To Waste Art

I go to art museums and see patrons flying past exquisite paintings stopping only long enough to snap a picture with some high-end digital camera that can reproduce the image as if you are actually standing there. It seems to somehow escape their notice that they are actually standing there.

I can only imagine what they do with these pictures. Are they stored neatly away in a computer, each file bearing the name of the painter and the title? Are they sorted by subject, time, theme, or method? In my head, I have imaginary conversations with their apparently skeptical friends ("Dude, there's no way you went to that museum." "Oh yeah? Then how did I get these?"). It seems likely to me that they are most commonly never seen again.

When I go to a museum, I find that it is much more rewarding to see a quarter of the museum and to spend significant time actually looking at the art. I like to talk about it, even if I'm not entirely sure if I know what I'm talking about. I like to look at it long enough for it to make an impression on me and then to express that impression to someone else.

When it comes right down to it, I think that artists (by and large) hope that their art incites some kind of discussion. If a painting has made me talk about the painting itself, or about war or about government or my personal style, culture, and preferences, or even the monumentally unimportant, trivial details of my life, then I think that painting did its job marvelously. If the painting exists primarily as a proof that one has been to a place, I would think that the artist would be disappointed.

The same goes with other forms of art. Take plays for example. No one just writes a play to show characters doing stuff. It's more than actors and lines. It was written because it means something or because it addresses a meaningful topic. To view a play and to not at least talk about it is to snap a picture of the night-ending bows and store it in a dusty filing cabinet next to a carefully preserved copy of the program. Scrupulous perhaps, but utterly useless and almost completely off point.

Reviewing everything I've written so far, I can see how it might sound snobbish or high-minded. I guess I want to make it clear that I'm not making any claim that I understand paintings better than anyone else, or that I always derive some deep, meaningful insights from every play I see. Rather, I'm trying to express my confusion because some of my favorite memories with some of my closest friends revolve around discussions sparked by some painting, exhibit, or movie whose deeper meanings we could have just as easily ignored. It's not that the art made us anything we couldn't have been. Rather, we used it to become something we wanted to be.