My life in art

by tess

For several years I considered myself an artist. I had no actual basis for thinking this, but believed it nonetheless. My junior year term paper for Aesthetics was a cobbled together dog’s breakfast of quotes by Aristotle, Kant, and Schiller – none of whom I understood in the least. My eyelids would collapse during the 3 AM drug- and alcohol-induced What Is Art round-tables favored by my friends.

Decades later I’m still completely illiterate when it comes to art. It’s reasonable, therefore, that I’m not much of an art-lover despite the scores of museums and galleries I have insisted that we visit throughout North America and Europe. Paintings generally fall into one of three categories: pretty, I-don’t-understand-it, and a-four-year-old-could-paint-that. I know. I cringe, too. I have books about Art History but the books are much like the treadmill – apparently it’s not the Purchase of the tool, it’s the Use of the tool that matters. Which is so totally unfair.

Because I know so little about art, nuance and subtlety are anathema to my appreciation. I prefer art, both visual and performance, that attacks the jugular and refuses to release its bloody death grip.

When I lived in Seattle I would visit the museum alone early on Saturday mornings before The Families arrived. Native American masks and “totem poles” were in a corner of the eerily abandoned third floor. They were illuminated by slight pinpoints while spectral music piped through the darkness. I don’t think I ever made it more than twenty steps into that deserted gallery without scrambling away down the stairs, flushed and breathless in abject terror.


My visceral reaction to sculpture is unique among the visual arts. Frequently representational, it’s more immediate to me because it’s three-dimensional. I mean we’ve all seen paintings of people whose eyes seem to follow us. And we’ve all imagined the chilling cries coming from behind murderous masks. But it’s impossible to envisage statues who don’t come to life after the museum closes. Only it’s way cooler than Night at the Museum, and seriously scarier than Waxworks – the Vincent Price version, not that shiteous Paris Hilton remake.


The most emotionally crippling art is Western funerary sculpture. Statues decorating tombs are by their nature haunting and in their suffering inconceivable. To stand in the Richelieu wing of the Louvre surrounded by 500 years of sculpture commissioned to commemorate The Departed is to drown in despair. Empty-eyed angels and ancient effigies silently celebrate grief; each portrayal of greatness and loss is more awe-inspiring, more profoundly cathartic than the one before. If art must captivate us intellectually and provoke us emotionally, then perhaps I have discovered what is to me, if not to Kant and the others, aesthetically pleasing art.