The history of art in five minutes

Iamusedtohittingthespacebaraftereverywordsothisisweird.

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IjustfigureditseaseiertowritenormallyfirstandthentakeoutthespacesandpunctuationlaterIamanartistafterall.

                            Am

I

                                                                                                                                wasting

your

                                                                                                                                                                            time                                                                                                     already?

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                This

                                                                                                                                   will

still

only

take

five

minutes.

I will get to the—you know, that thing, the thing we are all after, the mosaic mysterium that’s keeping us hopping, hoping, putzing with patterns, what’s the word for it, no, not that, not that either, yeah, yeah, I got it, I finally remember, phew, I thought I wouldn’t and that would have turned out embarrassing after all the initial tomfoolery, but I got it now, I remember now, thank Jehovah!, huh?, yeah, so where were we, yeah, the thing I remembered, the thing I had to get to, the: point.

Do you see her?

No?

Okay, here’s a simpler one.

See her now?

I once hated what I am doing just as much as you (may) hate it now. It annoyed me, the horseshit that passed off as art. The only fun I had in art class was predicting the prices of artwork, whose value went up in the class’s capacity for a single sentiment: you’ve got to be fucking kidding me.

In the artwork, we were all searching for the same thing: the point. Which explained our outrage, which in its dumb-muscled essence had just one point: NO.

But art, much like life, starts at Yes.

The artwork you think You could’ve done? Someone said yes; just wasn’t you. So with the book you want to write, the journeys you want to make, the person you want to be.

While you were in pursuit of compressing the time it took you to do things, so you could do more things, some others chose to expand the time it took them to do just one thing: explore. It’s why it (art) ends in silence. There’s nothing more to say, make, be. To do.

It’s the reason art feels eternal. It evaporates time.

And meaningless. It lapses logic.

And lost. It explores the soul.

All art leaves behind is space. Because that’s where it originated—in emptiness.

Art is one of the few reminders we have left to recognize the absurdity in our relationship with time. I make art (/write) not to make a point, but to slow me down. And if you find no meaning in it, I am sorry. But if it slowed you down, even a little, thank you.

So what’s the point of this all? Here’re three.

Anything that slows you down is art. You don’t have to have created it. Simply noticed. It’s not so much about the patience of creating as it is about letting go of being seen.

Art is desirelessness at its highest. It’s replacing the gnawing sense of having to gain something from everything with having emptied, so you are now a little closer to nothing.

To make art is to be, as easy as it looks, and as hard as it is, quiet.