A Subjective Fable
Once upon a time my neighbor and I were walking up our front condo stairwell when passing a painting that we both have walked passed a hundred times he stopped, looked at the painting and said, “Is this good?”
I answered back with a resounding, “No!” Thinking this little exchange was over I headed for my door when I heard him utter, “Why not?” Feeling somewhat giddy that he wanted to talk “Art”, I said, “Hold on” and swiftly fetched a book containing reproductions of some of my favorite masterpieces to help prove my “No” point.
I then rolled up my sleeves, got on my soapbox and started proving why my examples were considered good art and this “furniture store-bought” painting hanging in our front stairwell was, well, bad art.
I pontificated on composition, harmony, balance and continued blabbering about color, form and tone. I felt a little cocky and even mentioned something about spatial orientation. Satisfied with my discourse my neighbor said, “Thank you” and added, “I learn something new everyday.”
Seeing my neighbor a few weeks later and wondering if he still had the “art bug” I invited him out for a visit to one of our city’s art museums. While strolling through the corridors we came upon a room which contained an ongoing exhibition that focused on local emerging artists. My neighbor and I were both looking at the featured paintings and I started thinking that this work was not very good. Again, I started pontificating about composition, harmony, balance, etc.—when all of a sudden a curator, a group of people and the artist himself came into the room: Artist Talk.
The curator started fawning all over the paintings. He was saying that this was very important work; he pontificated about composition, harmony, balance, etc. and I thought to myself, “Hey, wait just a minute....” Then the artist chimed in agreeing with the curator that yes, indeed this was important work. Having just about enough of this my neighbor slinked over to me and said, “This is a real museum and this is a real curator and that’s a real artist...right?” and then jokingly he added, “Well then my friend, you better go back to art school.” Glaring back and feeling a little small I was going to retort with a wisecrack of my own but then a big smile crossed my face and I thought, “Maybe we have a masterpiece back at home in our stairwell afterall.”
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