Friday, May 11, 2012

Things that come easy

When I was young I didn't appreciate things that were easy. I was not such a rebellious youth that I hated things that were easy. In fact, I barely noticed them. They floated by me and I busied myself in the more tangled difficulties of passion. Now I have settled, just a bit, and I can notice these easy things, and I actually appreciate them.
When a friendship comes easily, given without question and cultivated without conflict I am happy at my luck. When days are slow and tasks are known I relish in the flow of it all. I still appreciate when things are hard. I love the challenge, but I have finally come to notice, and to respect, the other side of it all. 
Because it is easy.

Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Will you forgive me?

"They" say that it isn't a good idea to share the private details of your life on the Internet. Once it is uploaded it is impossible to erase. There is always some hidden cache, or a screenshot saved for no apparent reason that you just didn't expect. These will be found during the most important moments of your life, and they will be held against you. Your pictures. Your thoughts. Your admissions. People are always searching for a weapon in the ashes of your life. These are personal things and do not belong on the web. But I have always hated the division between the personal and the professional. I long to be naked, to be honest, and I never care much about my vulnerability.

I sometimes am stopped by the idea that I will not be forgiven for my actions. It is not that I am doing things that I think should need forgiving. However, my personal ethics seem out of phase with the juggernaut of societal expectations. To be honest I do not know a single person who agrees with the standards that the world has set for its individuals, but we all propagate them. Our simple act of hiding what we do and think reinforces these moral standards. A person will say, "Ah, you had sex out of wedlock! (Well, so did I) But there is PROOF that you did! You are not worthy to work with children." There are standards that say it is not okay to be openly gay. That drinking and drugs are wrong. That girls have to maintain a very delicate, undefined balance between chastity and promiscuity. The norms go on, but I won't.

Sitting here at a cafe and writing my uncensored thoughts I wonder- Will I be forgiven? Maybe I will be forgiven for the things that I admitted to when I was 20, but with age comes responsibility and I fear that I won't be forgiven for any honesty that I give now. Now is a critical time, and everything will be held against me. Artists are forgiven. They are worshiped. Politicians are not. I don't want to be a politician, but I am no longer much of an artist. So, here I write, naked, wondering if maybe I am wrong and there is nothing to be forgiven. Or, maybe I will be forgiven.

Thursday, May 3, 2012

The Scream

This morning I woke up and checked my email as usual, and as usual there were a few stories on my homepage with varying degrees of worthiness to actually be called news. The one that caught my eye was about the famous painting, The Scream. Everyone knows the painting. It crossed from the elite wold of artistry into secular circles a while ago. It has been reprinted in every imaginable form, from neckties to final projects in animation classes. It has been slightly mocked and greatly appreciated. It has definitely become a common symbol that we share. I am about to do something that I rarely consciously do and qualify it by saying, "It is a good painting." It evokes emotions. It says something. Most people seem to be pleased by it and some are even fanatical. I have met a few people that are ambivalent towards it, but never have I met anyone who actually dislikes the painting. I generally refrain to from referring to art as "good" or "bad" but all of this points to a high quality piece of work.

Apparently there are four versions of the painting. Three are on display in public museums, and the fourth was owned by a private collector, who decided that it was time to pass it along. The forth is the only copy of the painting in a hand painted frame with the poem that inspired the painting along the boarder. It sold for the most any painting has ever sold for in an auction: $119 million.

Take a moment and let that sink in. $119 million. For me that is unfathomable. I only recently have started to be able to think in thousands. I sometimes think about the thousands of euro that a house would cost in Bulgaria, daydreaming about living slow and fruitful days in the rhadopes. But really I think in ones and twos. The cost of a beer, a haircut, maybe a few hundred leva for a project. I cannot imagine thinking in millions. Millions that are spent on one painting.I poked around in a few more articles and I found that I was not the only one a little unsettled by this. Apparently there were protesters outside of this auction, protesting the way that art falls into the hands of the very rich. Their complaints resonate within me, but they seem somehow incomplete. This begs more questions than just those of fair distribution of wealth. Art is tricky and slippery and does not hold a solid place within society, which bothers me.

The question begins to branch and things get confusing. There is the question of:
  1. How does one person have $119 million to spend on a single painting when many people don't have two dollars for lunch? This is a question of the occupy movement and the 1%. It has been asked a lot over the past year, and people have complained about it, but I have yet to hear theories let along answers regarding it. I think of all of the questions this situation evokes this is the easiest to wrap my head around and also the easiest for people to accept.
  2. Is a painting worth that much? What makes that painting so unique over all of the other paintings in the world? Is that even the value of the painting, or the value of its social placement? I have often wondered why one person becomes famous and another doesn't. I look at art that my friends make, some trained and others not, and often I like it just as much, if not more, than the art that I have seen in museums and galleries. I cannot figure out what made these paintings different, except that maybe the artist was in the right place at the right time. Their story was one that melted the heart of someone in power. They were seen to be marketable. This makes me think that art encompasses much more than just technique and expression, but is actually an entire force of society.
  3. What does it mean for art and artistry if fame is included in the equation? This is the same with music. Pop music, pop art. It is something fed to the masses that we are all told that we should like. It makes it very hard to form our own opinions, often because most of what we encounter is not even something worth forming an opinion about.
  4. Should art that has become a public symbol remain in the private sector, traded by those who can actually own the voice and expression of a culture? I don't like museums. They creep me out. I went to the MoMA in San Francisco once. I found the building intriguing. I found its guts to be overwhelming. While my friends were prepared to wander the walls for hours I had to leave before lunch. I couldn't breath inside. There is something about artwork without context and without purpose collected together that upsets me. However, at the same time there are certain pieces that have become so famous that they are almost public property, and what other way is there to make them available other than to put them on display for $5 a viewing, free on the third Thursday of the month? This produces the question of what is the point of seeing the original? If a piece of work has become so famous as to be symbolic, then the importance of that symbol rests not in its original, but in the crude lines of its agreed upon reconstruction. 
I don't understand art. I don't even pretend to. Even writing, which I love to dabble in and to explore, is something that I do not understand once it crosses into artistry and fame. All that I know is that when I read that article something did not sit right within me. I felt sickened. Something in the world is not adding up as it should. These questions of value and worth need to be asked, and eventually they need to be answered. I hope that when those answers come they begin to formulate a society with standards that I can agree with, where there are things worth far more than the power and status behind a single painting.

I am sure that my artist friends are not in agreement with me. Perhaps that is where I should start these questions.

Wednesday, May 2, 2012

The History of Europe

Today I purchased a children's book (in Bulgarian) about European history. It looks to be an excellent book. It is hard cover, has fully colored pages, and contains a history that begins with the development of plant and animal life due to climate and continental formation stretching all the way forward to current EU issues. All of this was sold to me by my favorite bookstore employee, who speaks perfect English, for a mere 12 leva. It was quite a deal.

Surprisingly, more important than the actual purchase or the awkward cultural exchanges surrounding the experience is the new found motivation behind the book. I woke up this morning, boarded the marshrutka towards Plovdiv, and was struck with the realization that I know nothing about history or politics. This was not a new realization. What was new was the accompanying desire to actually learn do something about it.

For the first time in my life I am finally admitting to the importance of history and politics. For quite some time I have conducted a silent, one-woman protest against history, specifically the historical identity. I denied that the actions of our ancestors created and controlled us. I claimed that what each of us are feeling as individuals in the moment creates us. In protest I refused to study anything to do with politics or history. I floated through the world with a selective blindness, bumping into current beings and refusing to reach around to tug at the tethers of their existence. In my blindness I was able to claim them as free.

I am not going to say that I was wrong about that. I still truly believe that a person can exist in the moment, separate from their history. However, after two years of being thrust into a slightly more diplomatic environment my understanding has changed a bit and broadened a bit. I now realize that many people are connected to and influenced by their past, and my personal choice to avoid that constant grooming of culture does not supersede the reality that others choose to create. My petulant desire for how I think the world should be does not change how it is- which is highly influenced by the politics and culture that I have boycotted. It it time to take a new tactic. Hence the history book.

Do you laugh that it is a children's book? I do. But that is honestly where I am at the moment. I am at the beginning.