human being with say, “Yes, I feel that same!” or more importantly “I never looked at it that way.” To receive a new perspective on something as adults, at a time when society had told us to stop growing, to settle- is thrilling. To be given by the artist another side of an issue, a turn of phrase, to see something like this can be transcendent.
I of course don’t just feel that just paintings or music is art. I believe that a human being can be art: messy, or fluid, with a strong amount of content, a constant fascination, with high pitches, or low registers. Sir Lawrence Oliver is one of those people to me that was pure art. The way he would take a beat, deliver a line, his body language. Charlie Chaplin, without words, but two fork and two dinner rolls created a magical world. Freddie Mercury could command the entire attention of Wembley stadium, with his vocal power, his overwhelming stage presences, making the audience lose themselves in his performance. Which brings me to this- I expect that art can also make me for a moment, forgot about myself and give myself over entirely to something or someone else, like falling in love.