18th
Some friends met me at the Courtauld Gallery for the afternoon. I had the kind of hangover that makes you say “I am never letting that poison we call alcohol cross my lips ever again,” it was bitter cold, I was tired, we were all hungry. I talked to them about a lot of art — I stood in front of Cezannes and waxed poetic about single red brushstrokes and his understanding of optics and color theory, about the phenomenology of paint. I told them about the history of the building, pointing out the old curator’s apartments, craning our necks to look up into the darkened Great Room. We talked about problems of storage and fire safety and conservation and collecting. Staring into Florentine wedding chests and looking at Breton women and thinking about how art is a lens for the world, I kept saying, “Tell me if you want me to shut up,” and they kept saying, “No, keep going!”
We stood in front of Manet’s inexhaustible Bar at the Folies-Bergère for 20 minutes, the painting that has had more written about it than any other work in the history of art. Somehow though, there always seems to be more to say, and it was strangely thrilling to see my friends try and work out the relationship between the mirror and the barmaid, the bottles and their reflection, the man in one corner, the trapeze artist in the other and themselves. I talked about Modigliani’s art school antics and Van Gogh’s severed ear and the 1850s conception of “museum fatigue” and slowly my headache, the one that I thought would never end no matter how long I waited, went away.
It was a group of five of us, some of whom had never met before. The question, “Are you an Art or Science person?” was bandied around. I suppose we all put ourselves in the “Art” category except for my one friend who is studying Public Health. He will go to school to be a doctor and he will be one of those people who Saves The World. He said to me, “I will spend my whole life just trying to maintain the human race. Not trying to advance it, to further it, just to maintain it, to keep the status quo. Spending an afternoon in a place like that makes me realize that that is why. People live so that things like that can be made.”
The inexhaustible well of human creative potential. The way artists can mediate our understanding of the world. Brains that work in different ways. Cool.
Him and Thomas Kinkade and Banksy, tending to our frail bodies and spirits in the hope that tomorrow’s more than another day in a life sentence of drudgery. Make sure you’re doing what you can to get high culture to all the margin-people who live in hell; they probably need it.
